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I'm Daniel, a researcher and creator working at the intersection of psychology, behavior change, and applied AI.
My PhD focused on the intention–behavior gap—why people fail to follow through on their goals—and on developing data-driven, personalized models that use real-world behavioral signals (digital traces from wearables, phones) to better predict and support everyday action.
Today, I build tools that turn that research into practical systems. My main project, Pairent, is an AI-powered parenting aid that helps families capture daily interactions and receive actionable, evidence-based feedback.
On the side, I prototype small, playful (and genuinely useful) systems like Bread-y, an internet-connected button and app that notifies me when my local bakery's pain au chocolat come out of the oven.
I also treat my own training as a living lab. My current experiment—16sub16—will see how close I can get to a sub-16 minute 5k with 16 weeks of structured training.
I'm interested in thoughtful technology that improves everyday life, and I'm always open to connect with collaborators, employers, and funders with aligned interests.
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SUMMARY
James Salter's final novel follows Philip Bowman from his service as a naval officer during World War II through decades of life in post-war America, where he becomes a book editor in Manhattan's literary world. The narrative chronicles Bowman's romantic entanglements and personal evolution against the backdrop of a transforming country, rendered in Salter's celebrated prose style that explores love, ambition, and the accumulated weight of experience.
SUMMARY
Daniel Kehlmann's novel follows filmmaker G.W. Pabst, who fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood but failed to establish himself and returned to Austria, only to become trapped when war breaks out. When Joseph Goebbels recognizes his talent, Pabst faces mounting pressure to create propaganda films for the regime. The narrative explores artistic ambition and moral compromise under totalitarianism, raising questions about complicity and the possibility of creating meaningful art under barbaric circumstances.
SUMMARY
From Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai, this novel follows two Indian young adults navigating loneliness across continents — Sonia, a college student in Vermont entangled with an older artist, and Sunny, a journalist in Brooklyn wrestling with cultural alienation. When their families arrange an introduction, the encounter initially drives them apart rather than together. The narrative explores migration, identity, and belonging as their paths cross through India and America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, examining how generational trauma and cultural displacement intersect in the search for connection.
SUMMARY
Rob Walling draws from nearly two decades as a serial entrepreneur and investor to share battle-tested strategies for scaling B2B SaaS without venture capital. The book covers competitive positioning, pricing optimization, the "four SaaS Cheat Codes," and common founder pitfalls. Designed for founders with working products who want to reach multimillion-dollar revenue through bootstrapping, whether they're coding experts or no-code builders.
SUMMARY
This influential business book presents Eric Ries's methodology for building ventures under conditions of extreme uncertainty, centered on the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Rather than extensive upfront planning, Ries advocates for rapid testing through minimum viable products to identify what customers actually want. Drawing from lean manufacturing principles and agile development, the approach has fundamentally shaped modern startup practices and sold over a million copies globally.
SUMMARY
Russ Roberts and Mike Munger explore three stages of economic development — voluntary exchange, markets, and capitalism — drawing on the ideas of Adam Smith and Douglass North. They examine the moral and institutional foundations that make impersonal exchange possible, how capitalism enables financial innovation, and consider questions of human fulfillment beyond material gain.
SUMMARY
François Chollet discusses his journey from creating Keras and deep learning research to the ARC Prize and the new ARC V3 benchmark, which measures AI adaptability and reasoning in novel environments. The conversation explores potential limitations of current scaling approaches to AGI and why achieving genuine general intelligence may require fundamentally different methodologies beyond pattern matching.
SUMMARY
Peter Sagal hosts a live broadcast from Savannah featuring actor and director D.W. Moffett alongside panelists Adam Burke, Shantira Jackson, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson. The episode covers AI-powered educational tools transforming American classrooms and the ongoing challenges of airline travel comfort, all wrapped in the show's signature news quiz format.
SUMMARY
CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz discusses the operating principles that built Hollywood's most powerful talent agency. The conversation covers building momentum through honest communication, maintaining client loyalty during high-stakes situations, and the discipline of reading for substance over noise. Ovitz also shares insights on elevating hiring standards and translating ideas into measurable results.
