Today
- Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it...
- Jev is a useful zero-shot classifier, but its probabilities can't be calibrated for your data. Calibration depends on your data distribution, which Jev never sees, so treat its outputs as scores and recalibrate them on your own labeled examples.
- You could summarize 33% of my career over the last 2.5 years as “classifying queries with LLMs.” I teach a whole course on it . So, I took jev out on a query classification test drive. What am I classifying, exactly? The Wayfair WANDS dataset has labeled query-document pairs....
- Blog About Moonbound This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. September 23, 2026 I found David Cheng’s thoughts about his recent China trip fascinating — textured and surprising. These two linked...
- Yesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It’s …
Yesterday
- 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” …
This week
- 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,...
- 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…
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