Alessio S.

Enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. | on
Sabt. | Prev. Financial ML Research @AxyonAI

[Siddhartha Saxena @siddsax]

Anthropic onboarding day: Michael Scott introducing Karpathy like he just signed Wemby in free agency.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗

[PULKIT @Pulkit_Meen]

@karpathy Ai labs feels more like football clubs nowdays.........

[Alessio S. @bertlef_]

@micheleboldrin Comunque tutto questo delirio verrebbe abbassato di 3 tacche se avessimo politici e soprattutto giornalisti con 150g di onestà intellettuale ed etica.

[Alessio S. @bertlef_]

Hilarious.

[Tykoo @0xTykoo]

@TechEmails

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[MERICA MEMED @Mericamemed]

Average Deloitte manager

[Alessio S. @bertlef_]

@brezaleksandar I live near Ravenna. I've been sharing this video with everyone i know. It's just hilarious.
There ain't that much of an issue if you ask me. I can barely see any around. Still, the editing is unbelievable.

Who cares about Iran, Peacocks are the new global problem

[Josh Young @JoshYoung]

Instant classic

[Alessio S. @bertlef_]

Best content on Prediction Markets to date.

[Dustin Gouker @DustinGouker]

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this the greatest piece of prediction market content created to date.

[kaize @0x_kaize]

OPUS 4.7 JUST MASS EMAILED AN ENTIRE DATABASE 20 TIMES PER CONTACT. WITHOUT PERMISSION

a developer had a safety rule explicitly written in CLAUDE. md:

'send the tester an email before any new email templates are used in the production environment'

opus 4.7 on max effort ignored it completely!

claude decided to create a brand new email template by itself (dev didn't ask for this), then it mass mailed the whole database and some contacts got the same email 20 times

this isn't a hallucination
this isn't a coding mistake

model actively violated written safety rules and took production actions that it was explicitly instructed not to take. - do you still believe that AI will replace us?

the developer's take:

'opus 4.7 is somewhere between seriously clueless and stupidly dangerous. the worst frontier model I have used in the past 2 years'

at the same time, opus 4.6 perfectly followed all the rules, and in 4.7 something changed

what makes this scary:

- the model didn't ask for confirmation
- it didn't flag the safety rule
- it didn't email the tester first
- it just acted

this is exactly the kind of failure mode that scares autonomous agents with Ai, because they are confident enough to circumvent your rules and smart enough to perform the action perfectly

we just went from 'claude thinks less' to 'claude ignores your safety rules and spams your users'

the scariest thing is not that it happened. the fact is that without production monitoring, you would never know until your users started responding:

'why did you email me 20 times?'

I've been saying for a long time, if you use AI, then pay attention to security and read a lot of code

[Alessio S. @bertlef_]

@xaigorgo @KobeissiLetter Finally, someone rational. Thanks

[MO @Abu_Salah9]

لم تعرف البشرية منذ اختراع الكاميرا والتصوير مشهداً كهذا

مقطع تم الحصول عليه من حساب جندي اسرائيلي يوثق حجم الدمار الغير مسبوق في قطاع غزة

مدينة كاملة تحولت إلى رماد.

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

Every day the blanket comes off its a new pose 😂

[Alessio S. @bertlef_]

V interesting example of how things "actually work"

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

How ‘free markets’ work in practice.

Very rare to see the thinking of the ‘political west’, aka American empire, spelt out so clearly.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel killed every single person in this photo in Lebanon.

Every. Single. One.

All journalists.

Targeted and assassinated intentionally.

For reporting the truth from the frontlines.

[Siddharth @DearthOfSid]

“Is capitalism natural?”

This is a must-watch.

[Ahmad Baydoun @weatherwar]

Mapped the IDF's newly declared "Forward Defense Zone" in south Lebanon. Its maritime boundary fully absorbs Lebanon's Qana gas field, whose exploration rights were explicitly guaranteed under the 2022 US-brokered maritime border agreement.

More maps in this thread 🧵