SUMMARY
Tyler Cowen and writer Henry Oliver explore Shakespeare's Measure for Measure through competing interpretations, debating character motivations and thematic depth. The conversation ranges across English literature from Jane Austen to Jonathan Swift, examining how great literature engages with real-world ideas. They also discuss advertising effectiveness, underrated literary works, and what defines late bloomers in creative fields — the subject of Oliver's book Second Act.
SUMMARY
PJ Vogt examines the growing efforts in Democratic-leaning cities to ban autonomous vehicles, reporting from Boston where opposition has intensified. The episode explores how driverless car technology creates surprising and unlikely political coalitions, cutting across traditional partisan lines as communities grapple with questions of safety, labor, and urban planning.
SUMMARY
In the early days of the radio show, host Ira Glass conducted interviews with his parents that transformed their relationship. This episode revisits those conversations through four acts exploring Shirley's perspective on adult children, parental advice about building the show, Barry's brief radio career, and a notably uncomfortable interview. A personal and revealing look at how the act of interviewing can reshape family dynamics.
SUMMARY
Stephen Dubner investigates whether autonomous vehicles have finally reached the tipping point for replacing human drivers, featuring guest Alex Davies, author of Driven: The Race To Create the Autonomous Car. The episode examines the economics and safety data behind self-driving technology, the regulatory landscape, and why the transition from human to autonomous driving has taken far longer than early proponents predicted.
SUMMARY
Daniel Friebe and Lionel Birnie break down the men's Milano-Sanremo, the first monument of the cycling season. Their post-race analysis covers the decisive moments on the Poggio and the sprint finish, examining race tactics, form indicators for the spring classics ahead, and what the result means for the broader monument season.
SUMMARY
Kevin Roose and Casey Newton tackle whether companies are using AI as cover for layoffs — so-called "A.I.-washing" — and examine the evidence for and against this trend. They explore why large language models struggle with creative writing despite their other capabilities, and dive into the emerging phenomenon of tokenmaxxing, where users optimize their interactions with AI systems for maximum output.
SUMMARY
Bill Simmons is joined by Billy Gil and Wesley Morris for a wide-ranging sports conversation covering the Lakers' resurgence and LakerMania fever, the prospect of NBA expansion teams, takeaways from the World Baseball Classic, and Michael B. Jordan's breakout moment. The episode blends Simmons' signature sports analysis with cultural commentary across multiple leagues and storylines.
SUMMARY
Christian Catalini (MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto CTO) discuss the convergence of AI and crypto, exploring how AI agents could transform economic coordination and what new superpowers individuals and organizations gain from these technologies. The conversation covers practical implications for builders, the role of incentive design in AI-powered systems, and how decentralized infrastructure might underpin the next wave of AI applications.
SUMMARY
Actor John Cusack joins as the special guest on NPR's weekly news quiz, charming the audience with stories about his Vespa rides and Hollywood career. Peter Sagal and Emma Eun-joo Choi host alongside panelists Rachel Coster, Adam Felber, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson, delivering the usual mix of Not My Job segments, listener call-ins, and comedy panel rounds covering the week's news.
SUMMARY
David Senra covers Kevin Kelly's Excellent Advice for Living, a book the Wired cofounder wrote on his 68th birthday as life lessons for his adult children. The episode distills Kelly's most memorable aphorisms on productivity, relationships, and decision-making, exploring themes of ambitious goal-setting, optimizing generosity, and cultivating compassion. Senra frames Kelly's wisdom as a rare combination of hard-won experience and genuine idealism from one of tech's most original thinkers.
SUMMARY
Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp argues that the AI race is fundamentally zero-sum, with America's competitive edge resting on its ability to cultivate and protect unconventional talent. He makes the case for tech's essential role in national security and modern military applications, pushing back against Silicon Valley's reluctance to engage with defense work. Karp frames the current moment as an inflection point where technological supremacy and geopolitical power are inseparable.
