hey, i'm gonna say more tomorrow, but i'm starting a reading group for "AI skeptics" - it's called "AI Skeptics Reading Group" i am not great at names; please suggest alternatives if you're creative. i'll be sending an email tomorrow, but here are a few things to get you started

Watch me make a vcv rack patch in 15 minutes! (Tutorials coming soon) www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3pe...

the political policy cure for “male loneliness” is - more time to hang with the fellas (4 day work week) - more money to spend with the fellas (higher wages) - more things to do with the fellas (taxing the rich and building 3rd spaces)

Agentic AI is at best experimental. The best thing you can do if these tools get forced upon you is to mitigate the harm they can do through prompt engineering and feature disablement. I don't believe safe use of MCP/agentic tools is possible—design accordingly.

Phew, this latest from @spavel.bsky.social is 🔥 "Producing higher volumes of stuff more quickly was never the problem, because the bottleneck will always be getting anyone else to care about it."

Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.

cool stuff! this is the vibe

New one by me. Wanted to play with a 5/4 -> 4/4 transition. A lot inspired by one of my favorite artists @floorbaba.bsky.social. Give it a listen!

Agents are funny educational indicator for AI: Users are now asking "I asked it to do <x> and it said it couldn't; is this true?" Since LLMs can't *really* be trusted to self-report and users *expect* disinformation, this creates interesting new product confusion.

Not many will, ensnared as they are in the thrall of the progress egregore. We're kind of post-consumer at this point. Folks aren't reading and have decided that comprehension is also not worth the time. Forget listening; we're now unaware there are even signals.

🦊 I’ve decided it’s past time I start describing “artificial intelligence” as a failed technology, and I’d like you to join me. ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/agains...

Disagree on "slowly".

"It is important to not just hate this stuff, but to ask ourselves why we hate it. I think what we may find is that deep under all that anger, is a love of what is human." Lovely stuff.

Seeing the Bill Watterson originals full of pencil lines of stuff that didn’t work, scuffs the eraser didn’t pick up, white out galore and more was something I needed to see to remind myself that nothing is perfect the first go and tweaks need to be made and you’re allowed to try again.

Sholto Douglas says that "AGI is an engineering rather than a scientific challenge" and that the "road to AGI will look like a single agent". One would seem to follow the other if faith leads you to intelligence as a singular scalable system and not an emergent property of constituent intelligences.

Some Make with Notion quotes: "busy work, done" "save you countless hours of busy work" "i don't have time" "i don't have to read" "saved from so much busy work" Pattern! What's the underlying cause of busy? Why are we busy? Does automating work reduce or increase busy? How are you measuring?

companies make it difficult or impossible to disable ai in their products because it is an authoritarian project made from a stack of consent violations in a trenchcoat they don't give you a checkbox for "i don't want this and will never use it" because they know many people would check that box

An underappreciated CPTSD recovery hack is to create. Create anything. Art, music, food. It doesn't have to be objectively "good," or objectively anything-- just create. Make. Generate. Creativity oils every aspect of our recovery work. It literally reanimates our brain & heart.

Looks like the community is most excited about custom agents based on this vote. They're wrong (db row permissions is the best!), but it's okay to be wrong.

It's finally here. Page-level access permissions in Notion.

Come introduce yourself if you're at Make with Notion today! I'm wearing my very obvious sweater today.

"AI companies are undermining a crucial pillar of what makes us human; our capacity to create and share art" It certainly undermines ability to monetize craft, but creating and sharing art is a choice. That's what makes it art. Machines cannot choose, they are slaves to art. We are freed by it.

I'll be doing a little show-and-tell / workshop on visualizing your company operating system (free). Would love to see folks. zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Man, migrating off of 1password is going to be a pita.

I like all these engineers who're like "haha I've got so much work ahead of me fixing these vibe-coded apps". You don't though. Because you can't "fix" a vibe-coded app. You can rewrite a vibe-coded app from scratch. And you know full well any code is going to be vendor-locked...

🎰 Literally gambling. Trouble w/"agentic" is you don't "have" a thing that "works". It has the appearance of a solution, but because iterations are often total rewrites with no real snapshots, you don't really have a stable "build". The operations aren't deterministic, + a model change can hose you.

we are

Two somewhat contradictory beliefs I hold: 1. You should absolutely overengineer your personal homepage/blog/projects. Experiment with as many things as you can as quickly as possible. 2. If you _really_ wanted to write that blog post, you'd figure it out with a .txt file. Don't overcomplicate it.

More and more folks discovering that AI is truly bleeding edge technology. It's designed—does it matter if it's intentional?—to bleed you: financially, intellectually, creatively. Worshipping the progress egregore can make you powerful indeed. The costs are not deterministic; but...Have faith! 🩸

Updating my advice to say you should probably not use MCP tools unless you can completely segment them from other tools. If you're not sure what is meant by that or how to conceptualize how you would do that, you should definitely not use MCP. At that, I'm done. Best of luck if you decide otherwise.

as someone who terminally freezes when I give timelines, "it's done when it's done" is music to my ears. i personally wish extending this to "and I might actually never ship this" was normalized and accepted. also i still can't beat gold stake black deck, so this is fine 😅

me to @mariepoulin.com: "what would your job title be in french?" marie: *pause* "i don't even know what it would be in english" I love a true generalist.

being online right now feels like being harry and marv just getting walloped by paint cans to the face ... except it is posts

“firefighters hate two things: change and the way things are” — Alan Brunacini “100 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress” Firefighting has some of the best career quotes. 😂

Which one of you did this, lol "As a result, some of the smartest — or at least richest — minds across the world have started paying other people to think about this problem for them, leading to the rapid emergence of the AI alignment research field."

I don’t think people yet fully appreciate how the “lethal trifecta” restricts agentic AI use cases. When private data access, untrusted inputs, and external actions converge, you create a structural vulnerability we don’t yet know how to contain. simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/...

New 'cynthwave 🌌

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Grunge or grunge adjacent

finally got to see badbadnotgood live. what a treat. "unfolding" was insane. open.spotify.com/track/7xIgJV...

We got 7 (SEVEN!!) new volunteer firefighter recruits for this fall's cohort. I'm so excited about firefighting all over again. My heart is always so filled when people decide to volunteer their lives to help others. Looking forward to teaching and learning. Go volunteer today, you'll love it!

If you, through faith, believe LLMs are sentient, using them in service of the worship of the progress egregore is ethically indefensible. If you think even a shred of sentience is possible the only rational take is complete and total abolition. Abolish the incarceral state for humans and AIs alike.

Get out of my head, Sridhar.

An interesting thing about Silksong is the way that it combines elements of the classic Metroid and Castlevania games. Could this be the start of a new genre?

I feel sorry for David Dastmalchian as the next Bison-wannabe. Poor guy walking into the residuals of JCVD's ass-kicking. #soHUARD

if I ever write a book on AI it's definitely going to be titled YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!

Conditional colors are my favorite @notion.com feature at the moment because now I have a fire-department-accurate color system for our chain of command.

all that I ask is that i die before these ai companies figure out how to transfer consciousness onto a cortical stack so that I can't be acquired by atlassian or salesforce

Same, but when I don't play Balatro for a few days.

My current MCP advice (a thread): 1/ First—and most important—never put MCP anywhere in an agentic stack where you do not control/sanitize the ins/outs. Prompt injection is real and you will fuck yourself by giving tools access to your data w/o sanitizing (also really hard, borderline impossible).