New Anthropic research: Natural Language Autoencoders.
Models like Claude talk in words but think in numbers. The numbers—called activations—encode Claude’s thoughts, but not in a language we can read.
Here, we train Claude to translate its activations into human-readable text.
SOMEONE JUST KILLED THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY
A guy scanned an entire house with his phone. Uploaded it.
Now anyone on Earth can walk through it in a browser tab. No app. No VR. No agent. No appointment.
Click → you’re inside. Every room. Every angle. Every shadow. Photoreal.
The numbers are insane:
- Agent fee on a $500k home: $15,000
- Cost to make this scan: ~$200
- Time to “tour” 50 houses: one evening
- File size: smaller than a TikTok
The science is wild too:
It’s called 3D Gaussian Splatting instead of polygons (how games render), it uses millions of tiny glowing “splats” of color and depth.
AI reconstructs reality from your photos. The result loads on a phone and looks like you’re THERE.
The grift opportunity is even wilder:
Freelancers are already charging $300–$800 per scan for realtors, Airbnbs, venues, car dealers, museums.
One person + one phone + one weekend = a business.
Open source. Built on PlayCanvas.
Free GitHub: https://t.co/ew6Ql8Ad6u
Esa noche le pregunté por qué tan nervioso si ya sabía la respuesta.
Me dijo que no, que no sabía la respuesta. Que nunca se sabe de verdad y que cualquiera que diga lo contrario está mintiendo o no le importa tanto.
Llevo tres meses comprometida y esa frase me sigue pareciendo lo más honesto que alguien me ha dicho sobre querer a otra persona.
Que el miedo no desaparece cuando uno está seguro. Que precisamente porque importa es que da miedo.
Anónimo
Prof. Donald Knuth opened his new paper with "Shock! Shock!"
Claude Opus 4.6 had just solved an open problem he'd been working on for weeks — a graph decomposition conjecture from The Art of Computer Programming.
He named the paper "Claude's Cycles."
31 explorations. ~1 hour. Knuth read the output, wrote the formal proof, and closed with: "It seems I'll have to revise my opinions about generative AI one of these days."
The man who wrote the bible of computer science just said that. In a paper named after an AI.
Paper: https://t.co/juSOmK9vOt
El cerebro comprime los recuerdos cuando la vida es rutina:
“Cuando tienes 5 años, un año es el 20 % de tu vida. Y cuando tienes 50 años, un año es solo el 2 % de tu vida. Esta es una explicación de por qué el tiempo parece acelerarse a medida que envejeces. Se llama la ley de Janet. Afirma que has experimentado aproximadamente la mitad de tu vida percibida a los 20 años. O, dicho de otra forma: las vacaciones de verano para un niño de 5 años se sienten tan largas como los 10 años que van de los 40 a los 50.
Pero la ley de Janet se puede romper con alta agencia.
Tú tienes agencia sobre la velocidad del tiempo. No eres una víctima pasiva.
Una explicación mejor de por qué el tiempo se acelera al envejecer es que, como adulto, tienes menos experiencias nuevas, así que tu cerebro borra los recuerdos.
Si tomas agencia sobre tu vida, haces cosas nuevas y creas dividendos de memoria, el tiempo se ralentiza.
Si vives tu vida en piloto automático, puedes morir a los 80, pero sentir que moriste a los 20.
Si tomas agencia sobre tu vida, puedes morir a los 80, pero sentir que moriste a los 200.”
Un seguidor en el hilo añade esto:
“El corolario que nunca se dice: la densidad de novedad es la palanca real.
El cerebro comprime las secuencias familiares en tokens de memoria únicos.
Si cada semana es estructuralmente idéntica, una década se almacena como aproximadamente un mes de tiempo sentido.”
@manuelnosoy Hay que irse por los que venden la palas, no por los que buscan el oro!
Apostaría por electricidad e infraestructura.
Solo vamos subiendo en la escala de Kardashev.
A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.
Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks. I'd expect something similar to be happening to well into double digit percent of engineers out there, while the awareness of it in the general population feels well into low single digit percent.
IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits.
Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.
Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance. Certainly I feel net way faster at what I was going to do, but the main effect is that I do a lot more than I was going to do because 1) I can code up all kinds of things that just wouldn't have been worth coding before and 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion.
Leverage. LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals and this is where most of the "feel the AGI" magic is to be found. Don't tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go. Get it to write tests first and then pass them. Put it in the loop with a browser MCP. Write the naive algorithm that is very likely correct first, then ask it to optimize it while preserving correctness. Change your approach from imperative to declarative to get the agents looping longer and gain leverage.
Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck (which is not fun) and I experience a lot more courage because there's almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. I have seen the opposite sentiment from other people too; LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.
Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.
Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We're also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.
Questions. A few of the questions on my mind:
- What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows *a lot*.
- Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro).
- What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music?
- How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?
TLDR Where does this leave us? LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.
Voy a votar por @jchidalgo, me parece el mejor y además ideologicamente me siento identificado (además de con Eli). Sin embargo creo que esta campaña tiene los mejores candidatos que he visto en mucho tiempo, y no me molestaría que ninguno quede (excepto Laura o Fabricio)