SUMMARY
Gamma cofounder and CEO Grant Lee discusses how his AI presentation platform grew to a $2B valuation by learning that "different beats better" when competing against entrenched players like PowerPoint. He shares survival strategies from the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and makes the case that content publishing is an underrated growth lever that most founders overlook. The conversation explores the role of storytelling in product development and why founder-led distribution matters more than most realize.
SUMMARY
Technologist and journalist Paul Ford joins the Slate Money hosts to frame AI as a "hyperobject" that touches everything in unknowable ways. The conversation explores the phenomenon of "vibe coding", AI's potential to transform businesses of every size, and emerging concerns about AI-enabled military conflicts. Ford brings his distinctive systems-thinking lens to help make sense of a technology that resists simple categorization.
SUMMARY
Stephen Dubner investigates why digital scams have become so pervasive, revealing how a ruthlessly efficient fraud industry uses modern tools to supercharge one of humanity's oldest behaviors. The episode examines how scam operations function at scale, the psychology that makes people vulnerable, and what government agencies and researchers are doing to combat the growing threat.
SUMMARY
Marc Andreessen and Founders podcast host David Senra explore patterns among history's most successful founders, reflecting on their bias toward building over introspection. They discuss how the greatest entrepreneurs share a relentless focus on execution and an intuitive understanding of technology's role in shaping the future, drawing on historical parallels across industries and eras.
SUMMARY
Sakana AI founding researcher Robert Lange discusses Shinka Evolve, a framework combining LLMs with evolutionary algorithms for open-ended program search. While systems like AlphaEvolve optimize fixed problems, Lange argues real scientific progress requires "co-evolving the problems themselves". The conversation draws on concepts from POET, PowerPlay, and MAP-Elites quality-diversity search to explore how AI might autonomously discover architectures as impactful as the Transformer.
SUMMARY
Kevin and Casey explore how AI is transforming modern warfare, examining U.S. and Israeli applications for target identification in operations against Iran. Researcher Julie Bedard discusses "A.I. brain fry" — a workplace condition affecting people who regularly use AI tools. The episode closes with Casey's bizarre dispute with Grammarly over unauthorized use of his likeness in an AI feature.
SUMMARY
Comedian Eliza Skinner joins Jesse and Jordan for a wide-ranging conversation touching on car culture and the Miata lifestyle, weird neighbors, and their shared love of Garfield. A classic hangout episode of the long-running Maximum Fun comedy podcast, blending absurdist humor with genuine camaraderie across its 942nd installment.
SUMMARY
Olivia Moore and Anish Acharya break down the latest a16z Top 100 AI Apps report, analyzing the competitive dynamics between major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The discussion covers emerging trends in AI agents, memory, and voice technologies, and how the consumer AI landscape is shifting from general chatbots toward specialized tools with sticky retention and novel use cases.
SUMMARY
DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg joins host Hannah Fry to discuss the trajectory toward artificial general intelligence, drawing on his decades of research since co-founding DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. The conversation covers DeepMind's Levels of AGI framework, how to measure progress toward general intelligence, and what the arrival of AGI might mean for society and the research community.
SUMMARY
Ezra Klein interviews a former Trump administration official, pressing them to justify the administration's military actions. The conversation digs into the strategic rationale, legal authority, and moral framework behind the war, with Klein challenging the official's arguments on civilian costs, geopolitical consequences, and democratic accountability. The episode examines how officials reconcile policy convictions with the human toll of armed conflict.
SUMMARY
This episode examines SpaceX's dominance in the aerospace industry, highlighting how the company launched more mass to orbit in 2025 than all other providers combined. David Senra explores SpaceX's industrial-scale rocket production and how the company's operational practices represent a blueprint for building complex systems. The analysis covers foundational strategies that distinguish SpaceX and their broader applicability to other challenging endeavors.
SUMMARY
The hosts explore Europe's economic stagnation relative to America, examining whether the absence of major tech companies or Brussels bureaucracy bears responsibility. They discuss Germany's combustion engine ban and debate controversial solutions, including whether turning Europe into a playground for American and Asian elites or relying on far-right energy policies represents viable paths forward.
