Author name: Beth Washington

when-will-they-take-our-jobs?

When Will They Take Our Jobs?

Highlights / /

And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too?

Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, which will center this post.

I believe that Seb is being too optimistic on several fronts, but in a considered and highly reasonable way. The key is to understand the assumptions being made, and also to understand that he is only predicting that the era of employment optimism will last for 10-20 years.

By contrast, there are others that expect human employment and even human labor share of income to remain robust indefinitely, no matter the advances of AI capabilities, even if AI can do a superior job on all tasks, often citing comparative advantage. I will centrally respond to such claims in a different future post.

So to disambiguate, this post is about point #2 here, but I also assert #1 and #3:

  1. By default, if AI capabilities continue to advance, then the humans lose control over the future and are rather likely to all die.

  2. If we manage to avoid that, then there is a good chance humans can retain a lot of employment during the rest of The Cyborg Era, which might well last 10-20 years.

  3. What is not plausible is that AI capabilities and available compute continue to increase, and this state endures indefinitely. It is a transitional state.

First I’ll make explicit the key assumptions, then unpack the central dynamics.

There’s a background undiscussed ‘magic’ going on, in most scenarios where we discuss what AI does to future employment. That ‘magic’ is, somehow, ensuring everything is controlled by and run for the benefit of the humans, and is keeping the humans alive, and usually also preserving roughly our system of government and rights to private property.

I believe that this is not how things are likely to turn out, or how they turn out by default.

I believe that by default, if you build sufficiently capable AI, and have it generally loose in the economy, humans will cease to have control over the future, and also it is quite likely that everyone will die. All questions like those here would become moot.

Thus I wish that this assumption was always made explicit, rather than being ignored or referred to as a given as it so often is. Here’s Seb’s version, which I’ll skip ahead to:

Seb Krier: Note that even then, the humans remain the beneficiaries of this now ‘closed loop’ ASI economy: again, the ASI economy is not producing paper clips for their own enjoyment. But when humans ‘demand’ a new underwater theme park, the ASIs would prefer that the humans don’t get involved in the production process. Remember the ‘humans keep moving up a layer of abstraction’ point above? At some point this could stop!​

Why should we expect the humans to remain the beneficiaries? You don’t get to assert that without justification, or laying out what assumptions underlie that claim.

With that out of the way, let’s assume it all works out, and proceed on that basis.

Seb Krier wrote recently about human job prospects in The Cyborg Era.

The Cyborg Era means the period where both AI and humans meaningfully contribute to a wide variety of work.

I found this post to be much better than his and others’ earlier efforts to explore these questions. I’d have liked to see the implicit assumptions and asserted timelines be more explicit, but in terms of what happens in the absence of hardcore recursive AI self-improvement this seemed like a rather good take.

I appreciate that he:

  1. Clearly distinguishes this transitional phase from what comes later.

  2. Emphasizes that employment requires (A) complementarity to hold or (B) cases where human involvement is intrinsic to value.

  3. Sets out expectations for how fast this might play out.

Seb Krier: ​We know that at least so far, AI progress is rapid but not a sudden discontinuous threshold where you get a single agent that does everything a human does perfectly; it’s a jagged, continuous, arduous process that gradually reaches various capabilities at different speeds and performance levels. And we already have experience with integrating ‘alternative general intelligences’ via international trade: other humans. Whether through immigration or globalization, the integration of new pools of intelligence is always jagged and uneven rather than instantaneous.

I think we get there eventually, but (a) it takes longer than bulls typically expect – I think 5-10 years personally; (b) people generally focus on digital tasks alone – they’re extremely important of course, but an argument about substitution/complementarity should also account for robotics and physical bottlenecks; (c) it requires more than just capable models – products attuned to local needs, environments, and legal contexts; (d) it also requires organising intelligence to derive value from it – see for example Mokyr’s work on social/industrial intelligence. This means that you don’t just suddenly get a hyper-versatile ‘drop in worker’ that does everything and transforms the economy overnight (though we shouldn’t completely dismiss this either).




So I expect cyborgism to last a long time – at least until ASI is so superior that a human adds negative value/gets in the way, compute is highly abundant, bottlenecks disappear, and demand for human stuff is zero – which are pretty stringent conditions.

I agree that cyborgism can ‘survive a lot’ in terms of expanding AI capabilities.

However I believe that his ending expectation condition goes too far, especially setting the demand limit at zero. It also risks giving a false impression of how long we can expect before it happens.

I clarified with him that what he means is that The Cyborg Era is starting now (I agree, and hello Claude Code!) and that he expects this to last on the order of 10-20 years. That’s what ‘a long time’ stands for.

It very much does not mean ‘don’t worry about it’ or ‘the rest of our natural lifetimes.’

That is not that long a time, even if this slow diffusion hypothesis is basically right.

Yes, it seems likely that, as Alex Imas quotes, “Human labor share will remain a substantial part of the economy a lot longer than the AGI-maximalist timelines suggest,” but ‘a lot longer’ does not mean all that long in these scenarios, and also it might not persist that long, or humans might not persist that long at all, depending on how things play out.

As long as the combination of Human + AGI yields even a marginal gain over AGI alone, the human retains a comparative advantage.​

Technically and in the short term (e.g. this 10-20 year window) where the humans are ‘already paid for’ then yes, although in increasingly many places this can be false faster than you think because involving the slow humans is not cheap, and the number of humans practically required could easily end up very small. I suggest the movie No Other Choice, and expect this complementarity to apply to a steadily shrinking group of the humans.

Seb correctly points out that labor can have value disconnected from the larger supply chain, but that rules a lot of things out, as per his discussions of integration costs and interface frictions.

In this style of scenario, I’d expect it to be hard to disambiguate transitional unemployment from permanent structural unemployment, because the AIs will be diffusing and advancing faster than many of the humans can adapt and respecialize.

Humans will need, repeatedly, to move from existing jobs to other ‘shadow jobs’ that did not previously justify employment, or that represent entirely new opportunities and modes of production. During the Cyborg Era, humans will still have a place in such new jobs, or at least have one for a time until those jobs too are automated. After the Cyborg Era ends, such jobs never materialize. They get done by AI out of the gate.

Thus, if the diffusion timeline and length of the Cyborg Era is on the order of 10-20 years during which things stay otherwise normal, I’d expect the second half of the Cyborg Era to involve steadily rising unemployment and falling labor power, even if ‘at the equilibrium’ of the current level of AI diffusion this would fix itself.

Mostly it seems like Seb thinks that it is plausibly that most of the work to ensure full employment will be via the ‘literally be a human’ tasks, even long after other opportunities are mostly or entirely gone.

This would largely come from associated demand for intra-human positional goods and status games.

I don’t expect it to play out that way in practice, if other opportunities do vanish. There will at least for a time be demand for such tasks. I don’t see how, when you consider who is consuming and has the ability to engage in such consumption, and the AI-provided alternative options, it adds up to anything approaching full employment.

Krier later also points to bespoke human judgment or taste as a future bottleneck. Such taste evolves over time, so even if you could take a snapshot of bespoke taste now it would not long remain ‘taste complete.’ And he reiterates the standard ‘there’s always more to do’:

Seb Krier: People expect that at some point, “it’s solved” – well the world is not a finite set of tasks and problems to solve. Almost everything people ever did in the ancient times is automated – and yet the world today now has more preferences to satiate and problems to solve than ever. The world hasn’t yet shown signs of coalescing to a great unification or a fixed state! Of course it’s conceivable that at sufficient capability levels, the generative process exhausts itself and preferences stabilize – but I’d be surprised.

Yinan Na: Taste changes faster than automation can capture it, that gap can create endless work.

There are two distinct ways this could fail us.

One, as Seb notes, is if things reached a static end state. This could eventually happen.

The one Seb is neglecting, the point I keep emphasizing, is that this assumes we can outcompete the AIs on new problems, or in developing new taste, or in some other new task [N]. Even if there is always a new task [N], that only keeps the humans employed or useful if they are better at [N] than the AI, or at least useful enough to invoke comparative advantage. If that breaks down, we’re cooked.

If neither of those happens, and we otherwise survive, then there will remain a niche for some humans to be bespoke taste arbiters and creators, and this remains a bottleneck to some forms of growth. One should still not expect this to be a major source of employment, as bespoke taste creation or judgment ability has always been rare, and only necessary in small quantities.

Contra Imas and Krier, I do think that full substitution of AI for human labor, with the exception of literally-be-a-human tasks, should be the ‘default assumption’ for what happens in the long term even if things otherwise turn out well, as something we would eventually have to deal with.

I don’t understand why we would expect otherwise.

I’d also note that even if ‘real wages’ rise in such a scenario as Trammell predicts (I do not predict this), due to the economy technically growing faster than the labor share falls, that this would not fix people’s real consumption problems and make people better off, for reasons I explored in The Revolution of Rising Expectations series. Yes, think about all the value you’re getting from Claude Code, but also man’s gotta eat.

Ultimately, the caution is not to do policy interventions on this front now:

Until that specific evidence mounts, preemptive policy surgery is likely to do more harm than good.​

I agree with Krier and also Trammell that interventions aimed in particular at preserving human jobs and employment would be premature. That’s a problem that emerges and can be addressed over time, and where there’s a lot of uncertainty we will resolve as we go.

What we need to do now on the policy front is focus on our bigger and more deadly and irreversible problems, of how we’re navigating all of this while being able to stay alive and in control of and steering the future.

What we shouldn’t yet do are interventions designed to protect jobs.

As I said, I believe Krier gave us a good take. By contrast, here’s a very bad take as an example of the ‘no matter what humans will always be fine’ attitude:

Garry Tan: But even more than that: humans will want more things, and humans will do more things assisted and supercharged by AGI

​As @typesfast says: “How are people going to make money if AI is doing all the work? I think that that very much misunderstands human nature that we’ll just want more things. There’s an infinite desire inside the human soul can never be satisfied without God. We need more stuff. Like we got to have more. We got to have more.”

Yeah, sure, we will want more things and more things will happen, but what part of ‘AI doing all the work’ do you not understand? So we previously wanted [XYZ] and now we have [XYZ] and want [ABC] too, so the AI gets us [ABCXYZ]. By construction the AI is doing all the work.

