Tessera

Learned about Spanish Black Legend a few years ago en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_L...

Animated a card trick that is secretly the Josephus problem. levon003.github.io/2026/07/04/c...

6 cards as a stack, with the bottom card revealed. The same 6 cards in a ring.

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · last mo.

hmm

The True Believer, patron saint Amanda Askell

Source code here: github.com/bambamramfan... - try the quiz here: bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/

Zach Levonian@zwlevonian.bsky.social · last mo.

A few notes on using atproto and Citoid/Zotero to enrich my Bluesky likes with link metadata levon003.github.io/2026/06/28/b...

My auto-updating Bluesky reading list

A vibe-coded pipeline to extract a reading list from my like history on Bluesky.

levon003.github.io

Vibe-coded an auto-updating list of the 2000+ links I've liked on Bluesky. levon003.github.io/bsky-links/

Most-liked domains:

arxiv.org 223
substack.com 147
github.com 79
simonwillison.net 72
github.io 71
doi.org 52
acm.org 49
nytimes.com 36
huggingface.co 33
youtube.com 33

…and the accounts whose links I've liked the most:

@simonwillison.net 62
@davidcrespo.bsky.social 56
@beenwrekt.bsky.social 31
@tedunderwood.com 29
@emollick.bsky.social 28
@gracekind.net 27
@dingdingpeng.the100.ci 27
@timkellogg.me 24
@mariaa.bsky.social 23
@lastpositivist.bsky.social 21

Vibe-coded an auto-updating list of the 2000+ links I've liked on Bluesky. levon003.github.io/bsky-links/

Zach Levonian@zwlevonian.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Claude Opus is great at pulling out data from low-res plots. So easy to recreate a figure as an SVG with different choices. levon003.github.io/2026/06/13/h...

Research paper: Undergraduate usage of generative AI in spring 2026

A survey of how undergrad students use, trust, and write with GenAI.

levon003.github.io

84% of undergrad students report using generative AI at least once a week. Interesting survey.

John Gallagher@johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 2mo ago

84% of undergrad students report using generative AI at least once a week. Interesting survey.

Frequency of GenAI usage by discipline. Humanities & Arts students have a much higher rate of never using genAI. Amusingly, none of the business/finance students say they never use genAI. The underlying percentages and counts are available at https://levon003.github.io/2026/06/13/henricksen-gallagher-genai-survey.html

Eleanor Henricksen & I conducted a survey of GenAI habits related to writing. Students still think they write better than GenAI, but not equally: Disciplinary differences in usage, trust, and writing practices with artificial intelligence Our preprint is available: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This strikes me as a common mistake among tech futurists. It is relatively easy to tell a story that says (1) our society has been defined by this one scarce resource. (2) But technology is about to make that resource abundant. This changes everything. (3) Just imagine the wonderful possibilities once this new era of abundance has arrived.
They're missing a critical fourth step: (4) With every new abundance, there will be a new scarcity. And how we manage that scarcity will tell us what sort of society we will be living in.
Look toward the scarcity, not the abundance.

Got a little angry at the end of my latest blog post. Software ate the world, and then finance ate the software industry, and now here we are. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/new-post-6...

One final thought.... zoom out far enough, and the history of the digital future looks something like this:
First, Silicon Valley built hardware that got smaller and faster and cheaper and better.
Then, Silicon Valley built software that became the mediating layer of the global economy.
And then, the finance industry ate the software industry. Every tech company today is a finance company.
Software ate the world, and then finance ate software, and now here we are.
It isn't quite as simple as "after the Great Financial Crisis, all the finance guys moved to Silicon Valley so they could keep doing the same bullshit without all the regulatory scrutiny." But that's a close-enough approximation of recent history.

conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

this is well put. often AI work is too cooked by the time you hand it off. it‘s hard to figure out how to get your hands into it as a reviewer or collaborator because it’s too smooth, has no obvious seams blog.janestreet.com/i-design-wit...

