November 26, 2025
AI is probably not a bubble, but it does worry me when I see how Luma - the multimodal company - is raising $900 million to build a 2GW datacenter in Saudi Arabia. Let's do some calculations about AI's impact on the economy.
Kipply is back with another digest. Standard Intelligence (where I previously worked at) put out a cool post about how they built a storage cluster out of old hard drives. Devansh (one of the founders) writes about how to model employee equity with volatility.
Inventit et fecit. If you’re stuck, try regaining curiosity because tinkering is important for taste. If you can, you should negotiate your salary. And maybe put more thought into what you wear, because Fashion is Character design, but stay away from plastic surgery.
Gemini structures user memory better than others. I’m more of a Google Sheets kind of guy, but excel is pretty cool. HuggingFace put out a great guide to training small models.
Waymo keeps expanding, but Boston bans Autonomous Vehicles. This is bad. Please do not ban autonomous vehicles in your city. AVs are incredibly safe. Every time a driver takes an AV instead of driving themselves, their odds of being in a crash that causes serious injury or worse drop by about 90%. Almost 40,000 people die in car accidents in America each year.
Jack Clark writes in a way that makes me feel more ringlorn. Anthropic does Project Fetch where team Claude and team Claude-less compete against each other in training a robot dog to fetch a ball. Spot is so cool, and maybe we’re not all that far from the humanoid era. Why is AI writing hard, and will AI ever write a great poem?
Charlie XCX writes about the realities of being a pop star. Tyler Cowen discusses AI and Taylor Swift.
Zed uses Zed as its main tool, and Cursor has a cool work culture. Owain Evans gives a talk about Vintage LLMs and shares ideas for synthetic data generation. Alec is cool; let’s make sure Alec doesn’t keep suffering from his retrograde amnesia. RL is even more information inefficient than you thought but On-policy distillation is not.
Billionaires are starting to raise private armies again. For now it’s mostly drones. Sulla would be proud. Learning to win at games is one of the most important skillsets to learn. Ilya's testimony and the DOGE political drama were interesting stories of political power.
You still scroll? Really?? Like… don't you know how bad it is for you? Here are some ways to cure your doomscrolling addiction. I’m personally having success with just not having addictive social media apps on my phone, and using Leechblock with Firefox on my macs (with settings so that i cannot even edit the website list or blocked hours).
You can change your life in 30 days or less, including going to and living at a beach for under $1k. You probably have Aerobic Deficiency Syndrome, and it’s a good idea to learn some science behind hypertrophy.
Adavark is cool and makes me excited about a more secure future. OpenAI writes about their web browser.
More women have bachelor’s degrees than men. AI friends will probably be a good thing. Is the internet making culture worse? I think not.
What is your number that’ll allow you to live your 24 hour life? A gentle reminder to value people, systems, and things that are precious to you. Messi Walks are not laziness.