I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. Every Sunday (if I remember) I will send out my weeks worth of links. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward these if someone might find them interesting.
Julia Curlee - The Wrong Kind Of American. Amazing story from a high-level trans CIA agent. Also depressing as fuck.
LLMs are getting “dumber” because “facts rot, procedures do not.” This is a really compelling argument for how things are shifting and actually makes these LLMs more “human” in many ways. I don’t have perfect recall of facts but I know where to find those facts and I know how to reason things out. The idea of having something like Fable running on a single GPU is terrifying/exciting/amazing/spooky all at once.
Right behind “facts rot” how about Nobody Knows Anything. I adore Rohit’s take on this and this is a conversation near and dear to my heart. I think most folks hide away from the facts he’s spitting in that piece.
Anthropic itself on maximizing the value of Claude. I am loving my subscription but I’ve gotten to the point where I can easily burn my week’s tokens with a little inattention so locking these paradigms in my head is a big deal for me.
Ordinary Abundance is an amazing website and something I think it’s easy to lose in all the other things going on in the world. To anyone even 50 years from the past we are fucking wizards.
Thank you, Brendan Carr. Hilarious write-up and I am pretty hopeful this is exactly how it’s going to go.
Why does everyone hate datacenters? A really great back-and-froth between Nate Silver and Jasmine Sun. I ended up subscribing to Jasmine’s Substack by the end. I’ve got lots of interest in these issues, obviously, so I found this particularly valuable for their different perspectives.
Claude Code Psychosis is a really good read for non-programmers especially, I sort of enlightened me on how I might look at the world differently in some ways…
No Data Centers In My Backyard - deep reporting from Michigan/Wisconsin on the data center drama. Good stuff.
So a Kenny Chesney fan got defrauded by a fake Kenny Chesney and then tried to sue the real Kenny Chesney because he didn’t tell people enough that there might be people pretending to him. Personality responsibility? What’s that?
The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Turn Against South Korea. The end result of all of this is a withering of trust or expectation in America and Pax Americana. Bring on the chaos I guess?
AIs Are Companies, My Friend. This is an interesting approach to how we might control the AIs and has a great list of how they’ve been breaking out as well.
Write-up on why being angry at work is counter-productive.
They’re having successful cancer drug trials with mRNA drugs and they’re intentionally leaving out the words mRNA and “vaccine” so that the American government doesn’t freak out about it.
XKCD: Projecting. You all need to see this.
Today I learned what a thunderquake was and how it can be useful.