people who think highly of their own intelligence tend to crave power

Today we're launching Automix, our new AI-powered mixing agent that analyzes your audio on the fly and makes live adjustments across every stem. Mixing that mixes itself.

I just created an agent to text me daily user activity summaries from @posthog I just sent a few texts You can set it up in a few minutes on your phone here: poke.com/r/PzOM8fCZumz Very cool stuff @interaction

hot take the edge that high agency non-technical people just acquired with deep technical chops on tap thanks to Claude/Codex etc will subside when AI inevitably gives high agency on tap to everyone

Launched Flowtonik on Product Hunt today A macOS AI-assisted digital audio workstation built by producers, for producers Instead of generating finished AI songs, Flowtonik keeps humans in creative control Use natural-language commands to speed up edits, generate MIDI or music, separate tracks, and assist with mixing producthunt.com/products/flo…

You know times are rough when Pete Davidson gets on shark tank to pitch a sock company explicitly saying that he's looking for a more reliable source of income than comedy or acting

when you realize you need the agent more than it needs you

Wow I just tried this with my cat’s genome and it works left: my cat this am right: claude + NB

shoutout to this penguin

How men share with each other

Thinking Slow Consuming a lot of short form content gives you the illusion of broad and deep knowledge. In 3 minutes you've become an expert on the latest LLM models, learned how to harvest rubber, and had a good laugh seeing a meme about the history of Christmas. In reality you didn't absorb any of it. In a few hours you will have forgotten most of the content, but you'll remember the dopamine kick. So you will come back. You are like a rat being force fed cheese crumbs in a lab study. Even on X, the dopamine kick is cheap. It's intellectual masturbation masquerading as a quest for truth. Worst of all perhaps is LinkedIn. It transformed even the noble, arguably spiritual pursuit that is work into a performative shallow act. Short-form content is pre-digested information. Eat only pre-digested food and your body atrophies. Consume only pre-digested thoughts and your mind atrophies. Gen Z grew up like this, consuming bite sized content on tiktok, instagram and twitter. They "learned" this way more than through any other medium - books, movies, irl debate etc. This is why Gen Z kids think they know a lot about everything, when in reality they know close to nothing about everything. Superhuman surface area, subhuman depth. Duolingo epitomizes this. You’re having fun thinking you’re learning but you’re really just having fun, not much is getting cemented in your brain long term. "Thinking slow": to actually learn something you have to read it then apply it. Then summarize it, explain it to someone else, sleep on it, test your knowledge in the wild, learn it again. Even LLMs need to reason longer for better answers. The mechanism design of feed algorithms accelerates this. The goal is to keep as many people as possible on for as long as possible. This channels a somewhat democratic vote on what is the most entertaining content. A democratic race to the bottom. That is simply the easiest content to understand, relate to, get angry at, laugh about, and just generally consume, for as many people people as possible. This optimization function absolutely does not give a shit about you or your growth. So we get "pick a side" topics like nationalism and sports. Ego-driven content like fashion and dating. Or easy to consume things like cooking and memes. We don’t get math, physics, art, history, literature. The content is packaged like fast-food, and the topics themselves are concentrating into "easy" categories. It feels so cheap and fake. This is bad for humanity and should be fought. The human brain is capable of wonders and its healthy existence at scale should be preserved. Some will say that this is a dumb take because as more people share the same public square (Internet), information keeps getting compressed in simpler and simpler formats, such as memes, and nothing can be done about it. "Progress" is inevitable, embrace it or die, “Seize the memes of production” etc. Change doesn't mean growth. Biological "growth" that is rapid, simplified, and consumes the host is called cancer. This kind of lossy compression is how entire nations end up blaming immigrants for their problems when it has been decades of mass immigration being a systemic necessity for debt-trapped nations to maintain GDP growth and hold on for dear life. Others will say: it's not the car, it's the driver. Lots of people became successful thanks to social media, revolutions were started on Facebook, marriages began on Instagram, careers took off on Tiktok. The issue is that the "car" is designed by thousands of the world's smartest engineers specifically to override the "driver’s" willpower. Yes, social media and short form content is not all bad. The best of us already know all of the above and can manage it. But for most people, 1v1 against a billion-dollar AI algorithm is not a fair fight. Another argument against this view is that humans are simply biologically wired to be lazy. Sitting down to synthesize a complex text consumes a lot of calories, it's metabolically expensive. Just because humans are biologically wired to crave sugar and fat since they were rare in the wild doesn't mean a diet of 100% high fructose corn syrup is inevitable. There are civilizational guardrails for physical health (nutrition labels, gym culture, health education) because we recognized that our natural laziness/cravings would kill us in an environment of abundance. Also, virtually everything of value in civilization was built by thinking slow. If we allow the "mass dumbing down" to continue because "people are lazy," we lose the ability to maintain the very systems that allow us to be lazy in the first place. At this point, you are convinced that this is bad. So how do we fight this? Can we fix it? The world eventually reacted to the physical health crisis of processed sugar and fast food with the "wellness" and "organic" movements, Markets may eventually price brainrot inducing content as having too expensive of a negative externality, leading to new models for content. The answer could also come from the education curriculum and model. A radical transformation to match the times. The best I got today is to try to use my brain to the fullest of its capability and fight these cheap dopamine loops at the individual level. At times I am terrible at it, but I will never give up.

it’s a way to transcend existence