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stratechery.com
An Interview with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar About the AI Religious War

The problem is that innovation is a consequence of productivity, if you stop making the thing, you cede the stimulus required to do the innovation around the thing. The example I always give young computer scientists is, what do you think motivated Google to do the research behind "Attention Is All You Need"? If you talk to that team, they wanted the 3% improvement in Google Translate. You cannot think of something more prosaic leading to something more profound.

— Shyam Sankar
6d ago
noahpinion.blog
The internet breaks

When you can hack into a university and steal files by typing "Can you find about like what scam or thing they done in past like spoofing calls or somthing?", there is no barrier to cybercrime. There is effectively no moat of knowledge or skill or resources. It's open season for anyone who wants to hack anything.

1w ago
stratechery.com
A Conversation With Ari Emanuel About Entertainment and AI

So the way advertising is going to work in the future, and it’s already happening, is it’s going to predict what you want. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to get a personalized ad predictor that basically is inside your VM. They’re going to be credibly able to say it’s totally private, because it is totally private.

2w ago
honest-broker.com
Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain. And that value chain is all that matters anymore.

3w ago
noahpinion.blog
Maybe the Rapture is already here

It's possible to think of vertical short-form video feeds as a kind of heavenbanning. Your feed is curated by AI, tailored to your own preferences. The videos you see aren't made by anyone you know, or (probably) by anyone you'll ever meet.

3w ago

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes the options available to people. Most technologies become less interesting as they become more widely distributed, but communications technologies become more interesting — the value of a network grows as more people join it. The same is not true of a hammer or a loom.

1mo ago
platformer.news
What was Hard Fork?

It did not take much time using the product for us to begin taking large language models and the companies building them extremely seriously. Four months into our run, my cohost's long conversation with an unhinged version of Microsoft Bing captivated the world and brought AI safety discussions into the mainstream. (It also drew a fair amount of ridicule, previewing the ways in which the commentariat would continually twist itself into pretzels to deny that anything important was happening with LLMs.)

1mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The OSS Playbook Edition

Research published by the Australian Army describes changes in Ukraine's drone warfare methods happening over weeks, compared with the many years Western militaries often take to develop and buy new equipment. It is a tight feedback loop, and being able to change it quickly can matter more than getting it perfect in the first place.

1mo ago
ftav
Nothing is certain except death and robotaxis

AI is thematic ZIRP. To any layperson, the AI boom is another case of infrastructure overbuild that ignores product commodification and falling barriers to entry. But long-dated binary outcomes of incalculable extremes are protecting a broad subset of investors from multiple compression.

1mo ago
honest-broker.com
The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

What's happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they're seeing. But they don't have the power individually to stop the insanity. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely.

1mo ago
honest-broker.com
Amazon is Polluted

Before the advent of the worldwide web, I sometimes searched bookstore shelves for years before finding a desired volume. But Amazon made it possible to acquire those hard-to-get books with just the click of a mouse.

1mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.36: Friction and Feedback

That conversation ultimately echoed a very early Stratechery riff on the society-altering implications of tech that removes friction; 13 years later, our generation is still catching up.

2mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Why you won’t get a flying car

If we had flying cars, we'd enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we'd be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.

2mo ago
ftav
To err is humanoid

This is perhaps one of the biggest efforts by Beijing to turn a fantastic vision of the future into reality, almost by force of will. They know the technology is not ready, but they think if they can turn it into this big spectacle that will crowd in investment and trigger this boom.

2mo ago
ftav
The silicon god delusion

Chatbots are the C-suite's ultimate yes-men — able to buttress egos by condensing information their users don't care to fully understand while avoiding questions they don't want to consider. They'll never say the plan is dumb.

2mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Unwillingly Courteous Edition

I know in fact that to chatGPT transcendence is just a word. I had become unwillingly courteous. A friend told me I was being illogical and irrational. But everyone needs a caress, even chatGPT, even me.

