mindmodel

Exploring the power and pitfalls of using AI to create business results. Advising biz and tech people how to get the most out of AI. Developing novel lead gen.

[mindmodel @mindmodel]

Fable 5 and I are discussing what it can and can't do to create a bug-hunting system. It just nailed one of the central issues: "The tell you're really probing for is this: the elaborateness of the proposed system is inversely correlated with its honesty here. A grand...

[Nexp @CodexResets1]

🚨 GPT-6.1 Terra might be OpenAI’s next big surprise

- Cheaper than Sol, priced at $2/$10 per million tokens
- Rumored to outperform GPT-6.1 Sol
- 18 Microsoft eval setups moved from GPT-5.6 Terra to gpt-6.1-terra
- Could arrive within days

A model positioned below Sol beating it for less money would completely challenge OpenAI’s usual naming hierarchy.

If real-world tests confirm this, Terra could be far more capable than its name implies.

OpenAI might be cooking something serious.

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

Day 19/ Small updates. Calls connect much faster for dots, changing reasoning in codex & work mid conversation does not invalidate cache anymore and a we've also updated the codex cli.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Marinating chicken overnight pushes the flavor in about as deep as a nickel is thick. Leave a chicken breast in soy sauce for 12 hours, cut it in half, and the middle tastes like you never bothered.

America's Test Kitchen tested this on chicken breasts soaked in soy sauce and red wine, since both leave a color line you can see. They shaved 3 millimeters off the outside, and that cut went a full 2 millimeters past the deepest spot either marinade had reached. Kenji López-Alt got the same result and put the overnight number at a millimeter or two.

It comes down to size. Meat is mostly water packed between tight bundles of protein. Salt breaks into tiny charged bits that can slip through that water. Sugar molecules are huge by comparison, and most of the flavor in herbs and spices dissolves in oil, which the water inside meat pushes away. Then the whole thing sits in a fridge, where the cold slows everything down even more.

Even salt is slow. Greg Blonder, a Harvard-trained physicist who tests barbecue science for AmazingRibs, found salt takes almost 24 hours to travel 1 inch into meat. That's really the one thing the overnight wait does for you. It gives the salt time to reach the middle, while everything else in the bowl sits on the surface, which is honestly where flavor counts most anyway, since the outside is what browns and hits your tongue first.

Acid is where a long soak backfires. Lemon juice and vinegar only loosen the proteins on the outside, and after enough hours that outer layer goes soft and mushy while the inside stays as tough as when you started.

The cuisines that are best at marinating figured this out with a knife. Chinese stir-fry slices meat so thin that the center is only about an eighth of an inch from the surface, so a short soak gets all the way through. Tandoori chicken gets slashed deep before the yogurt goes on, which gives the marinade way more surface to grab onto. Cooks in both places worked out the geometry long before anyone measured how fast flavor moves through meat.

So when a recipe springs an overnight step on you 16 minutes in, salt the meat right away, score it, and give the marinade 30 minutes before it hits the pan. That 12-hour wait was buying you about a nickel's worth of flavor.

[Dane Knecht 🦭 @dok2001]

Cloudflare previous CTO sent this into our bug bounty. We are investigating.

[MERICA MEMED @Mericamemed]

As a millennial I feel attacked. This is so accurate it hurts.

[Incentivising @incentivising]

According to game theory, you must never underestimate a weaker player, especially when the game involves at least three players. A weak player can still hold strategic power, such as resources or relative influence. Whenever two strong players of equal power engage in conflict, it results in a stalemate; the “weak” player can turn into a “kingmaker”: their strategic power may be weak, but it's enough to tip the scales. Suddenly, the weak player gains exponential, previously unheard-of leverage. You might want his favors. Remember this: a player's strategic importance is determined not merely by how much power they possess, but by how much their participation changes the outcome of the game.

[Vital Vegas @VitalVegas]

Vegas-related: Many restaurants now have perfunctory desserts, here’s why.

[oops_all_paperclips @OA_paperclips]

Amazing how quickly we went from "oh no LLMs are going to flood the Internet with insecure code" to "oh no LLMs have discovered the internet was already flooded with insecure code"

[David Agranovich @DavidAgranovich]

What a creative way to celebrate cybersecurity awareness month

[₷₳®∀ℏ @s4hvm]

Saw this a few days ago and it’s put a worm in my brain. Can’t stop thinking about it.

[Herrington Darkholme @hd_nvim]

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
4
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

[Boston @BostonMassUSA]

Worcester (not Providence, not Hartford or wherever) is the 2nd biggest city in New England

[james hong @jhong]

Lots of VCs kindof sound like this: "Your basketball team doesn't have a moat, any healthy human can throw the ball into the basket thingy. "

People who have not run companies before don't understand how much the team matters more than some imagined structural moat.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

The dirty secret of SAAS is that subscription pricing allows you to keep charging customers who aren't really using the product.

The downside of this is that when your subscriptions finally churn, it's a *lagging indicator* of your business failing.

I strongly suspect that there are many, many "dead men walking" now in SAAS, both AI-native and traditional: businesses where the financials may still look fine -- just a quarter or two of stagnant growth, margins are still great, maybe there's an AI narrative going forward, etc. but the *product* is losing utilization and they will lose every single customer to {{AI-native competitor, possibly the big labs themselves}} as the customers encounter those solutions. Those customers become dormant users, but the subscriptions still run for the while.

The actual revenue churn only occurs months or quarters later when the question of "is anyone still using this? do we need to keep paying for this?" is finally answered with a "no" rather than an "i'm not sure".

[our band could be your wife @grace_roso]

The cashier I met at a sandwich shop asked me and my three friends to write down the names of the bands on our shirts on his copy of the receipt and said that he listens to every band he sees on a customer's shirt. So far that's the best music discovery method I've ever heard of.

[shipra @shipranotes]

A broken heart is painful, but an unbroken heart locked away in self-protection is hell. C. S. Lewis said it best.

[Steve Clemans @Steve09812]

Is THIS the Most Important Line In the History Of 'Seinfeld'

[H S Joshi @jon_stewartmill]

A friend says:

"Academics tend to be massive conformists because success consists in the consensus opinion of one's peers. Investors or other business people tend to be much less conformist because success comes from being the first to do something no one else is doing, etc."

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” -Willa Cather

Ran into two PMs I overlapped with at Meta at the Noe Valley Cafe. Usual CV: couple of small exits, mostly vesting out at FAANG, now at the usual retirement startup involving health or education having netted their SF lifestyle bag and real estate.

There aren't 7B people in the world: there are really maybe a few hundred types of people, and you'll meet a dozen of them in any given industry or career arc.

[susie @susieetweets]

nathan fielder creating a play called “smokers allowed” to get around the smoking ban

what’s the loophole? nathan’s responding “theater law” makes me laugh every single time 😭