garethsprice

n8n pipeline that scrapes industry sources daily, uses an LLM to score each story according to how relevant it is to my particular focus of interest, and sends me a weekly digest on Friday mornings. Could probably do something similar with OpenClaw or scheduled Claude tasks or a bunch of other ways pretty easily.

General old-school way of not being overwhelmed by tech news: just picking stuff up when I need it to solve a real problem. News in general: is it genuinely improving your life to spend time on consuming it? If you cannot name concrete life improvements, cut it out entirely.

2014-15 was when the news feed switched from static, human-written code to machine learning models optimized to maximize ad revenue[1], the models discovering "user attention time" was a far better metric to optimize for than clicks, likes or shares[2]. And what people spent the most "attention time" on was content that triggered raw moral outrage, fear and tribal hostility[3].

This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.

[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent

Same - at the end of the day I'd leave my last turn running with something like "I am going to bed so keep going until you are done" and be surprised that in the morning it'd kept going.

This latest crop of frontier models (Fable, Sol) are very good at broad exploratory directions like "audit for bugs" or "find places in this codebase that I custom-implemented functionality that has since become available in the libraries I am using" in ways that prior generations would fail or not return as high quality results.

I did a recent head-to-head comparison between Qwen 3.6 35B running locally and Fable on the above and while Qwen did an admirable job finding a good handful of things, Fable returned many more, and more serious, issues. This included many more issues that crossed system boundaries in a multi-service repo.

In terms of one-shot "follow these detailed instructions" I think we are at a point where frontier models are overkill, especially at the price. For broad fan-out explorations, I think we are just getting started.

Many harnesses include a current date and time in their system prompt, and if there is a way for the model to call for an updated time (either a dedicated time tool or calling the OS' `date` tool) they can track time they spent doing something. If not told up-front, they can try to infer it from timestamps in their logs. Sort of like a human - if you ask them to time something and give them a stopwatch, they do it. If you ask them post-facto they'll estimate it.

This "spend at least 8 hours" trick is a new one to me, though.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/Buttons <- these also fit the IBM ones (still using the Model M I pulled out of a telco dumpster in the rain when I was a teenager, it's a bit Ship of Theseus at this point with bolt mods and USB but still the same to me)

Good essay. In my own readings on art and artists, one overlap with substance abuse is that artists tend to be highly sensitive people - the type of people who are drawn to both creative pursuits and also to coping mechanisms like drinking to numb the over-stimulation.

So it is not so much that writing leads to alcoholism, so much as being the kind of person who is deeply sensitive to the world around them makes both of those activities appealing.

As heavily drinking becomes less socially acceptable, and people learn more about mental health and healthier coping mechanisms, I wonder if there will be less famously intoxicated public figures - and if art will be better or worse for it.

Using OpenCode + OhMyOpenCode + Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B Q_4_KM on an Ada 4000 (20GB VRAM) at 55 tok/sec for generation (slower than it sounds as OpenCode has a bunch of context it adds). Meaning to check out pi when I get a minute as I hear that one mentioned a lot lately.

I am using Opus to generate plans that the local agent then follows, then validated by Opus. So I'm not at 100% local but these models are increasingly part of my production workflow. Probably not worth doing - yet - unless you are a hobbyist who likes spending time and money tinkering.

This setup is certainly not as "good" as Opus or other frontier models but they are "good enough" for an increasing number of rote tasks. You don't need to drive a Rolls Royce to the supermarket, when a used Corolla gets you there just fine.

It also enables new workflows that would be cost-prohibitive with frontier LLMs (especially as token costs rise) - eg. overnight I use the Chrome devtools MCP and have the above setup fuzz-test as a user for a number of hours and see if it can break things. Even got it working with multi-modal so it can check screenshots, which blows my mind (and not my wallet, as Claude+screenshots burns $$$).

The "12-18 months behind frontier" sounds about right, it's about where I was with gpt-4o and basic harnesses back then. In another 12-18 months my bet is we have Opus-level models that can be run locally for <$5k... but the frontier models will be even further forward (unless governments have blocked them). Fun times.

One part of ADHD is hyperfocus. ADHD is a dopamine deficiency issue, so when something highly stimulating (like a good book, or writing code) causes a release of dopamine the brain locks onto it and won't let go.

https://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt - contemporary account that is still a pretty good overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary has an episode entirely on Fidonet (creative commons, freely available online)

Memories of being amazed to see messages from all around the world arriving to my hometown's local BBS, merely days after they were posted.