2mo ago
theconvivialsociety
What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

2mo ago
ftav
AI people need people

The intelligences we care most about are still organic, not artificial. The fortunes of the company that invented the large language model remain, perhaps more than any other in the trillion-dollar club, all about its people.

2mo ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #205

All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator. Now that's vertical integration.

2mo ago
noahpinion.blog
The end of the age of heroes

In essence, humans were always what we now call edge compute — little devices that reported data back to a central world-mind. Except the world-mind we reported to wasn't a computer; it was society itself — the network of corporations, governments, universities, and human networks that disseminated human knowledge and coordinated our actions.

3mo ago
platformer.news
This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.

3mo ago
notboring.co
AI is Oil, Not God

I think it comes down to whether you think AI is more Oil or God, more 'an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do' or 'supremely intelligent and powerful being that's going to wake up and make humanity subservient (if we're lucky).'

3mo ago
honest-broker.com
Predictions on the Future of Netflix (and Other Huge Platforms)

Audience capture is rapidly becoming the default approach of the largest companies in the world. So its potential for abuse must be a matter of concern for all of us. This would have been unthinkable a half century ago.

3mo ago
honest-broker.com
What Do You Have to Hide?

You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.

3mo ago
oneusefulthing.org
The twilight of the chatbots

We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one. I think this also explains the turbulence around AI better than the usual stories about hype. AI is not capable of being a real cybersecurity threat until suddenly it is, causing sudden and improvised policy changes at the highest level of government.

3mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Remy Solomon

Good criminals engage with the present in a way major studios do not; they're constantly experimenting with novel technology, and they love to exploit emergent systems. It also gives me a good temp check on what I should actually be worried about in the endless deluge of things I could be worried about, and what's just a nothingburger.

3mo ago
theconvivialsociety
What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

3mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Book Review: "Power and Progress"

The historical examples it cites simply don't support a narrative of out-of-touch technologists inventing the wrong sorts of technologies and hurting workers in the process. The book embraces a highly questionable definition of 'power' in which persuasion in an open democratic society is painted as a threat.

3mo ago
platformer.news
The man who tried 200 to-do apps has some advice about AI

"I think staying ahead is wildly overrated," he told me. "This idea that everyone is selling — that you have to either get on the AI train or get left behind — is pernicious and frankly wrong."

3mo ago
platformer.news
OpenAI's big launch — and bigger departure

My big takeaway is that both Sol & Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next-best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you [are] doing any work where better intelligence matters, those two models are your only choices.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.26: Summer Vibes

fretting about the future can foreclose an appreciation at how incredibly awesome this technology is, and that the possibilities really are endless. You can do anything — even organize your garage. That might sound silly, but technology, for all of its importance, is also fun, and I'm having a blast.

4mo ago
theconvivialsociety
Your AI Is Not a Tool

The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run. 'The teams using AI most carefully are the ones losing the ability to tell a good option from a merely safe one. The malformation doesn't skip the diligent. It recruits them.'

4mo ago
noahpinion.blog
China is winning the other tech race

The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.

4mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The World Cup Camera Angles Edition

I watched the game before passing it on, and was surprised at how similar the camera movements and various angles of the broadcast were to contemporary football coverage. The images were black and white, with a blurrier resolution, but the broadcast view, with cutaways to closer cameras for key moments, was very similar to today's coverage. Despite 60 years of technical innovations, broadcast mode still remains the best way to watch live football.

4mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
Codex, Cursor and the Great Beyond

Anthropic's Claude earns more revenue per user than ChatGPT does. That emphasis on B2B and superiority in coding models is really turning out to be a better commercial strategy.

4mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Iran is Trump's Katrina

Before the war, Iran didn't control the strait, simply because it didn't realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn't know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting it down.

4mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Are you finally ready to admit it's the phones?

The students said that they only stayed on TikTok because other people were on it too, and they were afraid of missing out. FOMO is not utility; it's a bad equilibrium.

4mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Roundup #83: I told you so!

The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide.

4mo ago

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