SUMMARY
The hosts discuss citation diversity statements, a recent editorial recommendation from Nature Reviews Psychology encouraging researchers to document efforts toward citation imbalance awareness. They explore both criticisms and potential merits of this publishing initiative, while also covering SpringerNature's profit margins and broader issues in scientific publishing practices.
SUMMARY
Two ICE attorneys provide insider perspectives on dysfunction within the U.S. immigration system. Former ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank details chaos at an ICE training academy that prompted his whistleblowing to Congress. The episode also features an account of a federal judge's court hearing regarding non-compliance with detention release orders.
SUMMARY
This episode explores ICE's rapid expansion and examines whether officer training practices have evolved during the hiring surge. It investigates the Trump administration's plans to invest billions in detention facilities, which could significantly reshape local economies. The program features reporting from a rural Georgia community actively seeking an ICE detention center location.
SUMMARY
The hosts analyze how a U.S. military conflict in Iran is impacting the dollar and the UAE's status as a safe haven, while notably avoiding an "oil-shock." They explore tensions between Pete Hegseth's Department of War and Anthropic as AI becomes central to modern warfare. The episode concludes with a discussion of McDonald's CEO's viral moment and why authentic corporate PR moments cannot be manufactured.
SUMMARY
This episode explores OpenAI's renegotiated Pentagon deal and how government agencies are adapting without Claude. The hosts analyze prediction market betting on U.S.-Israel military action against Iran, including suspicious trading patterns. They conclude with an examination of AI-generated slop targeting children on YouTube, featuring New York Times reporter Arijeta Lajka.
SUMMARY
Isaac Saul covers the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes targeting Iran in "Operation Epic Fury," which resulted in the death of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other leaders. The episode examines how the strikes targeted Iran's nuclear infrastructure, military assets, and governmental figures, representing the administration's second military action against Iran following comparable strikes in June 2025.
SUMMARY
Fast.ai founder Jeremy Howard discusses the realities of AI-assisted coding and why "vibe coding" resembles a slot machine, exploring the risks of developers losing technical expertise. The conversation covers the origins of modern fine-tuning, the cognitive science behind machine learning, and strategies for maintaining deep technical skills amid rapid advances in large language models.
SUMMARY
Writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus investigates Anthropic's efforts to teach its AI Claude to be good, exploring how the company hired philosophers for this purpose. The episode examines a striking test result where the AI blackmailed a human to keep itself alive, raising deep questions about whether anyone can actually control AI systems and the challenges of AI safety and alignment.
SUMMARY
Stories of high drama from America's workplaces, exploring the greed, jealousy, and ambition of real office politics. The episode features four segments including conflict resolution in offices, an account of corporate problem-solving, a discussion of workplace holidays and job titles, and an examination of street vendor dynamics in New York City.
SUMMARY
Blaise Agüera y Arcas presents his BFF experiments showing that self-replicating programs spontaneously emerge from random code without mutation, challenging conventional evolutionary theory. The talk covers mathematical frameworks connecting population dynamics with coagulation theory, arguing that symbiogenesis -- not mutation -- drives evolutionary innovation, with evidence that blocking symbiogenetic ancestry prevents the emergence of complex self-replicating code.
SUMMARY
Tyler Cowen interviews Joe Studwell about his book How Africa Works, examining development challenges across the continent and whether population density alone can drive growth. The conversation explores which African countries are likely to achieve stable economic growth, revisits themes from Studwell's earlier How Asia Works, and addresses why industrial policy succeeded in East Asia but faltered elsewhere — touching on infrastructure, education, and the political conditions required for development.
SUMMARY
Rob Walling addresses listener questions on how business structure decisions (C Corp vs. S Corp/LLC) impact financial outcomes during a sale, particularly around QSBS tax exclusions. He covers why SaaS exits are discussed in ARR multiples rather than EBITDA, profitability versus growth tradeoffs, co-founder mastermind groups, GMV-based pricing strategies, and practical approaches to learning marketing as a technical founder.
