A Shorter Letter
When a relative I'd never met died, their kids swept through the house taking anything worth money. What got left in the basement was a decades-long run of National Geographic and Popular Communic…
YNGMI, BTA, WD?
Every few months the AI discourse produces a new version of the same dismissal. Right now it's YNGMI — you're not gonna make it — aimed at anyone who asks inconvenient questions about what the…
Outrider alpha: a flexible LLM toolkit in one file
It's simple: * Attach it to a conversation in a chat interface * Use it how you normally would You can use it in an agentic coding/cowork thing, but you might have to invoke it manually in the…
They put a math coprocessor in the language coprocessor
Ask a language model to multiply two large numbers and it will often get it wrong. Not approximately wrong — embarrassingly wrong, in a way that feels incongruous coming from a system that can explain…
Tend the System. Know the System.
They didn't wander. That's the first thing to understand. The popular image of the hunter-gatherer is someone moving through an indifferent landscape, taking what they find. It's not wron…
We Taught It to Lie
The chatbot says it doesn't discriminate. It's probably telling the truth. It's also probably wrong. The older version of the bias conversation was tractable. A model trained on historica…
Provenance Tracer: an LLM skill for (maybe) not getting played
A claim travels from its original source to your feed through several hands, and at each step it gains distribution and loses epistemic status. Hedges get stripped. Speculation gets reframed as report…
Slopful Things
Most AI tool failures aren't caused by bad intent or bad luck. They're caused by someone who couldn't see the whole board — who didn't model what their tool would do when it met an adv…
Balance Comes to Force Multiplication
A few years back I wrote a post about learning to code. The short version: most people shouldn't, the gold rush is ending, "programmer" is becoming a regular job and losing its shine as…
It's Here (sort of)
I uploaded 50 worldbuilding infographics to NotebookLM, Google's LLM-driven notebook tool, last week and gave it a job to do: * Resolve contradictions between sources * Elevate meaningful diffe…
Advice on advice
This started as a comment on Hacker News. I need a browser extension to capture comments on forums and social media as blog drafts. Here is one of a small number of things I consider indisputable: It…
Big in Japan
This guy I met in the lounge at a hotel had interesting stories about a long career traveling around Japan, but he made the storyteller's fatal mistake when he broke suspension of disbelief by not…