We either save avoidable deaths & destroy society OR accept avoidable deaths & save society. The moral dilemma of our time.

I'm 74. How do I survive 2 quarts of whiskey and 3 packs of unfiltered cigarettes every day? Because I also take 3,000 mg of N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine, inject 5,000 mcg. of Cyanicobalamin and take massive amounts of milk thistle extract, magnesium, calcium and thiamine daily. Simple.

“We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” Eighteen months ago they scored well below human accountants Good discussion here: mercor.com/blog/human-baseli…

Many people have opined that AI is ruining open source because people fling half baked slop patches at a higher volume than maintainers can handle. Actually the opposite is true, it’s going to make open source vastly better. Most open source projects have been dramatically underfunded. Projects with massive usage have hardly any contributors. They have had to scrape by on a skeleton crew of part time people that can’t be counted on to finish things. I think very small teams are going to be able to run very large code bases with much higher quality now. They won’t want your patch, they’ll want really precise descriptions of the problem. Given that the patch will be easy enough. The right model isn’t some diffuse committee of people mostly not paying attention, it’s 1-3 high context people with high commitment and great taste who care about the project. AI is fundamentally commoditizing software, and open source has historically been the end point of commoditization. There is going to be a lot of awesome open source coming our way.

My hot tech career tip of Q3 2026 is that your end of year performance review is going to get drafted by AI. The time to start putting your accomplishments in a shared doc / folder / slack thread with your manager is this afternoon.

If I was Trump going into a big midterm loss, I would just go out with a bang: Cut entitlements & close the budget deficit It will crash the economy and he’ll be hated for 2 years—but history will remember him for saving the country.

Mal eine andere Thematik, die mich wirklich beschäftigt: Ich bin ehrenamtliche Turntrainerin und stelle immer wieder fest, wie viele Kinder im Grundschulalter nicht sicher schwimmen können. Das halte ich für nicht akzeptabel. Schwimmen ist kein Hobby, sondern eine lebenswichtige Fähigkeit. Und es reicht nicht, Kindern irgendwann in der 3. Klasse ein paar Monate Schwimmunterricht anzubieten und das Thema danach abzuhaken. Mein Vorschlag: Jedes Halbjahr zwei Wochen intensiver Schwimmunterricht – wie eine Projektwoche, von Klasse 1 bis 4. Das Ziel darf nicht sein: „Schwimmunterricht wurde angeboten.“ Das Ziel muss sein: „Das Kind kann sicher schwimmen.“

We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.

„Algorithms lack the spark of humanity”. What does it even mean? That’s just an empty phrase without any meaning.

I keep hearing this nonsense, that English is the new programming language, and Ai is a "compiler". Okay. If you're right, then the same English should give you the same software every time. That's what a compiler does. It doesn't. The same prompt with the same model but you get different outputs. A compiler doesn't guess what you meant while Ai does. Prove me wrong. Give it the same English twice and get the same software.

You shouldn‘t wash your hair with conditioner after a nuclear disaster: conditioner contains cationic surfactants, which bind to radioactive particles and can trap them in your hair.

Man, I am not sure how I feel about this one!

The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams. But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.” vist.ly/5kje9

dots demo. Now... with better WiFi.