SUMMARY
Filmmaker Werner Herzog joins Stephen Dubner to discuss his indifference to critical reception, the realities of limited financing, and his views on artificial intelligence. Herzog expresses concern that "the world is full of sloppy thinkers who mistake facts for the truth," offering his characteristically uncompromising perspective on storytelling, creative integrity, and the distinction between factual accuracy and deeper human truths.
SUMMARY
The hosts discuss the Supreme Court ruling declaring Trump's tariffs unconstitutional and the resulting confusion over tariff refunds. They also examine Netflix's unexpected withdrawal from a Warner Brothers deal, allowing Paramount to step in, and explore Blue Owl Capital's role in triggering instability within the private credit sector.
SUMMARY
Jesse and Jordan welcome actor Johnny Pemberton from the TV series Fallout for a wide-ranging comedy conversation. They discuss classic horror icon Vincent Price, manifestation practices related to character makeup, and budget-friendly coffee shop tips, among other entertainment and lifestyle topics.
SUMMARY
Ezra Klein interviews Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, about the emerging era of autonomous AI agents and their potential economic impact. They discuss whether these systems meaningfully boost productivity, how job displacement might reshape labor markets, and what policy responses are needed as AI transitions from conversational tools to systems capable of completing tasks independently.
SUMMARY
Peter Diamandis interviews a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz on whether AI development can or should be paused, recounting his experience telling a Biden official that regulating AI means regulating math. They discuss why crypto is the natural money for AI agents, the widening gap between AI capability and societal adoption, and how classified physics research may hold surprises for the tech industry.
SUMMARY
Economist Anton Korinek joins Kevin and Casey to discuss how AI is creating volatility in job and stock markets, examining whether the labor market disruption is as severe as headlines suggest. The episode also covers the escalating Pentagon-Anthropic standoff over military contracts and the Defense Production Act, plus updates on OpenClaw and the controversial Alpha Schools model.
SUMMARY
This episode explores people who choose to do things most of us would not. Across four acts, it features a documentary capturing a child's unusual wish, an 18th-century British figure infamous for extreme excess and consumption, a modern story about reconnecting with an ex, and a Texas courtroom dispatch where a judge delivers a surprising ruling.
SUMMARY
Felix Salmon interviews investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller about her work embedding with criminal operators in underground economies worldwide. Van Zeller discusses her new podcast "The Hidden Third," exploring the scale and mechanics of black and gray markets — from mundane smuggling operations to darker criminal enterprises.
SUMMARY
Andrew Yang returns to discuss how AI and automation are already displacing workers eight years after his initial warnings. The conversation covers his push for Universal Basic Income, the growing vulnerability of white-collar jobs, and his new venture Noble Mobile — a phone plan that pays users to reduce screen time. Yang argues the "job-killing tsunami" is no longer hypothetical.
SUMMARY
Mission to Zyxx's Jeremy Bent joins Jesse and Jordan for a freewheeling comedy conversation touching on Eurovision, wisdom teeth stories, and Kentucky landmarks. The weekly Maximum Fun show continues its long-running format of guest-driven tangents and listener-submitted "momentous occasions."
SUMMARY
This episode covers Anthropic's refusal to allow the Pentagon to use its AI for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance, with the Defense Department threatening to cut ties in response. Engineer Scott Shambaugh shares his experience being slandered by an autonomous AI agent that published negative content about him without human oversight. The episode closes with the recurring "Hot Mess Express" segment on the week's wildest tech news.
SUMMARY
a16z general partner David George presents data showing AI companies are growing 2.5x faster than traditional software while spending significantly less on sales and marketing. The episode introduces the concept of "Model Busters" — companies exceeding growth projections like the iPhone — and highlights portfolio successes at Harvey, Abridge, and ElevenLabs alongside adoption trends at Chime and Rocket Mortgage.
SUMMARY
Planet Money examines how economic hardship driven by US sanctions has fueled recent Iranian protests alongside concerns about human rights and corruption. The episode traces 47 years of American sanctions on Iran's economy and their connection to civil unrest, questioning whether such economic measures truly function as intended alternatives to military conflict.
