This TED Talk is over 10 years old, which makes me wonder if we can find people who were influenced by it 10 years ago and ask how they’re doing now? “Clinical psychologist Meg Jay has a bold message for twentysomethings: Contrary to popular belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In this provocative talk, Jay says that just because marriage, work and kids are happening later in life,…
The technical details explaining NotebookLM. Remember when this automatic podcast generator took the world by storm? Old news, I know (haha: October 30, 2024). Yet the technical details to its development are instructive. ~ learn more
MCP is a powerful new tool for software builders. Reading this post from a security expert should make builders and users a bit more nervous about it. “In just the past few weeks, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly grown into the de-facto standard for integrating third-party data and tools with LLM-powered chats and agents. While the internet is full of some very cool things you can do with…
How do you get a dumb LLM to do your bidding? You have to write a very good system prompt! Nobody wants theirs exposed as it’s intellectual property, but it seems that they inevitably leak because LLMs are inevitably jailbroken. Here is Cursor’s system prompt from March 2025. ~ learn more
“You might find yourself “feeling the AGI” as well. Or maybe not. Maybe the AI failed you, even when you gave it the exact same prompt I used. If so, you just encountered the jagged frontier. My co-authors and I coined the term “Jagged Frontier” to describe the fact that AI has surprisingly uneven abilities. An AI may succeed at a task that would challenge a human expert but fail…
I boldly claimed during a dinner this week that in our lifetime human drivers on roads will be illegal. I stand by that prediction. “Pittsburgh-based Aurora is expected to send its first driverless truck on the stretch of highway between Dallas and Houston in the upcoming days, Axios reported. The company is reportedly launching a completely driverless truck—meaning there will be no backup drivers in the vehicle.” ~ learn more
“Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded. So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!” ~ learn more
Get a dozen answers to any multiple-choice question you can pose — in real time. I asked about tipping. Specifically this: at a counter service restaurant where a 1-person meal costs $40, is it more appropriate to tip $0 - $5, or 10-20%. If you email me your answer I’ll tell you what I learned from the crowd. ~ learn more
I mean I’m only human so I’ll read it. But for real WSJ, not enough going on in business affairs? “The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump.” ~ learn more
This is a heck of a story! “This is the story of Jack Tramiel, one of the most explosive and ruthless founders the computer industry has ever seen. It is the story of four machines—the PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Atari ST—and of the man who ruled home computing for over 20 years.” ~ learn more