You could say, that’s fine, you have [ABCXYZ] without doing work. Which, if we’ve managed to stay in charge and wealthy and alive despite not doing any of the work, is indeed an outcome that can be looked at various ways. You’re still unemployed at best.

A full response on the maximalist comparative advantage, unlimited demand and other arguments that think humans are magic will follow at a future date, in some number of parts.

Discussion about this post

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FBI fights leaks by seizing Washington Post reporter’s phone, laptops, and watch

Policy, press freedom, trump administration, Washington Post / /

“Extraordinary, aggressive action”

FBI searches home and devices of reporter who has over 1,100 government contacts.

The Washington Post building on August 6, 2013 in Washington, DC, Credit: Getty Images | Saul Loeb

The FBI searched a Washington Post reporter’s home and seized her work and personal devices as part of an investigation into what Attorney General Pam Bondi called “illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

Executing a search warrant at the Virginia home of reporter Hannah Natanson on Wednesday morning, FBI “agents searched her home and her devices, seizing her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch,” The Washington Post reported. “One of the laptops was her personal computer, the other a Washington Post-issued laptop. Investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the probe.”

Natanson regularly uses encrypted Signal chats to communicate with people who work or used to work in government, and has said her list of contacts exceeds 1,100 current and former government employees. The Post itself “received a subpoena Wednesday morning seeking information related to the same government contractor,” the report said.

Post Executive Editor Matt Murray sent an email to staff saying that early in the morning, “FBI agents showed up unannounced at the doorstep of our colleague Hannah Natanson, searched her home, and proceeded to seize her electronic devices.” Murray’s email called the search an “extraordinary, aggressive action” that is “deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work.”

The New York Times wrote that it “is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to conduct searches at a reporter’s home. Typically, such investigations are done by examining a reporter’s phone records or email data.”

The search warrant said the probe’s target is “Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement,” the Post article said.

“Alarming escalation” in Trump “war on press freedom”

Bondi confirmed the search in an X post. “This past week, at the request of the Department of War, the Department of Justice and FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars,” Bondi wrote.

Bondi said the Trump administration “will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information” that “pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”

Searches targeting journalists require “intense scrutiny” because they “can deter and impede reporting that is vital to our democracy,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “Attorney General Bondi has weakened guidelines that were intended to protect the freedom of the press, but there are still important legal limits, including constitutional ones, on the government’s authority to use subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to obtain information from journalists. The Justice Department should explain publicly why it believes this search was necessary and legally permissible, and Congress and the courts should scrutinize that explanation carefully.”

Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the search “an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.”

In April 2025, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era policy that limited searches and subpoenas of reporters in leak investigations. But even the weaker Trump administration guidelines “make clear that it’s a last resort for rare emergencies only,” according to Stern. “The administration may now be in possession of volumes of journalist communications having nothing to do with any pending investigation and, if investigators are able to access them, we have zero faith that they will respect journalist-source confidentiality.”

The Washington Post didn’t say whether Perez-Lugones provided information to Natanson and pointed out that the criminal complaint against him “does not accuse him of leaking classified information he is alleged to have taken.”

Post reporter has over 1,100 government contacts

Natanson does have many sources in the federal workforce. She wrote a first-person account last month of her experience as the news organization’s “federal government whisperer.” Around the time Trump’s second term began, she posted a message on a Reddit community for federal employees saying she wanted to “speak with anyone willing to chat.”

Natanson got dozens of messages by the next day and would eventually compile “1,169 contacts on Signal, all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories,” she wrote. Natanson explained that she was previously an education reporter but the paper “created a beat for me covering Trump’s transformation of government, and fielding Signal tips became nearly my whole working life.”

In another case this month, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena journalist Seth Harp for allegedly “doxxing” a Delta Force commander involved in the operation in Venezuela that captured President Nicolás Maduro. Harp called the doxxing allegation “ludicrous” because he had posted publicly available information, specifically an online bio of a man “whose identity is not classified.”

“There is zero question that Harp’s actions were fully and squarely within the protections of the First Amendment, as well as outside the scope of any federal criminal statutes,” over 20 press freedom and First Amendment organizations said in a letter to lawmakers yesterday.

The Trump administration’s aggressive stance toward the media has also included numerous threats from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to investigate and punish broadcasters for “news distortion.”

As for Perez-Lugones, he was charged last week with unlawful retention of national defense information in US District Court for the District of Maryland. Perez-Lugones was a member of the US Navy from 1982 to 2002, said an affidavit from FBI Special Agent Keith Starr. He has been a government contractor since 2002 and held top-secret security clearances during his Naval career and again in his more recent work as a contractor.

“Currently, Perez-Lugones works as a systems engineer and information technology specialist for a Government contracting company whose primary customer is a Government agency,” the affidavit said. He had “heightened access to classiïŹed systems, networks, databases, and repositories” so that he could “maintain, support, and optimize various computer systems, networks, and software.”

Documents found in man’s car and house, FBI says

The affidavit said that “Perez-Lugones navigated to and searched databases or repositories containing classified information without authorization.” The FBI alleges that on October 28, 2025, he took screenshots of a classified intelligence report on a foreign country, pasted the screenshots into a Microsoft Word document, and printed the Word document.

His employer is able to retrieve records of printing activity on classified systems, and “a review of Perez-Lugones’ printing activity on that dates [sic] showed that he had printed innocuous sounding documents (i.e., Microsoft Word‐Document 1) that really contained classified and sensitive reports,” the affidavit said.

Perez-Lugones allegedly went on to access and view a “classified intelligence report related to Government operational activity” on January 5, 2026. On January 7, he was observed at his workplace taking notes on a yellow notepad while looking back and forth between the notepad and a computer that was logged into the classified system, the affidavit said.

Investigators executed search warrants on his home in Laurel, Maryland, and his vehicle on January 8. They found a document marked as SECRET in a lunchbox in his car and another secret document in his basement, the affidavit said.

Prior video surveillance showed Perez-Lugones at his cubicle looking at the document that was later found in the lunchbox, the affidavit said. Investigators determined that he “remov[ed] the classification header/footer markings from this document prior to leaving his workplace.”

The US law that Perez-Lugones was charged with violating provides for fines or prison sentences of up to 10 years. A magistrate judge ruled that Perez-Lugones could be released, but that decision is being reviewed by the court at the request of the US government.

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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microsoft-vows-to-cover-full-power-costs-for-energy-hungry-ai-data-centers

Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers

AI, AI infrastructure, AI training, Amazon, Biz & IT, brad smith, community development, datacenters, Donald Trump, electricity, Google, machine learning, Meta, microsoft, openai, property taxes, skilled trades, water use / /

Taking responsibility for power usage

In the Microsoft blog post, Smith acknowledged that residential electricity rates have recently risen in dozens of states, driven partly by inflation, supply chain constraints, and grid upgrades. He wrote that communities “value new jobs and property tax revenue, but not if they come with higher power bills or tighter water supplies.”

Microsoft says it will ask utilities and public commissions to set rates high enough to cover the full electricity costs for its data centers, including infrastructure additions. In Wisconsin, the company is supporting a new rate structure that would charge “Very Large Customers,” including data centers, the cost of the electricity required to serve them.

Smith wrote that while some have suggested the public should help pay for the added electricity needed for AI, Microsoft disagrees. He stated, “Especially when tech companies are so profitable, we believe that it’s both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI.”

On water usage for cooling, Microsoft plans a 40 percent improvement in data center water-use intensity by 2030. A recent environmental audit from AI model-maker Mistral found that training and running its Large 2 model over 18 months produced 20.4 kilotons of CO2 emissions and evaporated enough water to fill 112 Olympic-size swimming pools, illustrating the aggregate environmental impact of AI operations at scale.

To solve some of these issues, Microsoft says it has launched a new AI data center design using a closed-loop system that constantly recirculates cooling liquid, dramatically cutting water usage. In this design, already deployed in Wisconsin and Georgia, potable water is no longer needed for cooling.

On property taxes, Smith stated in the blog post that the company will not ask local municipalities to reduce their rates. The company says it will pay its full share of local property taxes. Smith wrote that Microsoft’s goal is to bring these commitments to life in the first half of 2026. Of course, these are PR-aligned company goals and not realities yet, so we’ll have to check back in later to see whether Microsoft has been following through on its promises.

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dating-roundup-#10:-gendered-expectations

Dating Roundup #10: Gendered Expectations

Dating / /

The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game.

Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it’s impossible to be a woman.

It’s easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent about them, and ultimately be fine, such that we will also be fine if all that information we shared can then be shared with others or used as a weapon.

Express your emotions. No, not those, and definitely not like that. But do it.

That’s the goal. If you say that’s not fair? Well, life it’s fair, I report the facts rather than make the rules, and the whole thing sounds like a you problem.

Kryssy La Reida: Serious question for men
what is it that makes you feel like you are in a relationship with a woman that you can’t express your feelings to? Or why would you even want to be in one where you don’t have a safe space to do so? If your partner isn’t that safe landing space for those emotions what is the point? Or are you just conditioned to not express them?

Eric Electrons: Many women will often say they want vulnerability in a man, no matter how calmly and respectfully delivered, but treat us differently once they get it, use it against us when upset, joke about it, or share it without our consent to friends and family.

It takes time and experience to truly identify a woman who is trustworthy and knowledgeable enough to handle expressing your feelings to as a man. Especially, if she’s a significant other.

Philosophi_Cat: It’s true that many women say they want a man who’s “in touch with his emotions,” yet get the “ick” when he expresses them. This can be bewildering for men, but the issue lies in how emotion is expressed, not in the fact of feeling it.

Yes, women tend value a man who has emotional fluency and depth, someone who can articulate his inner world and empathise with hers.

But they recoil when a man loses his composure, collapses emotionally and turns to her for emotional containment. The moment she has to soothe or stabilise him, when she must step into the role of his therapist or mother, the polarity between them collapses. She no longer feels his strength; she feels his need. And that is where the “ick” arises from.

So this is the key distinction: Emotional depth does not mean emotional dumping.

A man can speak openly about his struggles while remaining self-possessed and anchored in his own centre. He might say, “I’ve had a rough week and I’m working through some frustration, but I’ll be fine,” rather than dissolving into self-pity or seeking reassurance. He shares what’s real without burdening her with it. His emotions are contained by his own form.

That’s what women respond to: emotional transparency grounded in composure. It signals a robust and stable inner centre. It shows he can hold complexity without being consumed by it.

