drfindley

Tech. Anti-monopoly. Pro-analog audio.

[drfindley @drfindley]

@matthewstoller So basically the thinking is, if tech needs 1/10 the coders for the same effort, then surely every other industry is as easily disrupted. It’s clearly not, but this is why they have large teams of “forward deployed engineers” trying to figure it out.

[drfindley @drfindley]

@matthewstoller I get in a lot of industries, AI has no impact, but for software development, it’s easily the most disruptive and transformative change I’ve seen in 20-30 years. Single developers could replace whole teams. Thats why Silicon Valley is so bullish

[drfindley @drfindley]

@theo I installed T3Code on my phone and it’s been amazing to have virtually no loss of functionality.

My biggest ask is to show me subagents output, which I’m sure the SDKs are a bit limited with, but with the fable-orchestrator-cheaper-model-implementer pattern, you miss a lot.

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

“Fable is a 'wise owl' who is very thoughtful and very well spoken, GPT-5.6-Sol is like a rottweiler who will grab the problem by the throat and not let go until it is done.”

Best explanation I’ve heard so far.

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

I want you to look at this chart before you read anything else.

68,094 people. Over 60. The group with the highest LDL cholesterol lived the longest.

More LDL. Less death.

Everything your doctor told you about cholesterol is built on the assumption that this chart should not exist.

It does.

(Ravnskov U, et al. BMJ Open, 2016. Systematic review of 19 cohort studies. N=68,094)

[drfindley @drfindley]

@Mqsley It’s gotten much worse since fable. I went over to gpt-5.5 and it’s been much better for me. I can’t figure out which opus doesn’t suck and give up and over index on the wrong thing

[drfindley @drfindley]

@patrickc Go check out Thirdman Records (Jack White’s record plant) and Dearborn music, one of the best music stores in the county, their vinyl collection is unmatched

[Sam Haselby @samhaselby]

No democracy can survive much more of this

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Important Nature Neuroscience paper shows how humans differ from LLMs.

Many people currently believe that humans are just next-word predictors, like LLMs.

But this new paper by Zou, Poeppel and Ding suggests something more interesting.

The human brain does predict words.

But it does not predict every word with the same precision.

Prediction is constrained by linguistic structure.

When a word continues the current phrase, brain activity tracks word surprisal in a way that resembles an LLM.

But when a word crosses a major phrase boundary, the match weakens.

In other words, the brain does not simply ask:

“What is the next word?”

It also asks:

“What structure am I currently building?”

This challenges one of the most common biases in today’s technological world: the belief that human language works like a large language model.

The answer is: no.
Human language is not just next-token prediction.

*
Paper in the first reply

[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

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

This is a worthwhile read from Meta engineer @championswimmer (who I met last time I was in London - great guy)

His point is that a lot of these “AI layoffs” could well be backwards: they are prob happening because more AI spend doesn’t correlate with better business results…

[drfindley @drfindley]

@thechrisperry It’s been horrible for like 10 years. Maybe longer. The early versions of the iPhone keyboard were incredible. Now, I feel like I type twice as many words and fight for every one of them

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

Since having kids I am completely incapable of handling it when kids are in distress. I didn't *like* it or anything before having kids, but I could tolerate it in reasonable doses. Since my first was born I can't watch movies where people hurt children, can't handle pictures of starving kids, can't read stories about it, can even feel myself getting somewhat upset about someone *else's* kid being truly distraught at the Dr's office. It's like a neurological switch flipped. I can barely even handle the scenes where the parents are worrying about their daughter in Moana.

[Mete Polat @metedata]

Ok this is sick. I just sent a photo of a bill I got in the mail to my Hermes agent and it just went out, paid it, and filed the receipt for me. I hate dealing with these payment portals and always leave these bills till the last minute. Now I can just snap a pic and send it to Satori (name of my agent).

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Pejman Pour-Moezzi @pejmanjohn]

Stripe really cooked with Link CLI. Look at how easily I can get my OpenClaw agent to buy me some coffee beans.

[Kakashii @kakashiii111]

Read my last article, "Compute Shortage, Overbooked Components: What’s Really Going On?", where I discussed the behind the scenes dynamics of what’s happening with semiconductor stocks.

https://t.co/6GPH43Xa05

[drfindley @drfindley]

@kepano Yeah, every app is different, hopefully many of the more content source apps like x, substack, Reddit, blue sky, threads, etc. share context

[Khem Birch Society @NBABabySecret]

Come on man that can’t be the name of the cab company you get for this lol