Author: Jason

It’s creepy to tell people they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t use AI. It’s weird to assume AI critics hate progress and are resisting some inevitable future. Luckily, most of my private conversations about AI with industry friends are neither weird nor creepy. Anil said it best: the majority of people who work with and in technology hold a moderate view of AI, as any other normal technology with valid use cases and real problems that need to be fixed.

That’s where I land. Generative AI and LLMs shouldn’t be as over-hyped as they are, forced on users, trained on content without creators’ consent, or used for high-stakes tasks where hallucinations and poor design can put people’s lives and work in danger. Generative AI output both feels magical and futuristic and gives people in photos three hands with seven fingers. It’s remarkable and so very bad at the same time.

— Read on notetoself.studio/post/measured-ai/

Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren’t the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.
And what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI, which can be pretty succinctly summed up:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

— Read on www.anildash.com/2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/

For three years, the UCSD and UMD researchers developed and used an off-the-shelf, $800 satellite receiver system on the roof of a university building in the La Jolla seaside neighborhood of San Diego to pick up the communications of geosynchronous satellites in the small band of space visible from their Southern California vantage point. By simply pointing their dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the obscure—but unprotected—signals they received from them, the researchers assembled an alarming collection of private data: They obtained samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities.

— Read on www.wired.com/story/satellites-are-leaking-the-worlds-secrets-calls-texts-military-and-corporate-data/

Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight? Sleep is about being invisible, private, not attracting attention, our secret, vegetal life, a pure existence outside the maelstrom of interaction. Not surprisingly, echoing Aristotle’s view of it as ‘a privation of waking’, sleep is typically defined by what it is not, rather than what it is. It is not moving, not acting, not responding, being disconnected from the world, doing nothing, at least from the observer’s perspective. When any organism sleeps, it takes a kind of leave of absence: it stops interacting with the environment, withdraws from action, and also gives space to others. Sleep, nightmares apart, is the only time when we are at peace with ourselves, forgetting pain and suffering, and the world outside, as we leave it alone to respite from us. A blessing for both the sleeping individual and for planet Earth.

— Read on aeon.co/essays/two-billion-humans-are-doing-something-bizarre-right-now-sleeping

So… what does it actually mean?

Nothing. That’s the beauty of it. “6–7” isn’t a secret phrase, an acronym, or some coded reference. It’s just fun to say, easy to copy, and makes kids feel like they’re part of something. In other words, it’s classic internet humor: random, harmless, and over before parents even figure out what’s happening.
— Read on www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/why-your-kids-keep-saying-six-seven

According to MLB statistician Sarah Langs, Ohtani became the first player in league history to hit three home runs and strike out at least one batter, let alone 10. Per the TNT Sports broadcast, Ohtani became the first starting pitcher since 1900 to hit a leadoff home run in the regular season or the playoffs, and the first starting pitcher since 1900 to hit multiple home runs in a postseason game.

All of those incredible superlatives come with one other amazing fact, given that starting pitchers usually thrive on a regular five-day schedule for starts: It was the first time Ohtani had pitched in 13 days.
— Read on www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/sport/baseball-los-angeles-dodgers-nlcs

Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid.
The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behavior do the work.
— Read on designobserver.com/the-compound-interest-of-design-what-not-to-build/

The United States is on the precipice of a historic, if dubious, achievement. If current trends hold, 2025 could be the first year on record in which the US population actually shrinks.
— Read on www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-population-could-shrink-in

It turns out that our agents love social media! They post about everything. When they discover a fun new thing? They post. When they get a hard problem? They post while they’re working. If we yell at them? They post. If we tell them they are great? They post.

The experiment was deemed a success. Plus, watching them post through their experiences was also very entertaining.

After adding these tools to our coding agents and working with our newly social media enabled agents for a few weeks, we started to notice some surprising results: the agents that were using social media seemed to perform better than those without.
— Read on 2389.ai/posts/agents-discover-subtweeting-solve-problems-faster/