CRISPR came from viruses. “Two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.” The system is called VIPR, and it uses a weird “skip-one” […]
Burger King’s “Le Nugguette”. “Burger King has made a bag, and it is roughly the size of a chicken nugget.” It’s called Le Nugguette, and each one comes with a sauce charm plus a code for a four-piece nugget order. […]
A billion-dollar drive-thru side hustle. “It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity and no disruption to our customer experience,” McDonald’s CMO Morgan Flatley said, as the chain […]
Better feedback with less threat. “The brain is a threat and reward machine.” If you want people to stay open and think clearly, the talk argues you should give feedback in ways that reduce social threat and increase a sense […]
I love being wrong. “All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.” A simple six-step loop […]
Andrej Karpathy’s latest LLM tip. Karpathy suggests forcing clearer formats like ASD-STE100 controlled language, diagrams, HTML pages, and even custom explainer videos to make model thinking easier to parse. I told my Claude to try these on stuff we’ve covered […]
Voice carries more than words. A startup claims heir model can do a lot more with recorded audio than just transcribe it. Including: “Disease-state presence and severity across neurological, cardiometabolic, respiratory, behavioral and cognitive conditions.” They sell it as a […]
Tech groupthink. “The particularly interesting thing about the Instinct conversation is just how emblematic it is of the groupthink endemic in tech and venture.” Hadick argues the product is fine, but the fawning says more about incentives and status games […]
A video Turing test winner? “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%.” Tavus says their new model Griffin does full-duplex video, meaning it can “listen, […]
Slop Cannons LOVE purple for some reason. “Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.” The article identifies 10 […]