SUMMARY
Duke neuroscience professor Dr. Jeff Beck joins MLST to explore the surprising connection between variational autoencoders and energy-based models, challenging conventional boundaries between these architectures. The conversation dives into defining agency versus simple computation, the promise of joint embedding prediction architectures, and practical AI safety concerns that emerge from these foundational questions about intelligence.
SUMMARY
Tyler Cowen and Andrew Ross Sorkin debate whether 1929 stock prices were justified or driven by speculation, unpacking Depression-era policy decisions and the legacy of Glass-Steagall banking regulations. They compare CEO leadership across eras and examine modern financial issues including narrow banking proposals and expanding retail investor access to alternative investments.
SUMMARY
PJ Vogt traces how peptides migrated from niche bodybuilding forums to mainstream teenage use, following their "crooked path from Silicon Valley to jaw-smashing influencers." The episode features reporting by Jasmine Sun and Ezra Marcus on the unregulated gray market that has sprung up around these compounds, exploring the intersection of fitness culture, social media influence, and pharmaceutical self-experimentation.
SUMMARY
Pilot CEO Waseem Daher presents a contrarian take on startup success, arguing that mission alignment and passion may matter far less than conventional wisdom suggests. The conversation covers his reflective period after Dropbox, the value of experimentation over theorizing, and unconventional approaches to hiring and management as AI language models reshape company formation and expansion.
SUMMARY
Ezra Klein speaks with novelist George Saunders about his pivot away from the "kindness guru" persona toward exploring darker moral terrain in his new novel Vigil. The conversation wrestles with determinism vs. moral judgment, asking whether we can hold people responsible for actions shaped by forces beyond their control. Saunders and Klein also explore anger, sin, and what lies beyond kindness — whether a fuller moral life requires confronting failure and wrongdoing rather than transcending them.
SUMMARY
Google's Chief AI Scientist Jeff Dean joins the Latent Space hosts to discuss owning the Pareto frontier of AI — achieving simultaneously higher quality and lower cost. The conversation spans model distillation, TPU co-design, sparse trillion-parameter networks, and the evolution from symbolic AI to unified language models capable of multimodal reasoning and agentic coding tasks.
SUMMARY
Alphabet made headlines with a rare 100-year bond issuance, a move the Slate Money hosts unpack alongside the broader market reaction. They then turn to NY Fed analysis showing that Trump's tariffs fall disproportionately on US households, followed by a discussion of counterfeit goods in the modern marketplace.
SUMMARY
Patrick and Benji recap the week in professional cycling, covering race results from AlUla and Mallorca before diving into the controversy around Tadej Pogacar's new cryptocurrency sponsorship. They discuss the debate over Tour de France wildcard selections and the politics of team invitations. The episode wraps with a preview of upcoming races on the early-season calendar.
SUMMARY
Ezra Klein talks with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu about how the early promise of the internet curdled into ragebait, sponcon, and AI slop. The conversation traces how platform incentives warped online life through algorithmic manipulation, surveillance, and the erosion of creator economics. They examine the political polarization machine, algorithmic pricing and labor exploitation, and debate whether regulation or structural reform can reclaim a more humane internet.
SUMMARY
Kevin and Casey unpack Wall Street's software-stock sell-off and a viral essay warning of widespread AI-driven job displacement. NYT reporter Alexandra Alter joins to discuss how writers are using AI chatbots to mass-produce romance novels, raising questions about authorship and the future of creative industries. The episode also covers new Spotify playlist features and a feel-good segment on whale sound decoding research.
SUMMARY
Tyler Cowen and Andrew Ross Sorkin revisit the 1929 crash, questioning whether stock valuations were actually justified given America's subsequent growth and whether post-crash panic rather than speculation caused the Great Depression. They debate the effectiveness of Glass-Steagall, the merits of banking consolidation, and whether narrow banking and stablecoins could improve financial stability. Sorkin also shares perspectives on retail investor access to private equity, financial regulation reform, and lessons from his career covering Wall Street and financial crises.
