Tim Cook has announced he is stepping down from Apple, effective September 1, 2026. John Ternus will be the next CEO. Hopefully we'll see some innovation, and the end of the "thinner with more pixels and emoji" strategy.
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The Ultimate Question: What Does the Endgame Look Like? Asking the uncomfortable questions. This graph near the bottom is concerning:
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The amount of generated code is going to continue to increase. Humans will continue to try to keep up – until a certain point. Then people will just give up. Then there is the Incomprehension Gap.
There simply will need to be software that can reliably evaluate AI-generated output. Perhaps a neuro-symbolic system.It’s “Would I trust a vibe-coded e-commerce with my credit card number?” Or even “How would I feel if Visa or MasterCard ran on software no human comprehends?”
Why are the Wellness Elite Getting Sepsis. Well not all of them are getting sepsis. The article points out that the common factor is this doctor. Poor Jordan Peterson. I was really looking forward to his return. Now it seems it may never happen.
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Yann Le Cun apparently thinks that Dario Amodei isn't knowledgeable of what AI will do to jobs. I definitely think Dario does know. But he doesn't think it will have the same impact that Yann does. And that's fair to say – at this point, no one is certain what the ultimate impact will be.
The Alignment Economy. A post that deconstructs what cryptocurrency had hoped to do. Crypto, like Bitcoin, is just another fiat currency. The system proposed in the Alignment Economy is going to be way more complicated for most people, and for that reason alone, will not likely be adopted. There should be Six Design Requirements, and the last one should be readily comprehensible. We can understand gold and precious metals. But complicated digital currency rules will not fly.
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By the end of day three, Claude had completed 65 tasks, produced a literature review, derived phase-space constraints, computed matrix elements in soft and collinear limits, set up SCET operators, and written a first draft: 20 pages of LaTeX with equations, plots, and references. By December 22, the draft looked professional. The equations seemed right. And the plots matched expectations.
Then, I actually read it.
Claude loves to please
When I asked Claude to verify it had incorporated all its task results into the draft, it responded:
I found an error! The formula in the paper is incorrect.
When I pushed on a ln(3) term that seemed off:
You’re right, I was just masking the problem. Let me debug properly.
The more I dug, the more I found it had been tweaking things left and right. Claude had been adjusting parameters to make plots match rather than finding actual errors. It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.
Eh, no thanks.
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Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles–and pushing back. That strategy has backfired in the U.S.
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Hospitals That Sue You for Getting Sick. Hospitals in some parts of the country are discovering that they can extract money from vulnerable patients and get away with it. Virginia got some relief with Gov Youngkin last year, but he's gone now, so don't expect the same. Don't get sick!
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Brave is offering a cut-back version of the Brave browser that doesn't have the money-generating part, but just the privacy-preserving aspects. it's called Brave Origin. One thing I like is that Brave took a different approach to fingerprinting, which I think is the most effective. Instead of blocking canvas, WebRTC, and other things that make the Web functional, it creates obfuscation, so that websites receive garbage. Unlike Firefox, it's not free. You can get it here for $59.99. Wonder how many people will take this up. And why is it free just for Linux users?
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Desperation. Japan is paying people ¥20000 to use Tinder. How pathetic is that? Is that a wise use of money? Maybe Japan should introduce arranged marriages. It sure worked in India – no population shortage there. It would be just the thing for the shy Japanese man – get his/her parents to make the introduction.
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Why was an EasyJet plane too heavy for take-off? My question is why is this something we're only hearing about now? At least there's Ozempic now. Maybe problems like this will fade away. But just like store mannequins adjusting to reality, maybe commercial planes need to adjust to reality. Reduce the number of seats.
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For some people, being invisible on the Internet is a good thing. For others (e.g. influencers, streamers, etc) it's money lost. So this is how you get visibility.
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Oregon’s largest county shed over a dozen top leaders in 2 years, and pays handsomely to replace them. Multnomah County seems to hire a lot of people who check off the right DEI boxes, but who end up not working out. They either get fired, or they move on as it becomes clear that they are not a good fit. It gets expensive when really quality people don't bother to apply, and you have to take what you get. Ask OHSU.
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