Bundled tasks hide AI gains. “If you’re half as productive at debugging code you didn’t write, or less, the LLM saves you no time at all.” Philip Trammell’s point: automating one slice of a job can break the feedback loop […]
Sequencing is a commodity. “Sequencing has become a commodity, like a bag of flour or a gallon of gas — everyone likes cheaper commodities.” A San Diego startup called Element claims its new VITARI device can deliver a whole genome […]
People want AI to do things. “The pattern across all 3,000 skills is clear. People don’t want to talk with AI. They want AI to do things for them.” Someone scraped 3,000+ OpenClaw “skills” and treated it like a revealed-preferences […]
Automate the entire company. “One of our goals for the year is to automate the entire company. If we all go on vacation at the end of the year, the company should, in many ways, keep running without us.” A […]
The Anthropic hive mind. “Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do […]
Is there not a single reasonable person in charge over here? “In 2023, Austin police did $23k in damage to an innocent house while SWAT raided the neighbor.” The city refused to pay, and now wants approval to hire an […]
A CTA world record. “Despite the well-chronicled chaos, the group became the official Guinness World Record holders when the men hit every ‘L’ stop in 8 hours, 58 minutes and 55 seconds on Nov. 10.” A Chicago trio pulled it […]
Blue photons ricochet around. “But blue photons have a tendency to ricochet around a lot.” They get dispersed throughout the atmosphere, so on a clear afternoon you can look almost anywhere and still get blue light coming straight into your […]
Ice made modern cities possible. “On the morning of February 13th, 1806, Tudor departed Boston Harbor, carrying with him over 80 metric tonnes of ice, the first shipment of its kind. The Boston Gazette ran an article that read, “No […]
Iceland: Where one in 10 people will publish a book. “There is a phrase in Icelandic, “ad ganga med bok I maganum”, everyone gives birth to a book.” Iceland has 300,000 people, and “One in 10 Icelanders will publish one.” […]