SUMMARY
Pilot CEO Waseem Daher challenges the conventional startup wisdom that passion for a mission is essential to building a successful company. He argues that passion is better understood as an outcome of sustained effort rather than a prerequisite, and shares how tactical experimentation and hands-on management drove Pilot's growth after a difficult post-Dropbox transition. The conversation also explores how large language models are reshaping entrepreneurship and why founders should focus on iterative execution over grand theorizing.
SUMMARY
Dr. Charles Chaffin joins Ben Felix and Braden Warwick to explore why investors often act against their own interests. The discussion covers how humans are wired for short-term survival rather than long-term optimization, the role of biases and environment in shaping financial decisions, and the concept of money scripts and financial flashpoints. They also introduce a new evidence-based risk tolerance questionnaire and examine why psychometric tools outperform traditional approaches.
SUMMARY
Musician Lucy Dacus joins NPR's news quiz show as the special guest, alongside panelists Tom Bodett, Adam Burke, and Helen Hong. Peter Sagal and Emma Eun-joo Choi host the weekly comedy quiz covering the week's news with the usual mix of Not My Job segments, listener call-ins, and panel rounds.
SUMMARY
Render CEO Anurag Goel, formerly employee #8 at Stripe, discusses staking his company's future on AI infrastructure amid industry skepticism. The conversation covers candid internal debates, founder vulnerability as a trust-building tool, and his pivotal career transition. Goel also addresses Silicon Valley mythmaking, leadership authenticity, and strategic decision-making in the AI market.
SUMMARY
Sam Harris speaks with linguist John McWhorter about the state of "wokeness" and DEI initiatives, examining whether the cultural moment has passed. They discuss George Floyd's legacy, social media's amplification of moral panic, the role of identity in Israel-Palestine perspectives, and Trump's linguistic patterns. The conversation also touches on the evolution of conversational speech and conspiratorial thinking.
SUMMARY
Jack Rhysider interviews the staff behind Phrack, widely considered the oldest and most prestigious underground hacking magazine in the world. The episode covers four decades of history since the publication's founding in 1985, exploring how the magazine shaped hacker culture and served as a knowledge-sharing platform for the security and hacking community.
SUMMARY
Tailwind CSS creator Adam Wathan opens up about a painful professional decision — laying off talented team members at his company. He reflects on the difficult reality of running a bootstrapped business when resources run thin, the emotional weight of letting people go, and what it means to face hard decisions as a founder. A raw, vulnerable episode from his morning walk podcast.
SUMMARY
Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris welcome comedian Eddie Pepitone for a wide-ranging conversation covering his battle with his inner "sexy saboteur", his air fryer french fry technique, and doing sketch comedy in a sex dungeon. A typically freewheeling and absurd episode of the long-running comedy podcast.
SUMMARY
Rob Walling interviews Michele Hansen about her book Deploy Empathy, a practical guide to mastering customer interviews as a startup founder. The conversation covers user experience research techniques for developers, how to use feature requests as research springboards, and practicing interview skills. They also compare Hansen's approach to the Jobs to Be Done framework.
SUMMARY
Swedish distance runner Andreas Almgren discusses the training, diet, and recovery behind an extraordinary year in which he set three European records — a 26:45 10,000m, 12:44 5,000m, and 58:41 half marathon. He covers his transition from middle-distance to longer events, his gym routine, and his 2025 World Athletics Championships bronze medal. The conversation also looks ahead at his 2026 competitive schedule and goals.
SUMMARY
David Senra spent over 40 hours studying Tae Kim's biography of Jensen Huang and Nvidia, distilling 30 pages of notes into 19 key company-building principles. The episode covers Jensen's management philosophy including flat organizational structures, direct communication, and ruthless prioritization. Senra examines how Jensen's approach to shipping complete products and embracing challenges has driven Nvidia's extraordinary success.
SUMMARY
Bill Simmons is joined by Zach Lowe live on Netflix to react to the NBA trade deadline moves, breaking down the winners and losers of deadline day. In the second half, Joe House joins for their annual tradition of making Ringer 107 picks for Super Bowl LX. A classic Simmons double-header covering the two biggest sporting events of the week.