By contrast, many men, fearing that any show of feeling will make them appear weak, over-correct by suppressing or hiding their emotions entirely.

Robin Hanson: So men, feel emotions only if you fully command them. If you are instead vulnerable to them, you are “ick”. Got that?

Robin’s imprecise here. It’s not that you can’t feel the emotions, it’s that you can’t talk about or too obviously reveal them, and especially can’t burden her with them. Unless, that is, you are sufficiently justified in not commanding them in a given situation, in which case you can do it.

As with many other similar things this creates a skill issue. Yes, we’d all (regardless of gender) like to be fully in touch with and in command of our emotions and in a place where we can own and share all of it securely and all that, while also having a good sense of when it’s wise to not share. That’s asking a lot, so most people need practical advice on how to handle it all.

When you sense potential trouble and the wrong move can cause permanent damage up to and including the ick, risk aversion and holding things back is the natural play. But if you always do that you definitely fail, and you also don’t fail fast. A lot of risk aversion is aversion to failing fast when you should welcome failing fast, which is the opposite of the correct strategy.

So you’ll need to start getting command and ownership of at least some of those emotions, and you should err on the side of sharing more faster if you’re in position to handle it, but also it’s fine to hold other stuff back or be vague about it, especially negative stuff.

You’ll be told that the above is overthinking things. It isn’t.

It is extremely attractive to feel and openly show your emotions and get away with it, if you do it successfully, largely because it is so difficult to do it successfully.

Taylor: wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall.

Pay Roll Manager Here: Any man reading her tweet, please do not believe her.

Geoffrey Miller: Sexual selection through mate choice can shape traits faster than any other evolutionary process can. If women were really attracted to men who cried a lot, men would have evolved, very quickly, to cry a lot.

Robin Hanson: And if women who actually knew what they wanted and said so honestly were attractive to men, that would have evolved very quickly too, right?

On the evolutionary level, yes selection is rapid but even if the effect were extreme that’s over centuries and millennia, not decades. So the ‘if this was attractive evolution would have handled it’ argument only holds for traits that would have been attractive in older worlds very different from our own, in cultures radically different from our own, where selection operated very differently.

Also, a lot of your reproductive success in those worlds (and ours) is about intersexual dynamics and resource acquisition, and several other factors, so a trait can be attractive but still get aggressively selected against.

So while yes, obviously evolution can offer some very big hints and should be considered, you cannot assume that this is predictive of what works now.

‘Can feel and openly show emotions’ is not one thing. There are some ways that being able to feel and openly show emotions is attractive and winning. In other ways and situations it is very much not. Like when you train an LLM, there are a bunch of correlated things that will tend to move in correlated ways, and modifying one thing also modifies other things.

So yes, when you see the player in the clip talk about missing his family, that is (mostly) a good use of feeling and showing emotions at this point (although it wouldn’t have gone as great in the same spot even a few decades ago, I am guessing). But that doesn’t mean that showing that level of emotion and crying on a regular basis will go that well.

This is a skill issue. Being the brick wall is not a universally optimal play. But it is a safer play in any given situation. In many situations it is indeed correct, and at low levels of related skill it is better than the alternatives even more often.

First best is to be in touch with your emotions but be high skilled in managing them and knowing when and how to communicate them to others, and so on. Second best is to be cautious. Long term, yes, you want to pick up this skill.

This is speculative. The theory is, it is fine to mix and match and combine and defy stereotypes, but only via embodying more things rather than less things.

Sasha Chapin: So I have a theory that for most people, men and women, peak attractiveness in a hetero context involves high-budget androgyny

Low-budget androgyny: not inhabiting either gendered energy

High-budget androgyny: inhabiting your own fully, and a bit of the other

I notice that the men I know who get the most laid or have the least trouble securing a relationship are men you could see boxing or fishing, but could also do a convincing impromptu tarot reading or w/e

Julie Fredrickson: I’ve generally dressed in a normie feminine manner and leaned into long hair and cosmetics because all my interests are masculine coded. Would this fall into high budget androgyny?

Sasha Chapin: Yes.

Andrew Rettek: I’ve noticed this androgyny binary before, this is a good description of it.

Sarah Constantin: this is in the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which i think is from the 60s. distinguishes “androgynous” (both masculine & feminine) from “undifferentiated” (neither masculine nor feminine.)

i’m pretty undifferentiated lol

but so are Tolkienesque elves so how bad can it be.

I’ve said it before but it’s important so it bears repeating, one of the fundamentals, obviously it is not this simple or easy but on the margin this helps quite a lot, you want to give people the unexpected compliments that mean something:

Ibrahim: telling a hot girl shes pretty is like someone telling YOU, presumably a smart twitter tech guy, ur smart.

if someone told you ur smart ud prob just say thanks.

maybe itll feel slightly good, but it wont leave much of an impression on u, bc no shit ur smart; ur a swe.

same thing for hot girls.

if someone says they r pretty, they drgaf, bc like its so obvious and that compliment doesnt mean that much to them.

give people complements they dont usually get to stand out. call ur local tech guy hot and call ur local hot girl smart

Alberto Fuentes: Calling a nerd Guy “hot” is a clear indication of the beginning of a scam.

Ibrahim: sigh you’re right.

Beware Alberto’s warning too, of course, you need to not overdo it, and also beware.

If you’re not sure what kind of compliment they prefer, you can run tests. Or in theory?

Ben Hsieh: for awhile i was on this completely psychotic kick where i’d relate this advice (tell pretty girls that they’re smart and smart girls that they’re pretty) and then ASK the girl which compliment they’d prefer

no idea where my head was on that, it’s a wonder i never got stabbed.

Lydia Laurenson: that’s actually hilarious… I feel like I might laugh pretty hard if someone said that to me

Ben Hsieh: …well, which compliment do you prefer?

Lydia Laurenson: đŸ˜č aren’t you married and monogamous

Ben Hsieh: yes, though who can tell how. I will say i’m confident my wife would be totally fine knowing i was asking this question, specifically on condition that it’s not to her.

Lydia Laurenson: my initial answer in any standard social context would be would be: laugh, deflect, make joke, deflect

my genuine answer: I feel slightly happier when men tell me I’m pretty than that I’m smart. I guess this indicates that I think I’m smarter than I am pretty, and that is true.

Zvi Mowshowitz: new level of ask culture unlocked, I love it.

Lydia Laurenson: it’s a real brain twister whether it’s a neg or not.

I think it’s entirely context dependent whether it’s centrally a neg. Your delivery of the line would matter a lot.

Ruby: The whole “men should pay on first dates” thing gives me the ick and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why. I think it’s some combination of:

  1. I’m less attracted to men who blindly follow social scripts.

  2. I have no interest in unequal partnership (except for kinky reasons) and I want my date to appreciate that.

  3. I dislike the kind of feminism that demands a bunch of advantages for women without accepting the corresponding responsibilities, and it disappoints me when women don’t reject this.

This is not to say that I’m against men ever paying, I just wish we’d reject it as this weird value-laden social norm. My preferred scenario would be to randomize it each time, perhaps weighted more towards the person who is wealthier

Aella: Yeah when I let a guy pay on a date I feel myself putting one foot into escort world where I become suddenly aware that our relationship is transactional.

The transactionalism worry is real as a downside. Despite this, I believe men should very clearly pay on most first dates, for at least five good (related) reasons.

  1. The man is usually the one doing the asking.

  2. The man is usually the one doing the planning.

  3. The man does not want her to have the distraction or bad vibes of thinking about money or having not paid. This is a lot of vibe improvement at low cost.

  4. The man wants the woman to say yes more often both to the first and subsequent dates, and have positive memories and a positive experience.

  5. The man wants to send a costly signal of several things.

Thus, given other dynamics present, the man should usually pay for the first date. This is a relatively acceptable way to make the date market clear more often and improve outcomes.

To the extent that the above justifications are broken, such as when the woman is initiating and suggesting the activity, that is an exception.

Consider an obvious example where one party should pay: If you are invited over to someone’s house for dinner, very obviously they should usually not send you a bill, no matter what relationship you have with them or what else you might do or not do. Similarly, I am a big fan of the rule I have with some of my friends that whoever travels the farthest does not pay for dinner.

Very obviously, if you have someone like Ruby or Aella where the vibes run the other way, and not paying hurts their experience? Then you should split or they should pay, It is on her to let him know this. He should reach for and request the check in a way that indicates intention to pay, but in a soft way that is interruptible.

Jeremiah Johnson: So Cartoons Hate Her tested the ‘Men are turned off when women have high paying jobs’ hypothesis. It turns out that’s just completely untrue – greater percentages of men swipe right when the same women is listed as having a higher-paying job.

Ella: This seems to also dispel the common more that men “swipe right on literally anything”, given that she at most got a 71% rate (and as low as a 58% rate) despite being in my estimate quite conventionally pretty.

Not only did she get more matches presenting as a higher earner, the matches were on average higher earners themselves.

Lila Krishna pushes back that CHH was asking the wrong question. Yes, you can get as many or more initial swipes, but that is not the goal. The problems come later if you don’t want to give up your ambitions, she says, with personality clashes and emasculation and resentment and the male expectation that you’ll still do all the chores and childcare which rules out deep work.

The ability to be ambitious is valued, she asserts, but actually still being ambitious isn’t. See Taylor Tomlinson’s bit about how she wants to marry a stay-at-home dad, but not a man who wants to be one, so she needs to find a successful man and destroy him, and she’s kind of into him resenting her for it.

Which is all entirely compatible with CHH’s findings, but also means that you’re strictly better off making more money rather than less.

Shut Thefu: Don’t have my car today so requested a colleague if he can drop me on the way.

His exact reply, “sorry dear, my wife may not appreciate it.” Men, it is really that simple.

Aella: Are the monogs ok

J: But yet you wanted to put him in that position. đŸ€”

Unfair: If dropping a colleague on your way is such an issue with your partner, you’re in a toxic relationship that will end badly one way or the other

Sammy: is it not entirely offensive to people that their partner’s are out there implying their relationship can’t survive a simple favor lmao?

“sorry my marriage is weaker than a car ride home with a woman. for some reason this is neither embarrassing nor sexist”

Books By J: I was confused too when I saw the post earlier lol

Could never be me. I don’t care if my husband drives a coworker home? Just let me know? Communicate? So I know you’ll be a little late so I’m not worried you are in a ditch somewhere?