You are, I see, a member of the "reality-based community" as Karl Rove presciently put it back in 2004. You live in a mental space where you critically evaluate facts and make decisions aimed at maximizing your outcome in life.

You would do well to explore this great nation of ours and realize that a wild and terrifyingly large number of its inhabitants travel in an almost unimaginably different headspace.

The men who roll coal are not doing it in cheap beater cars. A Ram or F-150 Super Duty is a $40-80,000 vehicle which requires $200-$5,000 in modifications so they can pull up next to a Prius ($28-36,000) and belch out thick black lib-ownin' ball-crushin' smoke, damaging their own engine in the process. You may ask them why, to which they'd spit a wad of brown tobacco in your face and scream in primal rage into the air: because f*k you, that's why.

It's hard to calculate the number of people who don't subscribe at all, but you can calculate the number of recovered subscriptions from a retention process.

FWIW, as a subscriber to both, I have more often found myself manually renewing lapsed subscriptions than going through painful cancellation processes to get out of them. I get the Economist through DiscountMags.com where it is often available with a discount.

The book "The Paradox of Choice" led me to using Wirecutter and Consumer Reports in recent years - if it's not something I care that much about, I will just buy whatever their top recommendation is without second thought. The cost of the subscriptions pays for a human to wade through all the junk and select something that is at least adequate for the job, and is cheap compared to the effective hourly rate of having to search through mountains of junk.

For more niche stuff, Reddit groups like BIFL and seeing what niche hobby groups coalesce around is helpful for me. Which I suppose is the same reversion to word-of-mouth expertise when, as you said, brand and price are degraded signals.

Watch the ageism there, older devs can be lazy and ignorant of security too! (And are responsible for building a dev process that catches such things in review - which points to larger systemic issues over there)

I will agree that anyone that works at Meta is likely not somebody who values privacy very much, though.

Hah thanks. I also feel this way rage-spotting AI-generated text everywhere these days. I have been looking into the speech patterns of LLMs lately ("unslopping" my own AI outputs) so had a bunch of the most horrible cliches memorized. Unfortunately this is a useless talent as a "reverse mechanical turk" at approx $25,000 for 1M output tokens (at 0.3 tok/sec) is not competitive in today's market.

Yes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754

You're absolutely right to call this out — and honestly? I want to sit with that for a moment. Here's the thing: this isn't really about AI writing. It's not even about coding agents. It's about something much deeper. What's genuinely worth knowing: while I generally agree, many people may not. I think there's a really interesting conversation to be had here. Thanks for naming this. It needed to be named.

(/s - Blargh, writing like that that by hand is exhausting)

From the article:

The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.

Had a peek at Morland's book on Amazon and the headlines he pulls at the top of Chapter 1 for the impact of falling fertility on society:

'Russia running out of "single-use" soldiers; 'UK running low on fuel, truck drivers'; 'China's factories are wrestling with labor shortages'.

Are we supposed to feel bad that people aren't rushing to birth the next generation of cannon fodder, truck drivers, or work in factories for 60-70 hours a week? Are these roles that Morland would have his own children fill, or just other people's?

Genuinely bizarre choice of headlines to present a pro-natal argument with. Did he not read the actual book? Bad editor? AI slop?

Another perspective from the posters saying "rich people"; in most advertising, it is aimed at aspiration and not reality - so "people who want to be rich leisure class people, or social media influencers", which tracks for a low-end laptop for a younger phone-native audience.

Advertising aimed at the actually rich is usually more about saving time, "elevated" experiences, or building legacy.

One use of design is signaling, but not all - successful design is that which fulfills its purpose.

Many designed things do not need to be differentiated and will benefit from a homogenous AI-powered design (internal documentation, local service business communications, etc) in the same way that desktop publishing replaced hand or type-written notes but did not replace professional designers (although it did require them to learn digital tooling).

For designs that do benefit from being differentiated it'll be interesting to see what happens. If anything, AI homogeneity provides more opportunity for talented human designers who can provide "design alpha" beyond whatever trends the LLMs sucked up in their last crawl.

Failed for me - no identification of me by pasting text, and refused to search the web as it said that’d be a privacy violation. I have some writing around the Internet but not much, and less tagged with my real name. My guess is it limits itself to “public figures” defined as people who have a lot of publicly posted text.

