I’m always amazed by how much and how well the average person knows Excel — the extent they’re willing to suffer to bend the tool to their will. So many companies run on spreadsheets cobbled together in a fashion not dissimilar to vibe coding.

Frank Chimero in an exhortation to treat AI as an instrument, with a focus on practice.

Nowfal Khadar, expanding on the Jevons paradox (production efficiency leading to higher demand), which is frequently mentioned when discussing AI and employment: Once demand saturates, employment doesn’t further increase but holds steady at peak demand. But as automation continues and workers keep getting more productive, employment starts to decline. In textiles, mechanization enabled massive output […]

Jasmine Sun: Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible. It is inevitable—given this reality and these incentives—that most people will soon use AI to write most things.

Robert Saltzman pressed Claude into thinking about itself — with some interesting results. At a certain point it even declared itself self-aware, full stop. What looks like introspection though is just a performance of it: statistical answers based on patterns that fit with what introspection and self-awareness look like. With what we (us) expect it […]

Some examples of how AI is being integrated in apps — and by integrated I don’t mean slapping a floating button with a chat interface: While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX. I […]

Ted Gioia: Slop is all about wastefulness! Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists—in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology. In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop. This seems […]

When is it okay to train a LLM on scraped data? Robin Sloan: If an AI appli­ca­tion delivers some pro­found public good, or even if it might, it’s prob­ably okay that its value is rooted in this unprece­dented oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the com­mons. If an AI appli­ca­tion simply repli­cates Every­thing, it’s prob­ably not okay. […] I […]

I think this is quite a good analogy: Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence […]

Ted Chiang: I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company.