Data empathy focuses on understanding the data. It considers the subjectivity introduced by humans into the data collection process and identifies biases. 1/n
The materials for the first class of my Stanford course 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 are officially on the course page.
This includes slides, completed code, and video demonstration of the exercise we worked through. Also week 1 assignment is on the course Github repo!
themodernsoftware.dev/
This lecture was once banned from the Internet because of how powerful it is.
Thank God I've recovered it after trying for years.
Study before it's deleted again
Titled: Why Dumb people outsmart You..
I found an AI model that physically cannot write a single word. Then I found out how much money that word was costing me every single day
it's called Jev. you hand it a situation and a list of valid answers. it hands back probabilities. no paragraph, no explanation, no chat window. ask it to write anything at all, and it simply refuses, because writing was never the job it was built for
I went back through my own agent's logs and started counting. is this urgent, which team owns this, did the test actually pass, three questions, two or three valid answers each, and every single one of them had been quietly costing me a full paragraph of generated reasoning before landing on a word it could have handed me instantly
within three days of launch, strangers proved exactly what that habit had been costing everyone, not just me. one found real flight results for $0.0039. another classified over a thousand research papers for eight cents, total. a third sorted five hundred real emails for three and a half cents. none of it used generation. all of it used a model returning nothing but a number against an answer someone had already written down in advance
here's what actually stopped me cold, mid-scroll, re-reading my own agent's bill. the expensive part was never the hard, creative work. it was a dozen tiny yes-or-no checks, every one of them wearing a full paragraph as a disguise, billed at the price of language for an answer that only ever had two shapes to begin with
I'm still paying for a paragraph, right now, today, every single time my agent could have just said yes
full breakdown below
I fused three small language models on my MacBook Pro to test whether they could match GPT-5.6 on a concrete reasoning task.
I had read a claim that combining local models during generation could deliver frontier-level reasoning. I wanted to see what happened when I built the loop, checked the tokenizers, and measured the answers.
Using MLX, I combined the next-token scores of three quantized Qwen2.5 models: 0.5B, 1.5B, and 3B. I then tested the ensemble, each model, and GPT-5.6 Sol on the same 24 scheduling problems.
The ensemble solved 1/24 cases. The 3B model also solved 1/24, with a lower median generation time. GPT-5.6 Sol solved 24/24 using medium reasoning and a larger generation budget.
This was a narrow test with different compute budgets, so I would not generalize it into an intelligence ranking. But it answered the practical question I started with: this fusion setup did not earn its extra computation.
I wrote up the full experiment, including the runnable code, setup issues, token traces, screenshots, and the distinction between correct JSON and a correct answer.
If you are experimenting with local LLMs, the walkthrough gives you a setup you can reproduce and a way to judge whether your changes help.
Read the full experiment for free 👇
🌟 Diagram Design Skill🌟
⤷ A Claude Code / Codex skill for editorial-quality visual types, matched to your brand in 60 seconds by reading your website.
github.com/cathrynlavery/dia…
AI agents typically fail because the architecture is unclear, not because the model is weak.
In this handbook, Tiago teaches you how to build agents with reliable planning, memory, tool use, and bounded execution loops.
Along the way you’ll learn practical patterns for creating agents that stay stable in production.
freecodecamp.org/news/how-to…
Mark Cuban on the next job wave:
"Software is dead because everything's gonna be customized to your unique utilization. Who's gonna do it for them..."
The answer is people who know how to fine-tune small LLMs on private data.
Not prompting. Not API wrappers.
Actual custom models trained on your business.
And almost nobody knows how to do it yet.
This is the complete guide ↓
Bookmark this. This is the one.
Fine-tuning is about to become one of the most valuable AI engineering skills.
Not because everyone needs a custom model.
But because the people who understand how models learn from data will build things others can’t.
Full guide:
My Stanford course 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 starts next Tuesday.
This Github repository will hold all the assignments (and has the ones from last year).
Bookmark it. See you next week.
github.com/mihail911/modern-…
The Central Bank of Kenya has done an exceptional job of safeguarding the stability of our financial system and steering the economy through the volatility and pressures we have experienced at one time or another.
She's 18 built an AI agent with Opus 5 and sold it to Anthropic for $3.2M - and came to Stanford to show how to do it from scratch:
00:34 - how Opus 5 builds a $3.2M agent in one evening
15:34 - 4 agents replaced 400 Anthropic engineers
34:47 - from first prompt to a $3.2M check from Anthropic
after watching I spent 60 minutes building my first agent - it cut my workday by 90% and a week later I got a $100k check from Anthropic:
save & watch - article below on how to go from one prompt in Claude Code to an agent people pay millions for.
Anthropic engineer:
"You're not supposed to prompt Claude
You're supposed to build a system that prompts itself"
In just 45 minutes, she breaks down how the Claude team builds agents that remember, fix their own mistakes, and get smarter with every single run
Prompts → Harness → Loops → Graphs → Self-Improving Systems
This is not about tweaking text in a chat box
This is about building the execution loop that tests, catches hallucination, and refactors code autonomously
If this were a $500 course, people would call it one of the best agent engineering breakdowns of the year
You probably think you don't have 45 minutes right now
Don't let this vanish from your feed
Watch it today
Then read the step-by-step guide below on building loops
If you want to learn about the math that powers AI tools, this book is for you.
In it, Tiago gives you insights into what makes AI models really work so you can understand them better.
You'll learn about Linear Algebra, Multivariable Calculus, Probability & Statistics, Optimization Theory, and lots more.
freecodecamp.org/news/the-ma…
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.