nexus

here for ai & politics

[nexus @onebecomeszero]

@richardpbacon That’s this evenings watching decided!

[Matt Griswold @griswold]

Anyone know how to beat this level?

[nexus @onebecomeszero]

@TheZvi @leopoldasch Coming soon to a feed near you “The Taiwanese Chip Wars” the prequel to “The Third World War” & don’t forget the terrifying new side quest “The Hormuz Crisis”

[Michail aka Opium Hum / Hyper Real Radio @opiumhum]

John Gerrard's "Western Flag" is probably the most relevant work of art right now.

[björk @bjork]

humongously grateful for rosalia inviting me on her journey

warmth björk

#BRITs #BritAwards2026

📷 Elliott Morgan

[Adam Taylor @mradamtaylor]

Full circle: The Washington Post's obituary for Khamenei was written by Bill Branigin, who joined WaPo to cover the 1979 Iranian revolution which would bring to power the theocracy that dominated Iran for almost half a century. (1/3)

[Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut]

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance.

In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.

[nexus @onebecomeszero]

@ProudSocialist He says posting on a social media platform hosted on a cloud service operated from a data centre…

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Germany's Merz:

China builds the world’s largest solar farms within a few months.

In the EU, it takes years just for the project to get approved.

Therefore, I propose to implement a fundamental principle in most permitting processes: Any project that is not treated within a few weeks or months will be regarded approved automatically.

[Ben Guerin @bjhguerin]

Pubs in England & Wales are facing a massive hike in business rates in April 🍻 💸 📈

75%+ of venues are looking at increases in their rateable value, some by 500%+

the government's signalled a potential u-turn... but nothing's confirmed yet.

so i built https://t.co/nSPT1YtVFX with official VOA data for 43,000 pubs, which looks at just how fucked they each are

find your local.
see what they're up against.
buy a pint.

[Pete @splendid_pete]

There is so much in this. Things that people obsessed with skin colour completely fail to grasp.

[Shane Legg @ShaneLegg]

I enjoyed the recent Nature article “Does AI already have human-level intelligence?” in which the authors argue that AGI has arrived!

While I’m sympathetic to much of what they write, I disagree on a few points and in particular their conclusion. Article link & comments below.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

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.

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

The Adolescence of Technology: an essay on the risks posed by powerful AI to national security, economies and democracy—and how we can defend against them: https://t.co/0phIiJjrmz

[Shane Legg @ShaneLegg]

AGI is now on the horizon and it will deeply transform many things, including the economy.

I'm currently looking to hire a Senior Economist, reporting directly to me, to lead a small team investigating post-AGI economics.

Job spec and application here: https://t.co/VAfwrMc8Tp

[nexus @onebecomeszero]

@felixrieseberg @trq212 Congrats on rapid progress! I built a PKM in Obsidian + CC with a deep archive: 100s of MD notes auto-managed by CC covering product, clients, projects, goals etc. Includes skills & hooks system for guidelines/workflows/rules. Would love a native PKM for deep context in Cowork!

[Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン @rakyll]

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

[A24 @A24]

Look up. @martysupreme