Being worried someone that is a little late is dead in a ditch? Also paranoia.

I don’t think this is automatically one of those ‘that which can be destroyed by the truth should be’ or ‘if I can take your man he was never your man’ situations. Circumstances drive behavior, and yes it is entirely plausible that you could have a good thing worth preserving that would be put at risk if you put yourself in the wrong situation, even one that is in theory entirely innocent. Opportunity and temptation are not good things in these spots and a tiny chance of huge downside can be worth avoiding.

Most couples most of the time do not need to worry on this level, and certainly having to worry that way is a bad sign, but play to win.

Also from the same person recently:

Shut the Fu: I just asked my boyfriend today what he’s most afraid of and I thought he was gonna say “I’m afraid of losing you” but he literally said “YOU” 😭😭

And for fun:

Now that I actually have a comfortable amount of money, I can say that it does indeed buy happiness. The guilt free occasional food delivery, being able to afford going out w friends, buying something that makes life easier, health appointments!, hiring a service. Y’ALL THEY LIED

She’s somehow cracked the Twitter code, she has 1584 followers and half her posts recently break a million views. It’s amazing.

There’s a note saying this was engagement bait but it’s a scenario either way.

At least one bullet was dodged here. The question is which one, or was it both?

Shannon Hill: This poor dude planned his proposal and she said NO in front of all of their family and friends because the ring was only $900 and came from Walmart.

Personally, I think he dodged a bullet.

I’d say that if this is real both of them dodged a bullet. It’s a terrible match. She was willing to crush him in front of everyone over this and then doubled down, saying that she didn’t feel chosen even though he’s been planning this for a year. In particular, she also said ‘something from Walmart’ rather than saying it was the wrong type of diamond, which I’d respect a bunch more.

But also, dude, look, this is your moment, you planned this for a year, you don’t leave the freaking price tag and Walmart label in the box, what the hell are you doing. And yeah, you can say that doesn’t matter, but that type of thing matters a lot to her.

Nikita Bier: If you get upgraded on a flight but your girlfriend/wife doesn’t, do you downgrade and both suffer or do you take the upgrade? I need an answer in 5 minutes.

(Even) Robin Hanson: You give it to her.

donnie: what’s the purpose of the trip?

Nikita Bier: Honeymoon.

Matthew Yglesias (being right):

  1. If it’s your girlfriend you should either take the upgrade and break up with her soon, or else quietly decline it and propose soon.

  2. If it’s your wife, you as a gentleman offer her the upgrade and she’ll probably decline and let you take it.

2 The Great: My legs are so long I literally cannot sit straight in domestic economy. I got offered the upgrade. I offered it to my 5’4” now ex-girlfriend to be polite and she took it.

Matt Yglesias: What’re you gonna do.

What you are going to do is realize that if she takes the upgrade, that information is far more valuable than the upgrade. Hence the now ex part of the girlfriend.

There are situations in which sitting apart is not worth the upgrade, and a honeymoon plausibly counts as this, but they are rare. Mostly you want to offer her the upgrade, the value of doing that (and the value you lose by not doing that) greatly exceeds the actual experiential benefits even if she says yes, she often says no and you get valuable information.

One of the big classic s.

Peter Hague: Wife:

Me: ?

Wife: I don’t want !

How do you get past this dynamic?

Yes, I get the idea that she wants emotional support. But I want to solve problems – why isn’t that equally valid?

Gretta Duleba: No standard worksheet but I’d suggest asking a question such as

– How much of this feels under your control vs. not?

– What is it about this situation that feels especially tricky?

– What’s the best case scenario here? Worst case?

– What kind of support would help you the most?

Uncatherio: Wait ~3 mins between giving emotional support and offering

Both sides of the Tweed: Wife:

Me:

Wife:

This really is husbanding 101.

Russel Hogg: Everyone here is giving you a solution but you seem to just want us to share your pain!

Most of you already know this, but perhaps a better framing is helpful here?

So I would reply: Wife’s problem is not it is , and so you are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out.

You need to offer a to at which point the problem changes to , which may or may not then be . As in, no problem.

Hello, human resources.

Chronically Drawing (Reddit): I have no idea how I feel about what he told me. I want to think it’s cute that he cared this much, but it’s just coming off as creepy and I feel lied to.

He got drunk because we were celebrating my first successful day at my clinicals and he ended up saying something along the lines of “could you believe we wouldn’t be this happy if I hadn’t watched you for so long?” To which I was confused and didn’t know what he meant.

Well I had worked at a local library for two years, before we met, during college and apparently he saw me there but didn’t actually talk to me, he just would watch me and listen in on my conversations with the people I was checking and my coworkers out to figure out what I liked. Then he apparently followed me and found the coffee shop I frequented. All this time I thought we had a sweet first time meeting story. He accidentally bumped into me, apologized, and offered to buy me coffee for the trouble.

He told me what he was ordering and it was the exact same thing I always get and I thought it was an amazing coincidence, I joked that it was fate and we spent like an hour talking over coffee. I feel so stupid. Apparently it was similar to a scene in a book that I had read and told my coworker I had thought was cute.

I’m just so frustrated, like why would you do this? And how much of our year and a half relationship is a lie.

The original response thread I saw this from said this was romantic and asked ‘you thought a meet cute was organic in 2025?’ Yes, meet cutes can still be organic, or involve a lot less stalking and deception.

The main problem with mostly harmless versions of such things is that they strongly correlate with and predict future very much not harmless versions of those and other things. Which is exactly what happened in this case. He got abusive and threatening and clearly was a physical danger to her, she had to flee her apartment. Fortunately it sounds like she’s okay.

A potential rule to live by here would be to say, don’t do anything you wouldn’t think the other person would be fine with in a hypothetical. Another obvious one is, if you think this would make people think you were crazy stalker person if they found out, then don’t do it, even if you think it wouldn’t mean that.

You don’t want the rule to be ‘would be fine with it if they knew everything,’ because knowing can ruin the effect. For example, one sometimes needs to Perform Vacation (or another occasion or action) and present as if one is happy in context, and they want you to do this if needed but it wouldn’t work if they outright knew you were faking it.

There certainly is also a class of ‘do your research’ strategies where you would okay with someone doing this as long as they kept it to themselves how they found out.

As many noted, the (often far more intensive) gender flipped version of this is common, and guys are remarkably often entirely fine with it (including many cases where it goes way too far and they shouldn’t be, but also many cases in which it is totally fine). This is not ‘fair’ but the logic follows.

Discussion about this post

Dating Roundup #10: Gendered Expectations Read More »

verizon-to-stop-automatic-unlocking-of-phones-as-fcc-ends-60-day-unlock-rule

Verizon to stop automatic unlocking of phones as FCC ends 60-day unlock rule

FCC, phone unlocking, Policy, verizon / /

FCC waives rule that forced Verizon to unlock phones 60 days after activation.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The Federal Communications Commission is letting Verizon lock phones to its network for longer periods, eliminating a requirement to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. The change will make it harder for people to switch from Verizon to other carriers.

The FCC today granted Verizon’s petition for a waiver of the 60-day unlocking requirement. While the waiver is in effect, Verizon only has to comply with the CTIA trade group’s voluntary unlocking policy. The CTIA policy calls for unlocking prepaid mobile devices one year after activation, while devices on postpaid plans can be unlocked after a contract, device financing plan, or early termination fee is paid.

Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another carrier’s network. While Verizon was previously required to unlock phones automatically after 60 days, the CTIA code says carriers only have to unlock phones “upon request” from consumers. The FCC said the Verizon waiver will remain in effect until the agency “decides on an appropriate industry-wide approach for the unlocking of handsets.”

The FCC rejected a request to at least limit the locking period to 180 days. The agency’s order said the CTIA code provides “an adequate threshold of ensuring Verizon consumers have competitive options and that granting this waiver will not impede those competitive options. We thus decline to limit today’s waiver to a period of 180 days.”

Until today’s waiver order, Verizon faced strict unlocking requirements that didn’t apply to other carriers. But that was by choice, as Verizon gained significant benefits in exchange for agreeing to unlocking requirements in 2008 when it purchased licenses to use 700 MHz spectrum, and again in 2021 when it agreed to merger conditions to obtain approval for its purchase of TracFone.

Goodbye, automatic unlocking

Verizon used to sell phones that were already unlocked, but in 2019 it obtained a waiver that allowed it to lock phones for 60 days in order to deter fraud. In March 2025, Verizon said the 60-day locking period wasn’t long enough to stop fraud and asked the FCC to waive the requirement.

In a press release today, the FCC said the Verizon rule “required one wireless carrier to unlock their handsets well earlier than standard industry practice, thus creating an incentive for bad actors to steal those handsets for purposes of carrying out fraud and other illegal acts.”

A statement from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said, “Sophisticated criminal networks have exploited the FCC’s handset unlocking policies to carry out criminal acts—including transnational handset trafficking schemes and facilitating broader criminal enterprises like drug running and human smuggling. By waiving a regulation that incentivized bad actors to target one particular carrier’s handsets for theft, we now have a uniform industry standard that can help stem the flow of handsets into the black market.”

Verizon’s current policy is for phones to be “remotely unlocked automatically 60 days after paid activation and 60 days of paid active service.” Phones already activated on the Verizon network won’t be affected by the waiver, according to the FCC.

“The terms of this waiver apply to all handsets that become active on Verizon’s network beginning the day after the release date of this Order,” the FCC ruling said. “The prospective application of this waiver will minimize customer confusion and interference with existing contractual arrangements and service agreements. Upon the release of this waiver, Verizon has stated that it will change its unlocking policies to follow those set out in the CTIA Consumer Code.”

Man sued Verizon to get phone unlocked

We recently wrote about a Kansas resident, Patrick Roach, who sued Verizon and complained to the FCC after the carrier refused to unlock an iPhone he purchased. Although the FCC took no action on Roach’s complaint, a small claims court ruled in his favor because Verizon tried to retroactively enforce a locking policy implemented in April 2025 on a phone Roach had bought before the policy change.

Verizon’s April 2025 policy change required “60 days of paid active service” before Verizon would unlock a customer’s phone. Roach alleged that this violated the FCC condition, which required Verizon to unlock phones 60 days after activation and did not say that Verizon may refuse to unlock a phone when a customer has not maintained paid service for 60 days. Going forward, today’s FCC ruling will render that distinction moot and make it easier for Verizon to avoid unlocking phones.

