Today
- 22 Sep, 2026 Books I grew up in a house stuffed full of books, with no television, and electricity for only an hour or two per day (while the generator was running). There were shelves full of old science fiction (Asimov and Heinlein), as well as books on history, some good old...
- I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on...
- Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev, their first example of a new category of model that they are calling “System One models” (I’m with Maggie Appleton, I think “decision models” …
Yesterday
- September 20, 2026 In my last post, I talked about the fun of making native macOS apps with AI agents. I have made a few macOS apps before, all on my own, but I found the process very taxing; I simply don’t know the idiom. But, I love a good, simple, fast desktop app! So this...
- John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone X iPhone 12 Mini iPod Touch Notes: How do you not put the OG iPhone at the top spot?...
- I wrote previously about upcoming design changes to Apple’s 27 series of OSs, but I didn’t run any of the betas myself. From afar, the changes all looked great to me. After having installed the updates at launch on Monday, I’m very happy with just about every visual tweak. But,...
This week
- I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. — Jacob...
- “System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958, but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a…
- Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building…
- To have a positive career you need to be appropriately recognized and rewarded for your work. But there are a lot of ways that credit and/or rewards can get missed. Often it’s something unintentional, like your boss or some other executive simply didn’t realize what you...
- “Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place. For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super useful, especially at night. And when it comes to skiing, I’ll take artificial snow if I have to. Beats no snow. Artificial...
- A few months ago, AI math results started making headlines. “Do a breakthrough” became a Twitter meme. Naturally, I became curious whether I, too, a math noob, can find some open mathematical problem and then have a frontier model solve it. It took me an entire month of my free...
- September 18, 2026 Magic lamp; click to download a larger version This is an update to my post about apps as home-cooked meals, which has found a large audience over the years. That post, published in February 2020, discussed personal software, designed and built in...
- For the last fortnight the news has been in a frenzy about AI killing us all. It started when Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and posted that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade“. One of Anthropic’s alignment leads replied that...
- I recently wrote about Jev, a new “System One” language model that only outputs decisions: the answers to a set of user-provided multiple-choice questions. This…
- My colleague Brian Pedersen recently released a report on current hiring trends. It’s a fascinating snapshot on what the market wants from new hires. How does this apply to you, the search professional? Some thoughts below on where to focus your skill development. Please join me...
- I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms...
- Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Willison sees two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and...
- I don’t write blog posts about new models. That’s Simon Willison’s beat, and he’s very good at it. But I want to write about Jev, which is a different kind of…
- Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency. But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad. Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an...
- There is a common design pattern that sometimes gets missed or overlooked. It’s having a list of items, each with an icon. When the text is one line, the icon is centered, but when the text has multiple lines, the icon is still centered but looks odd.
- Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline. more…...
- Early AI agents were basically enthusiastic idiots. Working with them required you to tell them precisely what you wanted them to do (for instance, “method A…
- Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents...
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