Derek Pym

We get the future we build

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@RealJayWilliams Well said. As a Canadian who grew up watching a ton of basketball, I really want to root for SGA and love this OKC team but I just genuinely just don’t enjoy watching them play…

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

Extended interview: Former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse has metastatic pancreatic cancer. He spoke with 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley about where America has been and where it could still go.

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@BrentBeshore @BenSasse Such a great interview

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Self recommending must-read for Canadians.

“The path Canada is on, economically and culturally, is no longer sufficient to make us a flourishing world class nation.”

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT]

This week's episode of "Interesting Times" is a conversation with Ben Sasse, who is dying in public:
https://t.co/MNMur4FB1V

[Sholto Douglas @_sholtodouglas]

2% to 4% in a month. Ludicrous.

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@letterboxd I’d love to have a view of upcoming movies and recently released trailers 🙏

[John Coogan @johncoogan]

Yesterday, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 and it delivered strong results across major benchmarks (SOTA on ARC-AGI, SWE-Bench, Computer Use, etc.). The model performed especially well on coding tasks. Gemini 3 had just set high bars in nearly every benchmark but the one that it couldn’t really crack was SOTA performance in coding (worse than Sonnet 4.5 on SWE-Bench Verified).

It feels like Anthropic is a real lesson in the value of focus, the team hasn’t spread its attention across multiple (frankly quite lucrative) opportunities in productizing a leading AI foundation model (or lab that churns them out). The long-term thesis is still this idea that coding prowess will deliver AGI. The clarity there has created a talent magnet, a focused product in a profitable and new (but enormous) market, and staved off attacks from bigger companies with more funding.

They haven’t even launched an AI image generator. Sholto Douglas, a researcher at Anthropic who came on the show yesterday, had a funny quote about it: “We believe there is no shortage of AI images.” Now to be clear, Anthropic does think that image understanding is important. Just as you’d want your human coworker to be able to look at the website they are building and see the results, Claude can look at a screenshot and understand what’s going on.

Also notable is that they didn’t vaguepost about the launch. This strategy was basically created by OpenAI to create buzz around new launches and honestly it’s a lot of fun. I still think it’s funny to read into what Sam meant by posting a Death Star picture before launching GPT-5. DeepMind recently picked up the practice of vague posting and had some fun with it, but Anthropic eschewed the opportunity and ran a pretty by the book launch plan. A blog post with some clear benchmarks, a video explaining some of the results and early findings, etc.

On AI safety, I’ve shifted my thinking a lot over the past year. I’ve come to appreciate safety research because of its applications related to understanding foreign influence that may occur from open-source models and the effects of long chatbot discussions with people who are under psychological stress. Neither of these scenarios was on my list of potential negative side effects years ago, but now they seem very real and worth taking seriously. Yesterday, Sholto highlighted a tradeoff Anthropic has been wrestling with around biology. No one wants a terrorist to build a bioweapon in their garage, but we all want top cancer researchers to be able to accelerate their workflows with helpful AI assistants. It’s very hard to put concrete timelines together for negative scenarios like “AI helps someone create a bioweapon” but I think it’s very good to have companies wrestling with these issues early and often.

It’s clear that all that moral wrestling is a cultural feature, not a bug. The most widely viewed clip from our interview with Sholto was about Anthropic’s writing-focused culture. Apparently Dario is regularly posting essays on Slack threads explaining his full chain of thought on various issues facing the company. Shawn Wang from Cognition said, “this is the single strongest reason to join ant i have ever read.”

Tyler on our team had some extra thoughts on the day, saying “Anthropic still feels very underhyped. Google is just now receiving its flowers in the public markets, and OpenAI has taken up most of the AI mindshare since the original ChatGPT launch. If you are AGI-pilled, Anthropic is probably where you want to work.”

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@teachrobotslove Beautifully written. I look forward to reading the essay.

[Canada Spends @canada_spends]

Federal spending, 2010-2025

[Stripe Press @stripepress]

In Maintenance: Of Everything, @stewartbrand encourages us to see our world through the lens of maintenance and repair.

Part One explores what we can learn from the maintenance of sailboats, motorcycles, cars, and weapons.

Preorder now: https://t.co/RqJ3EJh6Zn

[Logan Graham @logangraham]

My prediction from ~summer '25 was that we'd see this in ≤12 months.

It took 3. We detected and disrupted an AI state-sponsored cyber espionage campaign.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

New newsletter: THE MONKS IN THE CASINO

In the last few decades, the pro-social life script for many young people—date, marry, buy a house, have a kid—has become more expensive.

Meanwhile, the anti-social life script—e.g., posting, porn, parlays—has become easier, cheaper, frictionless.

This has created an unusual inversion of risk. Today's young people—and young men, in particular—have become more risk averse in the physical world and more risk-seeking in the digital world. They date less, and gamble more. They find intimacy scary and betting exciting. They furnish their rooms like high-tech monasteries and gravitate toward media that works like a slot machine.

I don't think young men suffer from a "loneliness crisis." I think the problem is bigger and stranger than that. They are choosing to be alone, because economics and technology have made aloneness feel easy and togetherness feels anxious. The result: A generation of monks in a casino.

https://t.co/hcG8fnpQkC

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Movies are great though. Even if you set aside the pure artistic enjoyment (you shouldn’t). Movies are stories, and stories are powerful, primal, moving, motivating. They are prompts to you to consider dilemmas and scenarios, to build your world model and compass. My rec is to go to the golden age of story telling and movie making that imo ramped up in the 80s, was roaring in 90s, peaked early 00s, and declined since. One sourcing example: pick a random year there, look up Oscar winners, pick and watch. Enjoy and attend guilt free.

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@Pontifex Amen

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

The reason it’s incredibly hard to break out of a “kind lie” doom loop is because the longer it’s gone on, the more unkindness is needed to get back on track. And the fact that you’re in this situation to begin with probably means your culture will hate that.

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@NeerajKA I’d love to see a serious prediction market co emerge that remains neutral publicly regarding live predictions on their platform

[Derek Pym @derekpym]

@HipCityReg Great advice for some, perhaps most, but far from a universal truth imo

I took time off recently and found that intentionally spending less time connecting with people online and offline was incredibly helpful for understanding and rewiring what motivates me