The Verizon petition was opposed in a filing by Public Knowledge, the Benton Foundation, Consumer Reports, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit, and other groups. The automatic unlocking enforced through the FCC condition was good for consumers and competition, the groups said.

“Automatic unlocking reduces switching costs, enhances competition, and promotes a more efficient and sustainable device marketplace,” the groups said. “It facilitates the resale and reuse of mobile devices, reduces e-waste, and enables low-cost carriers and MVNOs to compete on a more level playing field. The opposite, which Verizon seeks through its waiver request, merely serves as a way to keep customers locked in one provider.”

FCC cites law enforcement arguments

The consumer groups’ filing argued that “Verizon offers no specific evidence that a longer lock period would have prevented the fraudulent acquisition of the devices it identifies,” and said the carrier is capable of detecting and responding to fraud during the 60-day locking period.

“It can flag suspicious purchases, deny unlocking to devices that show signs of trafficking, and pursue legal or contractual remedies against fraudulent actors,” the groups said. “The Commission has previously found that 60 days is a reasonable and sufficient period to allow providers to identify and act upon fraudulent behavior. Verizon has not shown that these prior determinations were in error or that its current loss mitigation measures are being overwhelmed solely because of the unlocking rule.”

The FCC rejected these arguments, saying it found that the 60-day period has been insufficient to deter fraud. “Verizon explains that the globalization of 4G LTE and 5G technologies in recent years has created a ready overseas market for fraudulently obtained handsets, and stolen handsets are frequently sold or distributed to a secondary black market in countries that do not participate in GSMA blocking,” the FCC said.

The agency said the waiver will address concerns of law enforcement associations that supported Verizon’s petition. “Law enforcement commenters have convincingly linked our handset unlocking policies and public safety matters on the basis that the current 60-day policy has impacted law enforcement lives and requires that law enforcement entities dedicate significant resources to investigating stolen handsets rather than focus on other public safety matters,” the FCC said.

Verizon issued a statement thanking the FCC for the waiver. “The FCC’s action will end bad actors’ ability to exploit the FCC’s unlocking rules to profit from easier access to expensive, heavily subsidized devices in the US that they traffic and sell to other parts of the world,” Verizon said. “Before today’s decision, the FCC’s rules have benefitted these international criminal gangs at the expense of legitimate American consumers.”

Cable lobby group NCTA was not pleased by the FCC decision. Cable companies have increasingly been competing against large mobile carriers by offering wireless service in recent years.

“Mobile phone unlocking delivers clear pro-consumer benefits, saving billions of dollars across the mobile marketplace by expanding choice, competition, and affordability,” the NCTA said. “Today’s decision delays these benefits, underscoring the need for a clear, uniform framework so all wireless providers operate under the same rules.” The NCTA has urged the FCC to implement a 180-day unlocking requirement.

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Verizon to stop automatic unlocking of phones as FCC ends 60-day unlock rule Read More »

judge:-trump-violated-fifth-amendment-by-ending-energy-grants-in-only-blue-states

Judge: Trump violated Fifth Amendment by ending energy grants in only blue states

department of energy, Donald Trump, Electric vehicles, Fifth Amendment, Policy / /

The Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment when canceling billions of dollars in environmental grants for projects in “blue states” that didn’t vote for him in the last election, a judge ruled Monday.

Trump’s blatant discrimination came on the same day as the government shut down last fall. In total, 315 grants were terminated in October, ending support for 223 projects worth approximately $7.5 billion, the Department of Energy confirmed. All the awardees, except for one, were based in states where Donald Trump lost the majority vote to Kamala Harris in 2024.

Only seven awardees sued, defending projects that helped states with “electric vehicle development, updating building energy codes, and addressing methane emissions.” They accused Trump officials of clearly discriminating against Democratic voters by pointing to their social media posts boasting about punishing blue states.

On X, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, bragged that nearly “$8 billion in Green NewScam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” then listed only states that did not vote for Trump. Meanwhile on Truth Social, Trump confirmed he met with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” during the shutdown.

On Monday, US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion that the case was “unique” because ordinarily “the mere presence of political considerations in an agency action” does not mean that officials have run “afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.”

Judge: Trump violated Fifth Amendment by ending energy grants in only blue states Read More »

spacex-gets-fcc-permission-to-launch-another-7,500-starlink-satellites

SpaceX gets FCC permission to launch another 7,500 Starlink satellites

Policy, spacex, starlink / /

T-Mobile is using Starlink in the US, and the satellite operator has partnerships with carriers overseas. With today’s FCC authorization, Starlink will be able to provide both fixed and mobile service from all 15,000 second-generation satellites.

SpaceX wants to launch another 15,000 satellites

SpaceX also recently struck a $17 billion deal to buy spectrum licenses from EchoStar, which will give it 50 Mhz of mobile spectrum and reduce its reliance on cellular carriers. SpaceX has been leasing 10 MHz of spectrum from T-Mobile to provide supplemental service in the US.

Starlink is separately planning to launch yet another 15,000 satellites that are designed for mobile service. SpaceX asked the FCC to approve this plan in September 2025, saying the “new system will offer a new generation of MSS connectivity, supporting voice, texting, and high-speed data.”

Starlink requests for FCC authorization often face opposition from other satellite firms, and the application for 15,000 more satellites is no exception. Viasat filed a petition to deny the application on Monday this week.

“This proposed expansion of SpaceX’s operating authority would give it an even greater ability and incentive to foreclose other operators from accessing and using limited orbital and spectrum resources on a competitive basis,” Viasat told the FCC. “At the same time, the proposed operations would generate insurmountable interference risks for other spectrum users and the customers they serve, preclude other operators from accessing and using scarce spectral and orbital resources on an equitable basis, undermine and foreclose competition and innovation, and otherwise harm the public.”

Globalstar also filed a petition to deny, and several other satellite operators raised objections. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has generally been a supporter of SpaceX and Elon Musk, however. Carr alleged that the Biden administration targeted Musk’s companies for “regulatory harassment,” and in his current role as chairman Carr pressured EchoStar into selling the spectrum licenses that SpaceX is now buying.

In today’s press release announcing the latest authorization, Carr said that “the FCC has given SpaceX the green light to deliver unprecedented satellite broadband capabilities, strengthen competition, and help ensure that no community is left behind.”

SpaceX gets FCC permission to launch another 7,500 Starlink satellites Read More »

esa-considers-righting-the-wrongs-of-ariane-6-by-turning-it-into-a-franken-rocket

ESA considers righting the wrongs of Ariane 6 by turning it into a Franken-rocket

ariane 6, ArianeGroup, Arianespace, european space agency, launch, reusable rockets, Space / /

Bruno Le Maire, the former French finance minister, said in 2021 that the Ariane 6 was a “bad strategic choice.” More recently, in October of last year, the head of ESA said the continent’s space industry must “catch up” with international competitors like SpaceX and develop a reusable launcher “relatively fast.”

In its submission to ESA’s BEST! initiative, ArianeGroup proposes replacing the Ariane 6 rocket’s solid-fueled side boosters with new liquid-fueled boosters. The boosters would be developed by MaiaSpace, a French subsidiary of ArianeGroup working on its own partially reusable small satellite launcher. MaiaSpace and ArianeGroup would convert the Maia rocket’s methane-fueled booster for use on the Ariane 6.

Isar Aerospace’s concept for a reusable first stage booster (left) and ArianeGroup’s proposal for an Ariane 6 rocket with reusable strap-on boosters (right).

Credit: ESA/Isar Aerospace/ArianeGroup

Isar Aerospace’s concept for a reusable first stage booster (left) and ArianeGroup’s proposal for an Ariane 6 rocket with reusable strap-on boosters (right). Credit: ESA/Isar Aerospace/ArianeGroup

ArianeGroup’s proposal was first reported by European Spaceflight, which said the concept presented to ESA is similar to an ArianeGroup proposal from 2022, when the company described the liquid reusable boosters as a “plug-and-play” alternative to Ariane 6’s solid-fueled boosters, helping reduce operating costs and increase launch rates.

The details of ArianeGroup’s newest proposal have not been published, but the concept was summarized in a paper presented at the European Conference for Aeronautics and Space Sciences in 2025.

Isar Aerospace, a German rocket startup, won a separate BEST! contract from ESA to study a demonstrator for a reusable first stage based on the company’s light-class Spectrum rocket. The Spectrum rocket’s initial design is expendable. Its first test flight last year ended in failure, and Isar is readying the second Spectrum rocket for another launch attempt later this month.

ESA asked ArianeGroup and Isar Aerospace to assess the feasibility of their proposals, develop technology and system development plans, and define plans and costs for a “major flight demonstration.”

MaiaSpace’s rocket won’t launch until 2027, at the earliest, and it’s unlikely any decision to use it as the basis for new Ariane 6 boosters will bear fruit until long after Maia flies on its own. Even if ESA and ArianeGroup take this route, the Ariane 6 rocket would still be predominantly expendable.

ESA considers righting the wrongs of Ariane 6 by turning it into a Franken-rocket Read More »

claude-codes

Claude Codes

Claude / /

Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is so hot right now. The cool kids use it for everything.

They definitely use it for coding, often letting it write all of their code.

They also increasingly use it for everything else one can do with a computer.

Vas suggests using Claude Code as you would a mini-you/employee that lives in your computer and can do literally anything.

There’s this thread of people saying Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is AGI in various senses. I centrally don’t agree, but they definitely have a point.

If you’d like, you can use local Claude Code via Claude Desktop, documentation here. It’s a bit friendlier than the terminal and some people like it a lot more. Here is a more extensive basic discussion of setup options. The problem is the web interface still lacks some power user functions, even after some config work Daniel San misses branch management, create new repository directory via ‘new’ and import plugins from marketplaces.

If you haven’t checked Claude Code out, you need to check it out.

This could be you:

Paulius: ​whoever made this is making me FEEL SEEN

  1. Hype!

  2. My Own Experiences.

  3. Now With More Recursive Self Improvement.

  4. A Market Of One.

  5. Some Examples Of People Using Claude Code Recently.

  6. Dealing With Context Limits.

  7. The Basic Claude Code Setup.

  8. Random Claude Code Extension Examples I’ve Seen Recently.

  9. Skilling Up.

  10. Reasons Not To Get Overexcited.

I note that the hype has been almost entirely Claude Code in particular, skipping over OpenAI’s Codex or Google’s Jules. Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is, for now, special.