I am glad to see I am not considered a public figure and aim to keep it that way.

I also had to go oddly far back to find a piece of long-form writing I had done that was truly mine and not tainted by an LLM edit pass which was a slightly disturbing realization.

More like, society has a Facebook health scam problem (or just a "Facebook problem").

Facebook I'm sure does not think they have a problem, as they make a ton of money from running these garbage ads with no consequences.

This is what I am doing - it is rare that I'm in a situation with no Internet while traveling, but very often there is an intermittent connection. Using local models or even hosted foundation models is frustrating exercise in cancelled jobs and timeouts, but Tailscale + mosh + tmux is a really nice way to connect to a workstation and resume from where the session left off - or leave it running doing its thing and come back to it later.

Same with running my local dev environment's docker containers, now they run on that workstation and my battery life is far higher, treating my portable device as a dumb terminal.

Currently working on an Amtrak with XReal One Pro glasses and a ThinkPad bluetooth keyboard from my Macbook Pro that is folded up in the seat pocket.

They are "OK enough" that it will be a matter of taste if they are acceptable or not at this point for you to use.

For coding they work fine for me, terminal tools work particularly well as I can bump the font size up. IDEs and web browsing aren't bad either, it's about the equivalent of a single 1080p screen. They are nicer than hunching over a laptop for travel use but I still prefer a proper monitor when available.

The optics are a generation or two from being where they need to be to market these as productivity devices, but if you like being an early adopter with all the quirks that come with it, they're fun.

I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that people will also be running local inference on their phones in the next 5 years.

How about now? https://apfel.franzai.com/ (iOS/MacOS, runs the 3B param model already bundled for Siri) https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile-ai (Android, runs ~7B models on flagship phones at 15-30tok/s)

Foundation model investment feels like the bubble around fiber optics circa 2001 - a great technology being pushed forward by a speculative mania as it seems like it'll be useful in some profitable way, but nobody's quite sure how.

This isn't new, Theodor Adorno was making the point in the 1940s that taste isn't something formed in a vacuum and then expressed in the market, it's something the market produces in you and sells back. Chaotic Good is just an extension of the same tricks from back when Eddie Bernays was staging fake suffragette marches to sell cigarettes to women in 1929.

The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everything on the internet" is fake so much as the whole surrounding culture of consumerist societies - and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences.

Mark Fisher is a good read on whether we're even capable of comprehending what it would mean to live outside such a system at this point.

The data around media literacy is terrifying.

"Fewer than 2 in 10 teens can correctly distinguish between news, advertisement, opinion and entertainment" https://newslit.org/news-and-research/news-literacy-in-ameri...

"82 percent of middle school students couldn't tell the difference between sponsored articles and real news stories.

Out of the Stanford college students that were tested, more than 80 percent couldn't identify biased content from independent news sources supported by groups like lobbying firms as being less reliable than a mainstream news source." https://universe.byu.edu/2018/02/09/studies-show-lack-media-...

It was a good question. Investigating why people like $popular_thing that you just don't get is a good way to broaden the mind.

I hope it leads to interesting discoveries and more art to appreciate for you!

It is not my field either except for amateur interest. My understanding is that because they are publicly disclosing it to investors, it's not fraud in the legal sense. Fraud requires deception. It could be that they do genuinely believe that their expertise in shoe selling translates to expertise in AI infra.

If you agree (or think that enough people will agree to increase the value of the stock), you can buy the shares. If you don't, you aren't forced to buy it - and as a penny stock with a market cap of $21MM, nobody's index fund or pension is going to be forced to buy it either.

The stock market sort of _is_ just karma farming - building belief in your company vision so that investors bring capital. Nearly all companies trade at a positive "P/E ratio" - that is, the price of a share is on average 10-20X higher than their current earnings - the difference representing pure belief that the company will earn more in the future.

The regulatory guardrails around it are not perfect, but striking the balance between allowing the public to participate in the growth of successful companies in a dynamic economy, and protecting them from scams, is a fine line. Being able to invest in publicly traded companies has made many middle class and working class people wealthy, the regulations do work for most people to keep them out of trouble while allowing them to participate. The people who get hurt are the ones who trade penny stocks like lottery tickets, which is less a regulatory failure and more the impulsive behavior that drives any kind of gambling.