Simon Hook

I help founders build better technology—whether it’s finding market fit, acquiring early customers, scaling up, or enhancing product experience.

[Simon Hook @iamsimonhook]

How I coached @PlumbsVetDrugs to increase their app subscription conversions by 93%

And skyrocket their average App Store rating from 1-star to an exceptional 4.9-star, based on 781 global reviews.

Understand the transformative design journey I led here:

[BOURNYBOY @BOURNYBOY76]

Ofcom have a list of 186 words you cannot say

Enjoy 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Arvind Narayanan @random_walker]

We've written over 60,000 words on the AI Snake Oil newsletter — almost the length of a book. We just posted an annotated guide to our ~40 essays so far: https://t.co/NuIR8ZWdW4

There are four main themes:
– Resisting AI doom narratives
– Debunking hype about AI’s capabilities and transformative effects
– Understanding why AI evaluation is so tricky (which is one root cause of AI hype)
– Helping AI policy stay grounded in the evidence.

Our book is coming out in September but @sayashk and I will continue to cover AI in the newsletter. We originally started the newsletter as a way to jot down some of our thoughts as we drafted the book, but it's been way too much fun to stop now.

[healthbot @thehealthb0t]

The secret to living to 100?
HIGH CHOLESTEROL

A massive Swedish study tracking over 800,000 people for 35 years just revealed: Every single centenarian had HIGH total cholesterol. The higher your LDL, the longer you live.

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Tory Govt froze UK income tax personal allowance (PA) at £12570 in 2021, continued by Labour.

Inflation adjusted PA would be £16048 in 2026/27.

Millions of poor forced to pay income tax.

Capital gains & dividends taxed at lower marginal rates than wages
https://t.co/ioAIM1bUhT

[Steve Skojec @SteveSkojec]

He’s dead on.

[Simon Hook @iamsimonhook]

@TheBeardBro @claudeai Me too! Helpful error handling 🤦‍♂️ - For a moment I thought I was using a Microsoft tool 🔨

[Simon Hook @iamsimonhook]

@claudeai Just installed Cowork update and it’s not working at all. Keep getting an error 500 message 😳 Help!

[Simon Hook @iamsimonhook]

@om_patel5 Is it me or are these LLMs quite reflective of those responsible for building them?

[Om Patel @om_patel5]

sam altman watching ChatGPT hallucinate live on stage is the funniest thing i've seen all week

the CEO of OpenAI, on stage, in front of everyone, watching his own AI just make things up in real time

and his face says it all

this is the guy telling us AGI is coming soon btw

[Jesse Pujji @jspujji]

https://t.co/MyW8k0rjZD

[CG @cgtwts]

This is INSANE, Anthropic ran its marketing with basically one person.

Austin lau, a non-technical growth lead, was running paid search, paid social, email, and seo solo.

Here’s the workflow:

> export ad CSVs into Claude Code
> AI flags underperforming ads
> agents generate new headlines + descriptions
> Figma auto-swaps copy across 100 ad templates
> MCP server pulls live Meta data

The results:

> ad creation went from 2 hours to 15 minutes.
> total marketing output grew 10×.
> conversion rates landed 41% above industry average.

One person doing what used to take an entire marketing team.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Psychologist Stanley Milgram found that 65% of the population do not have the psychological or moral resources to defy authority’s order, no matter how illegitimate the order is.

Therefore only 35% have critical thinking capacity.

Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments (conducted in the early 1960s at Yale University) did not find that 80% of people lack the psychological or moral resources to defy illegitimate authority orders.

The actual results from his baseline condition showed that 65% of participants (26 out of 40) continued to administer what they believed were maximum 450-volt shocks to a "learner" (an actor), despite protests, screams, and apparent distress.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Yann LeCun (@ylecun ) explains why LLMs are so limited in terms of real-world intelligence.

Says the biggest LLM is trained on about 30 trillion words, which is roughly 10 to the power 14 bytes of text.
That sounds huge, but a 4 year old who has been awake about 16,000 hours has also taken in about 10 to the power 14 bytes through the eyes alone. So a small child has already seen as much raw data as the largest LLM has read.

But the child’s data is visual, continuous, noisy, and tied to actions: gravity, objects falling, hands grabbing, people moving, cause and effect. From this, the child builds an internal “world model” and intuitive physics, and can learn new tasks like loading a dishwasher from a handful of demonstrations.

LLMs only see disconnected text and are trained just to predict the next token. So they get very good at symbol patterns, exams, and code, but they lack grounded physical understanding, real common sense, and efficient learning from a few messy real-world experiences.

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From 'Pioneer Works' YT channel (link in comment)

[shouko @shoukointech]

Naval Ravikant: "Good design is a moat is an AI age"

[CG @cgtwts]

> be Anthropic
> lost the $200M Pentagon contract to OpenAI
> climbed to #1 on the App Store anyway
> ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295%
> shipped “Memory”to pull chatgpt users over.

[Jonathan Slater @slater57649]

I’m. Busy. Bro.

[Alan Smith @AlanJLSmith]

Rachel Reeves wants UK pension schemes to significantly increase their allocation to private equity investments.

Despite the fact that they are higher risk, less transparent and higher fees.

And have delivered lower returns:

State Street’s private equity index shows that the S&P 500 outperformed private markets funds over the last 1, 3, 5 and 10 years!

Another bad idea from Rachel.