InternetVin: The more I fuck around with Claude Code, the more I feel like 2026 is the tipping point for how we interact with computers. Will never be the same again. All of this shit is becoming StarCraft for the next little bit.

Reports of productivity with Claude Code and Opus 4.5 are off the charts.

Elvis: Damn, it is so much fun to build orchestrators on top of Claude Code.

You would think the terminal would be the ultimate operator.

There is so much more alpha left to build on top of all of this. Include insane setups to have coding agents running all day.

I didn’t think it was possible to have a better experience with coding agents beyond AI-powered IDEs, then came Claude Code CLI.

Now it’s about the UIs and orchestration capabilities, and turning your computer into a 24-hour building machine. Just scratching the surface.

Rohan Anil: if I had agentic coding and particularly opus, I would have saved myself first 6 years of my work compressed into few months.

Yuchen Jin: This matches my experience. AI collapses the learning curve, and turns junior engineers into senior engineers dramatically fast.

New-hire onboarding on large codebases shrinks from months to days. What used to take hours of Googling and Stack Overflow is now a single prompt. AI is also a good mentor and pair programmer. Agency is all you need now.

Claude Code built in an hour what took a Google team a year.

That part isn’t shocking. What is shocking is that Google allows their engineers to use Claude Code instead of forcing Gemini, Gemini CLI, or Antigravity.

Jaana Dogan (Google): 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.

It’s not perfect and I’m iterating on it but this is where we are right now. If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain you are already an expert of. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts.

Andy Masley: Do just have the urge to post “Wow Claude + the browser app + code can just do anything with computers now and I can just sit back and watch” over and over, which imo would be annoying. Trying to not hype too much but like it does feel so crazy

Dean Ball: got tired of having Claude use my computer (mostly I use gui use for qa) so I told it to spin up a vm and hook it up to the computer use api. so now when claude needs to use the gui to test a feature it’s coding in the gui it knows to fire up its vm. this itself is agi-pilling.

Dean Ball: I agree with all this; it is why I also believe that opus 4.5 in claude code is basically AGI.

Most people barely noticed, but *it is happening.*

It’s just happening, at first, in a conceptually weird way: Anyone can now, with quite high reliability and reasonable assurances of quality, cause bespoke software engineering to occur.

Lukas: Claude code is actually as good as all the insane Silicon Valley people on your timeline are saying

It appears 80% of jobs are totally debunked and we’re just waiting for people to notice

McKay Wrigley (warning: often super excited): feels like a ton of people finally got a proper chance to toy around with cc + opus 4.5 over the holidays (aka agi for devs)

the deserved vibe shift begins.

2026 will be electric.

claude code + opus 4.5 injected the immaculate hacker vibes back into ai that we haven’t had since gpt-4.

everything is new + fun + weird again.

you can feel it.

another oom of new ideas & latent economic value is waiting to be unlocked.

and building has never been this fun.

Oliver Habryka notices he is confused, and asks why one would use Claude Code rather than Cursor, given you get all the same parallelism and access either way, so as to integrate the same model with your IDE. Henry suggests that Anthropic now RLs for the Claude Code scaffolding in particular.

My experience coding has been that when I wanted to look at the code Cursor did seem like the way unless there was some price or performance difference, but also I’ve mostly stopped looking at the code and also it does seem like the model does way better work in Claude Code.

So far I’ve been working on two coding projects. I’ve been using the terminal over the web interface on the ‘skill up at doing this before you reject it’ theory and it’s been mostly fine although I find editing my prompts annoying.

One that I’ve started this past week is the reimplementation of my Aikido handicapping system. That’s teaching me a lot about the ways in which the things I did were anti-intuitive and difficult to find and fiddly, and required really strong discipline to make them work, even if the underlying concepts were conceptually simple.

At first I thought I was making good progress, and indeed I got something that ‘kind of worked’ remarkably fast and it did an amazing job finding and downloading data sources, which used to be a ton of work for me. That would have saved me a ton of time. But ultimately enough different things went wrong that I had my ‘no you can’t straight up vibe code this one’ moment. It’s too adversarial a space and too sensitive to mistakes, and I was trying to ‘fly too close to the sun’ in terms of not holding its hand.

That’s on me. What I actually need to do is go into an old computer, find a full version of the old program including its data, and then have Claude iterate from there.

The success finding and downloading data sources was exceedingly useful. I’m still processing the implications of being able to pull in essentially any data on the internet, whenever I have the urge to do that.

I also learned some of the importance of saying ‘put that in the claude.md file.’ Finally we have a clear consistent way to tell the AI how we want it to work, or what to remember, and it just works because files work.

The more important project, where it’s working wonders, is my Chrome extension.

The main things it does, noting I’m expanding this continuously:

  1. On Substack, it will generate or update a Table of Contents with working links, remove any blank sections, apply any standard links from a list you can manage, strip source info from links, or use Ctrl+Q to have Gemini reformat the current block quote or paragraph for those who refuse to use capitalization, spelling or punctuation.

  2. It will copy over your Substack post to WordPress and to a Twitter Article. I’m expanding this to Google Docs but permissions are making that annoying.

  3. Alt+click in Twitter Pro will add the highlighted tweet to a tab group elsewhere.

  4. Alt+a on a Twitter page loads it into the clipboard, alt+v will fully paste it so that it becomes a black quote in proper format, including the link back.

  5. F4 toggles between regular text and Header 4.

It’s early days, there’s tons more to do, but that already adds up fast in saving time.

I’d managed to get some of the core functionality working using Cursor, using previous LLMs, while doing a lot of reading of code and manual fixing. Annoying, although still worthwhile. But when I tried to push things further, I ran into a wall, and I ran into a wall again when I tried to use Antigravity with Gemini 3.

When I tried using Claude Code with Opus 4.5, suddenly everything started working, usually on the first or second try. What I’ve implemented is particular to my own work, but I’d say it saves me on the order of 10 minutes a day at this point, is the only reason I’m able to post my articles to Twitter, and the gains are accelerating.

Before, I had a distinct desktop, so that when I was coding with Cursor I would be able to focus and avoid distractions.

Now I do the opposite, so I can be running Claude Code in the background while I do other things, and notice when it needs a push. Vastly higher productivity.

As I write this, I have multiple windows working.

I’m having Claude Code manage my Obsidian Vault, increasingly handle my Email, it’s downloaded an archive of all my posts so I can do analysis and search easily, and so on. It seems clear the sky’s the limit once you realize it has crossed the critical thresholds.

This morning I needed contact info for someone, asked it to find it, and it pulled it from a stored Certificate of Insurance. I definitely would not have found it.

I’m still in the stage where this is net negative for my observed output, since I’m spending a bunch of time organizing and laying groundwork, but that will change.

The main reason I’m not doing more is that I’m not doing a great job thinking of things I want to do with it. That’s on me, but with time it is getting fixed.

I’m in the early stages of spinning up non-coding Claude Code folders, starting with one where I had it download a copy of all of my writing for analysis. For most basic search purposes I already got similar functionality from a GPT, but this will over time be doing more than that.

I’m not zero scared to hook it up to my primary email and let it actually do things as opposed to being read only, but the gains seem worth it.

Claude Code just upgraded to version 2.1.0, including this:

Added automatic skill hot-reload – skills created or modified in `~/.claude/skills` or `.claude/skills` are now immediately available without restarting the session

also:

Added support for MCP `list_changed` notifications, allowing MCP servers to dynamically update their available tools, prompts, and resources without requiring reconnection​

Thus, if you have it create a skill for you or change an MCP server, you can now start using it without a reload.

There’s a ton of other things here too, most of them minor.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherney’s highlights are:

​- Shift+enter for newlines, w/ zero setup

– Add hooks directly to agents & skills frontmatter

– Skills: forked context, hot reload, custom agent support, invoke with /

– Agents no longer stop when you deny a tool use

– Configure the model to respond in your language (eg. Japanese, Spanish)

– Wildcard support for tool permissions: eg. Bash(*-h*)

– /teleport your session to http://claude.ai/code

Fernando: Have any of these people spending thousands on CC shipped anything of note?

Jeffrey Emanuel: Yeah, I’ve shipped a tremendous amount of software in the last 8 weeks that’s used by many thousands of people.​

Deepfates: Our ideas about making software need to be completely upended. You no longer have to “ship” anything. The software just needs to be useful for you. It doesn’t have to be scalable or have nine nines uptime, it doesn’t need to be a library. We are returning to the personal computer.

Peter Wildeford: ​People realize that Claude Code can do email and calendar right?

I do a lot of things like “Can you look at my todo list and calendars and make a plan for today” and “Bob just emailed me asking to meet, can you look at my calendar and draft a reply about when I’m available?”

You can also do things like “What are my most urgent emails?” and “What have I sent in the past two weeks that still needs a response and thus I should follow up?”

How to set this up for yourself? Just ask Claude lol.

Ankit Kumar: Claude out here replacing both my EA and my sense of guilt about unread emails.

Molly Cantillon gives us an essay on her use that Tyler Cowen expects to be one of the most important of the year, entitled The Personal Panopticon. She’s got eight main instances running at all times, it’s paying for itself in cancelled subscriptions and by managing her trades and personal finances, and so much more.

Molly Cantillon: This is the default now. The bottleneck is no longer ability. The bottleneck is activation energy: who has the nerve to try, and the stubbornness to finish. This favors new entrants.​

Here’s what my tower looks like mechanically. I run a swarm of eight instances in parallel: ~/𝚗𝚘𝚡, ~/𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚜, ~/𝚎𝚖𝚊𝚒𝚕, ~/𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚠𝚝𝚑, ~/𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚜, ~/𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚝𝚑, ~/𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐, ~/𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕. Each operates in isolation, spawns short-lived subagents, and exchanges context through explicit handoffs. They read and write the filesystem. When an API is absent, they operate the desktop directly, injecting mouse and keystroke events to traverse apps and browsers. 𝚌𝚊𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚎 -𝚒 keeps the system awake on runs, in airports, while I sleep. On completion, it texts me; I reply to the checkpoint and continue. All thought traces logged and artifacted for recursive self-improvement.

