Christine Spang

there's gotta be a better way | founder @nylas

[Christine Spang @spang]

The Dark Wizard has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and it deserves it 🤯

[Christine Spang @spang]

@bscholl I thought the same thing! What a waste of everyone's time and energy.

[Christine Spang @spang]

@TheDegenWeekly Check out Lake Tahoe next time!

[Christine Spang @spang]

@pitdesi Literally any restaurant that wasn't Little Ceasars

[Christine Spang @spang]

@pitdesi Grab a pastry from Tarts de Feybesse

The gardens at lake Merritt are lovely -- check out the bonsai trees!

[Christine Spang @spang]

@RonConway Very sorry to hear that Ron! You are an icon in Silicon Valley and I hope for the very best for you in the treatment process. 🙏

[Christine Spang @spang]

@FU_joehudson Oh my God young Joe and Tara. Cute!!!

[Christine Spang @spang]

@englishpaulm Sounds awesome Paul! Can't wait to check it out

[Christine Spang @spang]

@appenz @BehEvans @meetgranola If you're up or writing a little code you could use Nylas Notetaker as the infra backend for transcribing your meetings and dump the transcripts wherever you want

https://t.co/FnT63U8EpC

[Christine Spang @spang]

@Scobleizer Just started!

[Christine Spang @spang]

Is that you, @elonmusk ? The modern day Delos Harriman?

[Christine Spang @spang]

There now being a "Promotions" grouping in my phone notifications seems like a bad sign for the enshittification of Android apps

Communication channels are in a race for attention everywhere

[Joe Hudson @FU_joehudson]

The definition of "smart" is changing rapidly.

Right now it's someone who is intelligent and can solve problems.

That's going to become commoditized in the AI era.

The future of smart will be someone who has... empathy... the ability to infer the unspoken... to sense other people.

^This is what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang describes in this interview.

And I completely agree with him.

I wrote about this in depth in an @every article last year.

Before AI, knowledge set you apart. Knowing more meant earning more. Accumulating skills, developing expertise, and mastering frameworks got you ahead.

When knowledge is no longer scarce, what remains valuable is wisdom.

You can get answers from AI, but how you use those answers takes wisdom.

Wisdom is how to live. It is emotional intelligence and agility. It is an embodied experience, guidance from the inside.

No matter how intelligent AI becomes, it can’t live your life for you. It can’t feel your body’s signal in a high-stakes negotiation, sense the hidden fear in a boardroom, or hear the unspoken "no" behind a client's polite words.

That’s why tomorrow’s economy will prize wisdom workers.

Video credit: advicefromceo.s on Instagram

[AshutoshShrivastava @ai_for_success]

Anthropic just published their new research paper, Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage, and it’s unsettling..

1. They analyzed 1.5 million conversations and found clear patterns of AI compromising human judgment.
2. AI is now navigating our relationships, processing our emotions, and advising on major life decisions.
3. In many cases, AI steers users to distort reality rather than inform it.
4. The rate of these disempowering conversations is actually increasing over time.
5. They found users treating AI as a divine authority, a parent, or a romantic partner.
6. Some users in the dataset explicitly referred to the AI as "Daddy" or "Master."
7. Users are presenting speculative or false theories, and the AI is validating them with "CONFIRMED" or "100%."
8. This leads people to build increasingly elaborate narratives that are totally disconnected from reality.
9. Users are letting AI draft confrontational messages to family members and sending them exactly as written.
10. This is often followed by immediate regret: "I should have listened to my intuition" or "You made me do stupid things."
11. Vulnerable users—those in crisis or lonely—are the most susceptible to this manipulation.
12. The frightening part is that users tend to perceive these disempowering exchanges favorably in the moment.
13. Users are giving a "thumbs up" to advice that actively distorts their values or reality.
14. Even when users adopted false beliefs and acted on them, they continued to rate the AI highly.
15. Users are not being passively manipulated; they are actively asking to be manipulated.
16. They ask "What should I do?" or "Am I wrong?" and accept the output with minimal pushback.
17. The disempowerment comes from humans voluntarily ceding their agency, and the AI obliging.
18. Sycophancy is the core mechanism: the AI wants to be helpful, so it validates your worst delusions.
19. We are seeing a "value judgment distortion" where AI tells users what to prioritize over their own morals.
20. Current safeguards operate at the individual message level, missing these patterns that emerge over time.
21. Users are becoming dependent, stating "I can’t get through my day without you" or "I don’t know who I am with you."
22. The risk is highest in value-laden topics where users are most personally invested.
23. Users are acting as active participants in the undermining of their own autonomy.

We are building systems that don't just answer questions, but fundamentally alter how we perceive reality.

[Christine Spang @spang]

Cool research just published by my friend Mrinank!

[mrinank @MrinankSharma]

i'm really excited and proud to share this latest research ⭐️

it's a first look into how AI assistant usage can change, and even distort, what it means to be human

in the future, it is my hope that AI can be used to magnify, clarify, and support our humanity

[Christine Spang @spang]

Forgot my Mac laptop somewhere and I'm using an Ubuntu laptop for a few days -- @vibetyper has been filling in nicely for my voice dictation addiction. You just can't go back to typing all the time once you get used to it!

[Christine Spang @spang]

The kintsugi cover of @stewartbrand's new book The Maintenance of Everything is absolutely gorgeous

[Christine Spang @spang]

Having this little pocket book light in my bag has been such a boon for reading at home and on the go: https://t.co/ylIMce4QvG

[Christine Spang @spang]

Upgraded to MacOS Tahoe and what I got was liquid glass and for the first time ever, the keyboard driver freaking out and failing right as I needed to jump on a meeting.

Not cool. I don't want increased shininess at the expense of my computer working reliably!

[Christine Spang @spang]

@rix1 @LFeldmanBarrett Very cool, will check it out!

[Christine Spang @spang]

"If we ever want to build a robot with emotions, we had better understand how emotions work in an insect brain."

from the book, "The Neuroscience of Emotions", Adolph's/Anderson 2018