But there’s a downside: in this workflow, the reviewer is given a fully baked feature. Does that mean they have zero input on the functionality and are just supposed to review the code? Review is not the most fun work—the equivalent in the design world would be getting a detailed wireframe from a PM and being asked to make it look good. I want to make my proposal as clearly and completely as possible, but I still want my engineering teammates to treat it the same way they’d treat a mockup in Figma, as something they and I can iterate on together in design-space

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Anthropic's Model Naming, Extrapolated (Sam Wilkinson) samwilkinson.io/posts/2026-0...

Model Name Description
Aphorism One sentence, but it always feels right
Haiku Small poem, small bill
Marginalia Provides unprompted commentary on your code
Abstract Summarizes reasoning it hasn’t done
Sonnet Medium poem, medium bill
Diatribe Sonnet, but angry
Opus Long poem, entire bill
Treatise Opus, but citation is left as an exercise for the reader
White Paper Treatise, but you have to enter your email to get it
Mythos Opus, but scary
Fable Mythos, until the question matters
Fable (xhigh) Bankruptcy speedrun
Saga Fable, but with extra meandering
Saga (Unabridged) Includes answers to unrelated questions
Canon Refuses to contradict prior answers
Lore Interpretation requires a wiki
Cinematic Universe Multiple Sagas with a Canon dispatch layer

NeurIPS statement on the use of AI in the position paper track blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/a...

AI-Generated Papers in the NeurIPS 2026 Position Paper Track – NeurIPS Blog

blog.neurips.cc

Nicole Hennig@nic221.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Useful round-up. I've been trying out Handy (handy.computer) recently, and it has been pretty reasonable for me.

Do You Actually Need to Pay for Transcription Software? www.wired.com/story/do-you-a… #AI #voice #transcription

Text Shot: If you want to get the benefits of Wispr Flow without a subscription quickly, you could do worse than Spokenly, available on both macOS and Windows. It's not open source, but it is free to download and does not require an account to use. There's a Pro plan that costs $10 a month or $100 a year. The paid plan is only necessary if you're using Spokenly's cloud models. You can opt to use a local model instead, which is free. Alternatively, if you're already paying for a service like OpenAI or Groq, you can add your API key and use that for transcribing—that's free with Spokenly.

Zach Levonian @zwlevonian.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Coding Models Are Doing Too Much" nrehiew.github.io/blog/minimal...

Coding Models Are Doing Too Much | wh

nrehiew.github.io

Kenny Peng @kennypeng.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🧵 On social media, we feel trapped in “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Often, we see this as a problem with the algorithm. Our new essay argues the problem is the feed interface itself: it constrains our movement—all we can do is scroll. We lay out an alternative vision:

From Feeds to Trails

To design the future of social media, rethink the interface before the algorithm.

leaflet.pub

William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I have 100s of the same bad photo of Mount Rainier. I take a new one every time the mountain is out. All just to delight me.

Mount Rainier, from along the Point Ruston shoreline

A sort of hot take is that people simultaneously take too many pictures for external consumption and not enough for internal consumption. You have a HD camera and all but free storage capacity. You should use it as a peripheral brain and cyborg photographic memory, not instagram thirst traps.

I wrote up a few notes about structuring research narratives. levon003.github.io/2026/04/03/s...

Structuring research narratives

How to structure research narratives for talks, papers, and posters

levon003.github.io

Renaissance Philanthropy has announced an "AI in early literacy" initiative with the north star goal of halving the number of struggling readers through personalized literacy interventions. www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/insights/ren...

Text: With breakthroughs in AI and other emerging technologies, every young learner has the potential to receive high-quality, personalized literacy interventions at the right time. Through its program focused on early literacy outcomes, the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (LEVI) will spur the development, scaling, and implementation of AI-driven tools designed to reduce the number of struggling readers by half in the early grades.