The essay was presumably written by Claude, does that make it and the whole process involved more impressive or less?

Roon: ​vessels for Claude. I don’t mean to single this person out but she wrote a wall of egregiously recognizable claudeslop about how claude is running her entire life. the Borg is coming

Near: i would be less upset if these ppl didnt lie when you ask them who wrote it

She does indeed deny it but admits it would be surprising if she hadn’t:

I do not think this is ‘one of the most important essays of the year’ and expect a hell of a year, but if you need this kind of kick to see what the baby can do and have some ideas, then it’s pretty strong for that.

Pedram.md has Opus 4.5 build an orchestrator, expecting it to fail. It succeeds.

Zulali has Claude Code recover corrupted wedding footage.

Ryan Singer is teaching it technical spaing and breadboarding, from his Shape Up methodology, it’s a technique to design features abstractly using places, affordances and wires before coding starts.

Ryan McEntush creates BuildList 2.0, a website listing companies doing important work, in two days with Claude Code. As per usual with websites, nothing here seems hard once you have the concepts down, but speed kills.

Avery vibe coded an interactive particle playground where you move them using your hands. Emily Lambert also did something similar.

Jake Eaton gives Claude Code the raw data for his PhD, the calculating and writing up of which took him 3 months the first time, and it recreates a third of the whole thing in 20 minutes with a short prompt. When you look at exactly what it did nothing is particularly impressive, but think of the time I save.

If you want Claude to use Chrome, you now have at least three options: The official Claude Chrome extension, Chrome DevTools MCP and Playright MCP. I am partial to typing ‘claude —chrome.’

You can do quite a lot with that, if you trust the process:

Nader Dabit: Claude Code can also control your browser.

It uses your login and session state, so Claude can access anything you’re already logged into without API keys or OAuth setup.

Here are 10 workflows that I’ve been experimenting with:

“open the PR preview, click through every link, report any 404s”

“watch me do this workflow once, then do it 50 more times”

“check my calendar for tomorrow’s meetings and draft prep notes in a google doc” (you can even combine this with notion pages and other docs etc..)

“open this airtable base and update the status column based on this spreadsheet”

triage gmail without touching gmail: “delete all promo emails from the last 24 hours”

scrape docs from a site → analyze them → generate code from what you learned → commit. one prompt.

“pull pricing and features from these 5 similar products, save to csv, analyze where we’re underpriced or overpriced, and draft a slide for monday’s meeting with recommendations”

“read through this notion wiki and find everywhere we mention the old API”

“compare staging vs prod and screenshot any differences”

You can debug user issues by having Claude literally reproduce their steps

If claude hits a captcha or login, it pauses, you handle it, tell it to continue, and it picks up where it left off.

It’s fun to watch chrome move in real time, no headless mode. It kind of feels like pair programming with a very fast ghost who never gets tired of clicking.

You can run this by upgrading to the latest and running claude –chrome

Use Claude Code with Chrome to directly fight customer service and file an FCC claim. When more people are doing this we’re going to have Levels of Friction issues.

Mehul Mohan points out that ideally many of us would have Claude Code running 24/7, in the background, doing various forms of work or research for potential use later. That wouldn’t be cheap, but it could well be cheap compared to the cost of your time, once you get it working well.

One issue Claude Code users share is compaction.

When you hit auto-compact, Claude Code does its best to condense the prior conversation and keep going, but you will lose important context. Daniel San disabled auto-compaction for this reason, instead choosing to restart sessions if and when limits get hit.

Many replied with some form of the claim that if you ever hit auto-compaction it means you did not manage your hooks, commands and subagents correctly.

My experience is that, at minimum, when you get into the danger zone you want to ‘rescue’ important context into files.

Daniel Sen also shares his other configuration settings.

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, shows us how he uses it.

He calls his setup ‘basic.’ So yes, to many this now counts as basic:

  1. Five Claude Code windows inside Terminal tabs, plus 5-10 on claude.ai/code, all in parallel, always using Opus 4.5 with Thinking.

    1. I note that I do NOT use tabs for my different terminals because I want to watch the tabs work, also this is why we have three huge monitors.

  2. He often will tag @.claude on coworkers’ PRs to add to claude.md. Most sessions start in plan mode.

  3. He uses slash commands for every ‘inner loop’ he does repeatedly.

  4. He uses some regular subagents.

  5. He uses PostToolUse.

  6. He does NOT use —dangerously-skip-permission, but does use /permissions to pre-allow common bash commands he knows are safe.

  7. “Claude Code uses all my tools for me. It often searches and posts to Slack (via the MCP server), runs BigQuery queries to answer analytics questions (using bq CLI), grabs error logs from Sentry, etc. The Slack MCP configuration is checked into our .mcp.json and shared with the team.”

  8. “For very long-running tasks, I will either (a) prompt Claude to verify its work with a background agent when it’s done, (b) use an agent Stop hook to do that more deterministically, or (c) use the ralph-wiggum plugin (originally dreamt up by @GeoffreyHuntley). I will also use either –permission-mode=dontAsk or –dangerously-skip-permissions in a sandbox to avoid permission prompts for the session, so Claude can cook without being blocked on me.

  9. A final tip: probably the most important thing to get great results out of Claude Code — give Claude a way to verify its work. If Claude has that feedback loop, it will 2-3x the quality of the final result.

Claude Code team gives us their code-simplifier agent:

Boris Cherny: ​We just open sourced the code-simplifier agent we use on the Claude Code team.

Try it: claude plugin install code-simplifier

Or from within a session:

/plugin marketplace update claude-plugins-official

/plugin install code-simplifier

Ask Claude to use the code simplifier agent at the end of a long coding session, or to clean up complex PRs. Let us know what you think!

Claude Canvas gives Claude an external ‘monitor’ space for the user to see things.

Claude Code Docs tells Claude about itself so it can suggest its own upgrades, he suggests most value comes from finding new hooks.

CallMe lets you talk to Claude Code on the phone, and have it ping you when it needs your feedback.

That’s not how I roll at all, but different strokes, you know?

Claude HUD shows you better info: Remaining context, currently executing tools and subagents, and claude’s to-do list progress.

Jarrod Watts (explaining how to install HUD if you want that):

Add the marketplace

/plugin marketplace add jarrodwatts/claude-hud

· Install the plugin

/plugin install claude-hud

· Configure the statusline

/claude-hud:setup​

Or have it do a skill itself, such as here where Riley Brown asks it to hook itself up to Nana Banana, so it does. Or you can grab that skill here, if you’d prefer.

Claude Code is a blank canvas. Skill and configuration very clearly matter a lot.

So, how does one improve, whether you’re coding or doing other things entirely?

Robert Long asks for the best guides. The only piece of useful advice was to follow the Claude Code team itself, as in Boris Cherny and Ado. There is clearly lots of good stuff there, but that’s not very systematic.

Ado offers a guide to getting started and to the most powerful features. Here are some:

  1. If you’re importing a project, start with /init.

  2. Tell claude “Update Claude.md: [new instructions].”

  3. Use commands like @src/auth.ts, or @src/components, to add to context.

  4. Use @mcp:github and similar to enable/disable MCP servers.

  5. ! [bash command] runs the command.

  6. Double Esc rewinds.

  7. Ctrl+R searches your past prompts and cycles matches, enter runs it, tab edits.

  8. Ctrl+S stashes the current prompt.

  9. Alt+P switches models (not that I’ve ever wanted to do this).

  10. claude —continue or claude —resume to restore a past session.

  11. /rename the current session, then refer to it by name.

  12. claude —teleport to move sections between web and terminal.

  13. /export dumps your entire conversation to markdown.

  14. /vim unlocks vim-style editing of prompts, not being able to do normal editing is the main disadvantage for me so far of the terminal interface

  15. /statusline to customize the status bar at the bottom, including things people build extensions to display, especially context window percentage

  16. /context to tell you what’s eating up your context window.

  17. /usage to see your usage limits.

  18. ultrathink (to start a command) to get it to think really hard.

  19. Shift+Tab twice to enter Plan mode.

  20. /sandbox defines boundaries.

  21. claude —dangerously-skip-permissions, of course, skips all permissions. In theory this means it can do arbitrary damage if not isolated.

  22. /hooks or editing .claude/settings.json creates shell commands to run on predetermined lifecycles.

  23. /plugin install my-setup

  24. Your permissions config file has three levels: Allow, ask and deny.

Petr Baudis suggests allowing most commands with notably rare exceptions.

​ask Bash –cmd ‘/brmb/’

ask Bash –cmd ‘/bgitb/’

ask Bash –cmd ‘/bcurlb/’

allow Bash –cmd ‘*’

A version of this seems logical for most uses, if you assume the system isn’t actively trying to work around you? Most of the things that go really wrong involve rm, git or curl, but also prompting on every git is going to get old fast.

My Twitter public mostly was fine with flat out dangerously skipping permissions for personal use:

Here’s a ‘Twitter slop’ style article about vibe coding that still has good core basic info. The key insight here is that it’s not about coding, it’s about communication, and specifying exactly what you want your code to do, as if you’re telling someone completely unfamiliar with your context, and having it do this one concrete step at a time and testing those steps as you go.

The process Elena is describing here should work great for ‘build something simple for your own use’ but very obviously won’t work for bigger projects.

Similar good basic advice from Dave Karsten is ‘treat it exactly as you would a junior employee you are giving these instructions to.’

Dan McAteer gives a super basic first two minute guide for non-coders.

Nader Dabit here gives a low-level guide to building agents with the Claude Agent SDK, listed partly for utility but largely to contrast it with ‘tell Claude Code to do it.’

Some people use voice dictation and have ditched keyboards. This seems crazy to me, but they swear by it, and it is at least an option.

Anthony Morris suggests you throw caution to the wind in the sense that you should stop micromanaging, delegate to the AIs, run a lot of instances and if it messes up just run it again. This is presumably The Way once you’re used to it, if you are conserving tokens aggressively on things that don’t scale you are presumably doing it wrong given what your time costs versus what tokens cost.

Another basic piece of advice is, whatever you want, ask for it, because you might well get it that way.

Allen: Is there anyway to chain skills or commands together in claude code?

Boris Cherny: Yes, just ask claude to invoke skill 1, then skill 2, then skill 3, in natural language. Or ask it to use parallel subagents to invoke the skills in parallel. Then if you want, put that all in a skill.​

You can use /config to set your output style to Default, Explanatory or Learning, where Learning has it prompt you to write code sometimes. You can also create your own custom style.

