not the word I would use (from @natolambert.bsky.social's latest newsletter)

New post alexcbecker.net/blog/myth-of...

nobody asked but rebuild really makes it clear that the problem with end of evangelion was not the budget or the deadlines or the mania but that anno's vision was, for all its strengths, incoherent. bringing it into better focus mostly just makes it worse

i love slave plantation heirs being landed gentry forever, but wokely

yeah similarly just being interested in the human factors literature here reveals the idea of "what if we told the (worker) to not make mistakes. what if we put it in capital letters and repeated it a lot" to be incredibly fucked

I missed the initial tangled discourse and now I’m just completely lost

i find models are often bad at writing prompts which seems ironic but makes sense -- it's a new, rapidly evolving, and poorly documented skill

pov: breakfast is late

Finally got around to changing the @

This company has the most tasteless ads in SF. This is actually the best one I've seen. Either they have no taste or they have an incredibly bleak view of their target audience.

Feeling a lot less bad about dropping Gemini today

I spent the last 2 months trying to prevent this. If OpenAI offered a fig leaf, Google said "imagine we offered a fig leaf." Google affirms it can't veto usage, commits to modify safety filters at government request, & aspirational language with no legal restrictions. Shameful.

I am reflexively skeptical results like this will transfer to large, thoroughly post-trained models: - large models can more effectively make use of the reasoning in token space - it is easy to hit a ceiling with a post-training regime that better post-training will blow through

It is an iron law of tax policy that popularity is inversely related to efficiency. For example, right now would be the ideal time to raise the gas tax.

also some of you

some of you

this makes me both proud and very sad

he makes some good points

The Matrix was right: the future *is* really full of screens streaming terminal text no one is reading

considering dusting off some draft blog posts from 10 years ago

unfortunately we know we are not in the good timeline because ireland did not reunify in 2024

suggests large welfare gains from "imputed dark matter social media" which posts the missing content of hyperrealistic AI generated videos of your friends and aquaintances doing the dishes, fighting with their spouses, stuck in traffic, and scrolling social media. can I get an EA grant for this

Short follow-up to my post on why everyone feels poor: alexcbecker.net/blog/decreas...

Now that I no longer write code I might finally start playing factorio

Sponsored by an MongoDB and a vibe-business-building app (really)

a lot to unpack here

Replaced most of my blog previews with GPT Image 2, ended up preferring it over Nano Banana 2 in 26/30 cases, mostly 1-shot. alexcbecker.net/blog/prompt-...

Unfortunately GPT Image 2 is just better than Nano Banana 2, which removes my last remaining reason to use Gemini.

some forum bans are load bearing alexcbecker.net/blog/rationa...

/compact

My hot take is that the median social system breaks under too much optimization pressure, and we should stop trying to optimize things

fun times when the model figures out it's in an eval but radically misjudges the reward function

Every frontier model is crazy undercalibrated on its abilities and it definitely makes me uneasy.

not much of a deadline then is it

Good to see Mozilla not only doing the needful but optimistic for the future blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-s...

all too easy unfortunately

This is very funny to me because I would consider myself ETTA except their definition of "late" is so early as to be outside of my social circle's Overton window.

I am once again asking that my microblogging site allow me to search my likes

Every now and then I remember Milton Friedman's main political legacy is Prop 13 and I get sad, confused and angry.

Just checked up on tanky twitter and was surprised to see it still going strong, but I guess they see no difference between Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk.

They are really good at picking up on style cues in text

Surely in 2026 the move is to just have Claude do this www.irs.gov/e-file-provi...

Fun fact if you have a moderately complicated tax situation Turbo Tax will ask you to fill in boxes one by one out of order identified by non-unique IDs and you can't correct it later.

gambling apps delenda est

this is why made my own markdown flavor

Imagine if Lovecraft were alive today

claude has taken over my hyprland and it is not going well

Great thread hitting on multiple points but this one resonates especially given my specialty

fuck it we're building an agent harness