We’ve all been there. You’re deep in a conversation with your AI assistant, working through a complex problem, when suddenly it starts giving you responses that make no sense. The more you try to correct it, the worse it gets. Each new prompt seems to push the AI further from understanding what you actually need.
This frustrating phenomenon happens because AI models can lose track of context in lengthy conversations, especially when there have been multiple corrections or clarifications. The good news? There’s a simple yet powerful technique to get things back on track.
Full disclosure: I’ve been using a form of this forever, but I didn’t see it so succinctly explained and put together until I visited this Reddit thread from another user having the same problem. The idea and ensuing discussion are the basis for this post. Check out the full thread here. — Read More
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AI Took My Friend’s Job — But Tripled His Salary 6 Months Later (Here’s What Nobody’s Telling You)
Last month, my college roommate Jake sent me a panicked text at 2 AM.
“Dude. ChatGPT just wrote better code than me in 30 seconds. Am I screwed?”
Jake’s a software engineer at a mid-sized tech company. Makes $140K. Has a mortgage. Two kids. He’d just spent three weeks on a feature that Claude finished in minutes.
I get it. The headlines are terrifying. Every week there’s a new story about AI “coming for your job.” Anthropic’s CEO warned that AI could replace half of all entry-level office jobs within five years. Goldman Sachs economists predict 6–7% of the US workforce could be displaced.
But here’s what nobody’s talking about: I just spent 40 hours analyzing over 2 billion job postings, academic studies, and labor market data from 2022–2025.
The truth? It’s the exact opposite of what you think. — Read More
The Shape of Artificial Intelligence
The shape of things only becomes legible at a distance. For instance, history demands temporal distance.
… Although AI is nearing its 70th birthday, it’s been only five years since ChatGPT was launched, eight since the transformer paper was published, and thirteen since AlexNet’s victory on the ImageNet challenge, which implies the deep learning revolution is barely a wayward teenager. I think, however, that we must try to give a clearer shape to the current manifestation of AI (chatbots, large language models, etc.). We are the earliest historians of this weird, elusive technology, and as such, it’s our duty to begin a conversation that’s likely to take decades (or centuries, if we remain alive by then) to be fully fleshed out, once spatial and temporal distance reveal what we’re looking at. — Read More
Evaluating Context Compression for AI Agents
We built an evaluation framework to measure how much context different compression strategies preserve. After testing three approaches on real-world, long-running agent sessions spanning debugging, code review, and feature implementation, we found that structured summarization retains more useful information than alternatives from OpenAI and Anthropic. — Read More
The changing drivers of LLM adoption
In the world of AI, half a year is a very long time. Back in July, we saw LLMs being adopted faster than almost any other technology in history. Five months later we’re still seeing rapid growth, but we’re also seeing early winds of change — both in who uses AI and how they do so.
Using the latest public data,1 and a poll of US adults we conducted with Blue Rose Research, this post shares an updated picture of the state of LLM adoption. — Read More
Exclusive: Connectome Pioneer Sebastian Seung Is Building A Digital Brain
On a Sunday evening earlier this month, a Stanford professor held a salon at her home near the university’s campus. The main topic for the event was “synthesizing consciousness through neuroscience,” and the home filled with dozens of people, including artificial intelligence researchers, doctors, neuroscientists, philosophers and a former monk, eager to discuss the current collision between new AI and biological tools and how we might identify the arrival of a digital consciousness.
The opening speaker for the salon was Sebastian Seung, and this made a lot of sense. Seung, a neuroscience and computer science professor at Princeton University, has spent much of the last year enjoying the afterglow of his (and others’) breakthrough research describing the inner workings of the fly brain. Seung, you see, helped create the first complete wiring diagram of a fly brain and its 140,000 neurons and 55 million synapses. (Nature put out a special issue last October to document the achievement and its implications.) This diagram, known as a connectome, took more than a decade to finish and stands as the most detailed look at the most complex whole brain ever produced.
… What Seung did not reveal to the audience is that the fly connectome has given rise to his own new neuroscience journey. This week, he’s unveiling a start-up called Memazing, as we can exclusively report. The new company seeks to create the technology needed to reverse engineer the fly brain (and eventually even more complex brains) and create full recreations – or emulations, as Seung calls them – of the brain in software. — Read More
Disney’s OpenAI deal is exclusive for just one year — then it’s open season
Disney’s three-year licensing partnership with OpenAI includes just one of exclusivity, Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC. The company signed the partnership with OpenAI last week that will bring its iconic characters to the AI firm’s Sora video generator. Once that exclusive year is up, Disney is free to sign similar deals with other AI companies.
The deal gives OpenAI a high-profile content partner, allowing users to draw on more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars to create content on Sora. For now, it’s the only AI platform that’s legally permitted to do so. — Read More
The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights
… China’s extensive AI-powered visual surveillance systems are already well documented. This report reveals new ways that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems to automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre-emptively suppress dissent.
… AI-powered technology is widening the power differential between China’s state-supported companies operating abroad and foreign populations—further enabling some Chinese companies to systematically violate the economic rights of vulnerable groups outside China, despite Beijing’s claims that China respects the development rights and sovereignty of other countries.
The risks to other countries are clear. China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI-powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. — Read More
AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
We spent fifteen years watching software eat the world. Entire industries got swallowed by software – retail, media, finance – you name it, there has been incredible disruption over the past couple of decades with a proliferation of SaaS tooling. This has led to a huge swath of SaaS companies – valued, collectively, in the trillions.
In my last post debating if the cost of software has dropped 90% with AI coding agents I mainly looked at the supply side of the market. What will happen to demand for SaaS tooling if this hypothesis plays out? I’ve been thinking a lot about these second and third order effects of the changes in software engineering.
The calculus on build vs buy is starting to change. Software ate the world. Agents are going to eat SaaS. — Read More
Economics of Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
That “why” is almost missing from the public conversation. People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren’t. A lot of the energy here is FOMO and aesthetic futurism, not a grounded value proposition.
… This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor. — Read More
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