Like my attempt to reimplement Aikido, when you iterate in detail in domains you know well, you see the ways in which you can’t fully trust the results or feedback, and when you need precision in any non-standard way you need to specify your requirements extremely precisely.

Noam Brown: I vibecoded an open-source poker river solver over the holiday break. The code is 100% written by Codex, and I also made a version with Claude Code to compare.

Overall these tools allowed me to iterate much faster in a domain I know well. But I also felt I couldn’t fully trust them. They’d make mistakes and encounter bugs, but rather than acknowledging it they’d often think it wasn’t a big deal or, on occasion, just straight up try to gaslight me into thinking nothing is wrong.

In one memorable debugging session with Claude Code I asked it, as a sanity check, what the expected value would be of an “always fold” strategy when the player has $100 in the pot. It told me that according to its algorithm, the EV was -$93. When I pointed out how strange that was, hoping it would realize on its own that there’s a bug, it reassured me that $93 was close to $100 so it was probably fine. (Once I prompted it to specifically consider blockers as a potential issue, it acknowledged that the algorithm indeed wasn’t accounting for them properly.) Codex was not much better on this, and ran into its own set of (interestingly) distinct bugs and algorithmic mistakes that I had to carefully work through. Fortunately, I was able to work through these because I’m an expert on poker solvers, but I don’t think there are many other people that could have succeeded at making this solver by using AI coding tools.

The most frustrating experience was making a GUI. After a dozen back-and-forths, neither Codex nor Claude Code were able to make the frontend I requested, though Claude Code’s was at least prettier. I’m inexperienced at frontend, so perhaps what I was asking for simply wasn’t possible, but if that was the case then I wish they would have *toldme it was difficult or impossible instead of repeatedly making broken implementations or things I didn’t request. It highlighted to me how there’s still a big difference between working with a human teammate and working with an AI.

After the initial implementations were complete and debugged, I asked Codex and Claude Code to create optimized C++ versions. On this, Codex did surprisingly well. Its C++ version was 6x faster than Claude Code’s (even after multiple iterations of prompting for further optimizations). Codex’s optimizations still weren’t as good as what I could make, but then again I spent 6 years of PhD making poker bots. Overall, I thought Codex did an impressive job on this.

My final request was asking the AIs if they could come up with novel algorithms that could solve NLTH rivers even faster. Neither succeeded at this, which was not surprising. LLMs are getting better quickly, but developing novel algorithms for this sort of thing is a months-long research project for a human expert. LLMs aren’t at that level yet.

​Got this DM:

I appreciate that you posted this – increasingly my twitter feed feels out of whack, especially with people claiming Claude Code makes them 1000000x more efficient. Felt like I was going crazy and falling behind badly even though I use coding assistants quite a bit.

Rituraj: Twitter is a feed of “Hello World” speedruns, not Production Engineering.

Jeffrey Emanuel: As a counterpoint, I honestly feel like I’m single-handedly outproducing companies with 1,000+ developers with my 9 Claude Max accounts and 4 GPT Pro accounts.

Another danger is that a lot of the things that ‘feel productive’ might not be.

Nabeel S. Qureshi: I love that people are getting into Claude Code for non-coding use cases but some of it feels Roam Research / note-taking app coded Organizing Mac folders or getting an LLM to churn through notes feels like you’re “doing something” but is not actually producing anything valuable

Also, getting AI to read books for you and give you a summary can feel good but it’s a bit like consuming all of your food in smoothie form

The really important stuff you need to read properly, in original form, and digest slowly; this process cannot be skipped

Ben Springwater: 90% of posts on X seem to be PKM-style creating systems for systems’ sake. I have a fairly simple life, so I suppose I’m not the right persona for heavyweight personal data management systems, but I’ve seen very few use cases that seem actually useful as opposed to just demonstrating “what’s possible”.

On books, I would say that a book that ‘deserves to be a book’ can’t be summarized by an AI, and the ones ‘worth reading’ have to be read slowly or you don’t get the point, but you have limited time and can read almost zero percent of all books, and a lot of books that people discuss or get influenced by do not fall into either category.

As in, for any given non-fiction book, it will mostly fall into one of five categories. A very similar set of rules applies to papers.

  1. Reading this (or some sections of this) for real is valuable, interesting on every page, you could easily write a full book review as part of that process.

  2. Reading this is fun, if you summarize it you’re missing the whole point.

  3. The value is in particular facts, the AI can extract those for you.

  4. There’s a good blog post worth of value in there, the AI can extract it for you.

  5. There isn’t even a good blog post of value in there.

So you need to know which one you are dealing with, and respond accordingly.

On organizing your notes or files, or otherwise trying to set yourself up for better productivity, that may or may not be a good use of time. At minimum it is a good excuse to skill up your use of Claude Code and other similar things.

Seriously, get pretty excited. Claude Code might not be the best tool for you, or for any particular job, but it’s rapidly becoming unacceptable to only use chatbots, or only use chatbots and Cursor-like IDEs.

Things are escalating quickly. Don’t get left behind.

Discussion about this post

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google:-don’t-make-“bite-sized”-content-for-llms-if-you-care-about-search-rank

Google: Don’t make “bite-sized” content for LLMs if you care about search rank

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, search / /

Signal in the noise

Google only provides general SEO recommendations, leaving the Internet’s SEO experts to cast bones and read tea leaves to gauge how the search algorithm works. This approach has borne fruit in the past, but not every SEO suggestion is a hit.

The tumultuous current state of the Internet, defined by inconsistent traffic and rapidly expanding use of AI, may entice struggling publishers to try more SEO snake oil like content chunking. When traffic is scarce, people will watch for any uptick and attribute that to the changes they have made. When the opposite happens, well, it’s just a bad day.

The new content superstition may appear to work at first, but at best, that’s an artifact of Google’s current quirks—the company isn’t building LLMs to like split-up content. Sullivan admits there may be “edge cases” where content chunking appears to work.

“Great. That’s what’s happening now, but tomorrow the systems may change,” he said. “You’ve made all these things that you did specifically for a ranking system, not for a human being because you were trying to be more successful in the ranking system, not staying focused on the human being. And then the systems improve, probably the way the systems always try to improve, to reward content written for humans. All that stuff that you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked, may not carry through for the long term.”

We probably won’t see chunking go away as long as publishers can point to a positive effect. However, Google seems to feel that chopping up content for LLMs is not a viable future for SEO.

Google: Don’t make “bite-sized” content for LLMs if you care about search rank Read More »

x’s-half-assed-attempt-to-paywall-grok-doesn’t-block-free-image-editing

X’s half-assed attempt to paywall Grok doesn’t block free image editing

AI, chatbot, csam, elon musk, grok, non-consenual porn, Policy, Twitter, X, xAI / /

So far, US regulators have been quiet about Grok’s outputs, with the Justice Department generally promising to take all forms of CSAM seriously. On Friday, Democratic senators started shifting those tides, demanding that Google and Apple remove X and Grok from app stores until it improves safeguards to block harmful outputs.

“There can be no mistake about X’s knowledge, and, at best, negligent response to these trends,” the senators wrote in a letter to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai. “Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices. Indeed, not taking action would undermine your claims in public and in court that your app stores offer a safer user experience than letting users download apps directly to their phones.”

A response to the letter is requested by January 23.

Whether the UK will accept X’s supposed solution is yet to be seen. If UK regulator Ofcom decides to move ahead with a probe into whether Musk’s chatbot violates the UK’s Online Safety Act, X could face a UK ban or fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s global turnover.

“It’s unlawful,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said of Grok’s worst outputs. “We’re not going to tolerate it. I’ve asked for all options to be on the table. It’s disgusting. X need to get their act together and get this material down. We will take action on this because it’s simply not tolerable.”

At least one UK parliament member, Jess Asato, told The Guardian that even if X had put up an actual paywall, that isn’t enough to end the scrutiny.

“While it is a step forward to have removed the universal access to Grok’s disgusting nudifying features, this still means paying users can take images of women without their consent to sexualise and brutalise them,” Asato said. “Paying to put semen, bullet holes, or bikinis on women is still digital sexual assault, and xAI should disable the feature for good.”

X’s half-assed attempt to paywall Grok doesn’t block free image editing Read More »

chatgpt-health-lets-you-connect-medical-records-to-an-ai-that-makes-things-up

ChatGPT Health lets you connect medical records to an AI that makes things up

AI, AI assistants, AI confabulation, AI hallucination, AI health, Biz & IT, chatgpt, confabulations, Fidji Simo, healthcare, machine learning, medical advice, openai, sam altman, SFGate / /

But despite OpenAI’s talk of supporting health goals, the company’s terms of service directly state that ChatGPT and other OpenAI services “are not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition.”

It appears that policy is not changing with ChatGPT Health. OpenAI writes in its announcement, “Health is designed to support, not replace, medical care. It is not intended for diagnosis or treatment. Instead, it helps you navigate everyday questions and understand patterns over time—not just moments of illness—so you can feel more informed and prepared for important medical conversations.”

A cautionary tale

The SFGate report on Sam Nelson’s death illustrates why maintaining that disclaimer legally matters. According to chat logs reviewed by the publication, Nelson first asked ChatGPT about recreational drug dosing in November 2023. The AI assistant initially refused and directed him to health care professionals. But over 18 months of conversations, ChatGPT’s responses reportedly shifted. Eventually, the chatbot told him things like “Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode” and recommended he double his cough syrup intake. His mother found him dead from an overdose the day after he began addiction treatment.

While Nelson’s case did not involve the analysis of doctor-sanctioned health care instructions like the type ChatGPT Health will link to, his case is not unique, as many people have been misled by chatbots that provide inaccurate information or encourage dangerous behavior, as we have covered in the past.

That’s because AI language models can easily confabulate, generating plausible but false information in a way that makes it difficult for some users to distinguish fact from fiction. The AI models that services like ChatGPT use statistical relationships in training data (like the text from books, YouTube transcripts, and websites) to produce plausible responses rather than necessarily accurate ones. Moreover, ChatGPT’s outputs can vary widely depending on who is using the chatbot and what has previously taken place in the user’s chat history (including notes about previous chats).

ChatGPT Health lets you connect medical records to an AI that makes things up Read More »