Many don't see how much AI has changed recently. Coding agents aren't just chatbots. We can’t deal with the challenges of AI if we don’t understand it. Here's a post to provide some evidence (Claude doing small ML experiments) and form intuitions. davidpreichert.substack.com/p/if-you-hav... 🧵..

If you haven’t recently used Claude Code*, you might not understand where AI is at

A report on a series of mini machine learning projects, executed with, and mostly by, Claude

davidpreichert.substack.com

Your infrequent reminder that if you live near the San Francisco Bay Area you should go to Moss Landing (south of Santa Cruz) and rent kayaks there, because the estuary is full of sea otters and you will encounter dozens of them

I work at Google DeepMind. This won't make me popular. But it's all public reporting: 2014: DeepMind reportedly sold to Google on conditions: no military use, independent oversight 2026: a Pentagon contract for "any lawful government purpose" Not one safeguard survived intact

Even before the agentic revolution, prompting tricks stopped being very valuable, as our research has shown. The format isn't key, the best approach to AI right now is to clearly specify your goals, your output, what "good" & bad look like, how to test the results... (yes, this is just management)

The most interesting Fable tip I've heard so far is to let the model use its own judgement as much as possible I told it "For all coding tasks use your judgement to decide an appropriate lower power model and run that in a subagent" and it seems to be saving tokens simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/3/j...

What that says to me is we’re one vote from basically no rights being secure. A court that could flip on this easy a question could flip on anything.

VANCE: that’s the wrong question and it valorizes [SLUR] institutions and [SLUR WHICH HASN'T BEEN USED SINCE 1874] ways of knowing and being and structuring society in really problematic ways.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo ago

DOUTHAT: Let's be honest -- the tone of the administration is not consistently a Christian tone. There is a tone of aggressive uncharity JD VANCE: Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences

new toy! generate a unique sigil (strange attractor) for any word what's yours? sigil.brennan.computer

It is a good time for moonshots. AI has reached a level where there are transformative projects that could result in huge social good, but require public R&D, consensus & transparency to pull off. Examples of such projects: universal tutors, co-scientist/replication systems, and remote medical help

Science fiction authors in the order you want them to be right about AI: Iain Banks Becky Chambers Martha Wells Douglas Adams Charles Stross (Singularity Sky) Peter Watts Charles Stross (Laundry) Harlan Ellison

most important paper: courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/t... godel, escher, bach is probably the most popular all-time book on the subject and also it's wrong about everything important you could do worse than going to every linked source here (it's my substack sorry): www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...

AI History in Quotes

Each of these presents the clearest, earliest, or most-cited statement of a specific idea in AI.

verysane.ai

i think it is a good idea to hold Elon to building the future from The Culture

Karl Bode@karlbode.com · 4mo ago

"AI/Robotics will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want!"

I just got around to reading this and I strongly recommend the video version too. It seems like the most intuitive thing in the world and folks who dump on it are making up a version of the experiment that's not here (and which the researchers explicitly disclaim).

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm sure this very concrete and measured writeup will be reported on in a completely normal way

"Luddism does not deserve to be rehabilitated. It was a medieval throwback, reactionary and primitive, a pre-Marxist labor convulsion closer in spirit to the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies of agrarian restoration than to the universalist solidarity of Eugene Debs." open.substack.com/pub/verysane...

Against the Luddites

The rehabilitation of Luddism is a vice signal.

open.substack.com

If LLM consciousness is interesting to fight enough it should be interesting enough to read seriously about, right?

Might An LLM Be Conscious?

In short, this depends on what you think that means, whether you think it’s possible in principle, and what you think would be evidence of it.

verysane.ai

my thought about natural language reasoning being the core of software engineering is that generating such argument is exactly what LLMs are doing when they make software and the code is incidental

/compact constantly

George Pearkes@peark.es · 6mo ago

“Our experiments confirm that all the top open- and closed-weight LLMs we test exhibit significantly lower performance in multi-turn conversations than single-turn, with an average drop of 39% across six generation tasks.” Shorten that context window!

a transformer is a nonrecurrent architecture. think of it like a big Pachinko machine. you put the token embeddings in the top (entangled with positional embeddings which tell you where in the context vector they occur) and a prediction for the next token falls out the softmax layer at the bottom.

new game trying to make a momentum-y, combo-rewarding, faster minesweeper mines.brennan.computer

my position is that intelligence is decomposable into families of capabilities, a few of which LLMs have but humans do not and many of which humans have but LLMs do not.

tweety fish@sifu.tweety.fish · 6mo ago

I have very strong and I believe well-justified scientific opinions about what LLMs have and don't have and how that relates to human cognition but to claim that anything about this is settled or inarguable or not debatable is in fact super wild and people should be real careful about it.

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

In January 2020 I said we had pulled off a miracle in that we had democratically ousted an outright fascist regime. it turns out the regime might have actually been more located in the media space, and without destroying that, it still persisted

ahahahaha my random scenario generator works claude.ai/public/artif...

The Weight of Letters: A Depths Scenario Guide

Explore a character-driven RPG scenario set in underground Karst society. Follow Oma Tessik's intimate decision about love and belonging across distance in this detailed narrative framework.

claude.ai

3blue1brown on youtube, basically all of it but in this context especially his linear algebra sequence (linked). welch labs has distinguished himself for ai stuff in particular. hon mention: professor dave does short lectures on like, every single thing in math. www.3blue1brown.com/topics/linea...

i realize that i am the only person on earth who is interested in this but it is genuinely insane that it is possible to one-shot a computer into producing this particular document claude.ai/public/artif...

Morai Memorial: Jurisdictional Boundaries & Administrative Authority

Explore this procedural clarification on jurisdictional boundaries between administrative bureaus, examining delegation chains, authority structures, and proper administrative function.

claude.ai

rev. howard arson@theophite.bsky.social · 8mo ago

succefully made a LLM pretend to be a bizarre censored future computer which doesn't let you say communist slogans in the fake language it is pretending you are writing in.

I have been charged in a federal indictment sought by the Department of Justice. This political prosecution is an attack on all of our First Amendment rights. I’m not backing down, and we’re going to win.

look at this shit!

i am going to try to give a framework of my own understanding which laypeople can understand.