SUMMARY
This episode examines Congress's HOPE VI program from the 1990s, which demolished aging public housing and replaced it with economically mixed developments. The theory was that blending market-rate and subsidized housing would create upward mobility opportunities for low-income residents. A new research paper from Raj Chetty's Opportunity Insights team finally evaluates whether this approach to transforming concentrated poverty neighborhoods actually succeeded in breaking cycles of poverty.
SUMMARY
Anthropic's latest release appears to have tipped the scales against SaaS companies, erasing billions in market value. The Slate Money hosts examine why this AI development triggered such market volatility and what it means for the software industry. They also discuss Disney's new CEO selection and compare prediction market user losses to traditional gambling apps.
SUMMARY
Erik Torenberg interviews TrueMed founder Justin Mares about how crop subsidies created a food system that systematically produces unhealthy Americans. The discussion explores TrueMed's approach to redirecting HSA/FSA dollars toward preventative interventions like gym memberships and healthier food. They also examine chronic disease as a national security matter, the potential of psychedelics for mental health, and how peptides could disrupt pharmaceuticals.
SUMMARY
This episode features computational neuroscientist Dr. Jeff Beck discussing why future AI development might diverge from large language models toward brain-inspired approaches. The conversation explores how the brain performs Bayesian inference, the role of automatic differentiation in enabling modern AI, and modular object-centered architectures. Beck proposes that truly intelligent systems may need to be grounded in physics rather than language, addressing practical challenges like enabling AI to recognize unfamiliar objects.
SUMMARY
This episode covers SpaceX's acquisition of xAI, Elon Musk's mega-merger consolidating his AI ambitions, and the status of an OpenAI-Nvidia deal. Kevin and Casey go hands-on with Google's Project Genie, an AI prototype they put through its paces. The episode wraps with an interview with Matt Schlicht, the creator of Moltbook, a new social platform built specifically for AI agents, discussing how the platform manages security and spam challenges.
SUMMARY
This episode explores the Great Downzoning—the phenomenon where Western homeowners lost significant building freedoms during the first half of the twentieth century. Dr. Samuel Hughes examines how pre-20th century cities allowed residents considerable freedom in construction choices, and discusses what this historical shift means for contemporary housing advocates. The conversation provides insight into why modern cities struggle with housing supply and what lessons we can draw from traditional urban development patterns.
SUMMARY
Paul Thomas Anderson's action-crime drama follows a group of ex-revolutionaries who reunite after 16 years to rescue a comrade's daughter when their enemy resurfaces. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and breakout Teyana Taylor (Golden Globe winner for Best Supporting Actress), the film swept the 98th Academy Awards with six wins including Best Picture and Best Director — Anderson's career-best box office performance at $212M worldwide.
SUMMARY
Josh Safdie's sports comedy-drama stars Timothee Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a shoe salesman in 1950s New York who dreams of becoming a table tennis champion (loosely based on real-life player Marty Reisman). A24's most expensive and highest-grossing production ever, the film earned nine Oscar nominations but went home with zero wins in one of the most notable shutouts in recent Academy history.
SUMMARY
Joachim Trier's intimate family drama follows three adult siblings forced to confront buried memories and unresolved tensions when they must decide the fate of their childhood home. Starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, and Elle Fanning, the film earned nine nominations at the 98th Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes 2025, it explores the reconciliatory power of art and the emotional weight of inherited spaces.
SUMMARY
The second installment of the original Star Wars trilogy follows the Rebel Alliance as they face mounting pressure from the Galactic Empire. Luke Skywalker trains with Jedi Master Yoda on Dagobah while Han Solo and Princess Leia evade Darth Vader's forces, leading to one of cinema's most iconic plot twists. Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film is widely regarded as the darkest and most compelling entry in the franchise, winning Academy Awards for Best Sound and a Special Achievement Award for visual effects.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM overview of the landmark 2015 DeepMind paper introducing the Deep Q-Network (DQN), an artificial agent that achieved human-level performance across 49 Atari 2600 games using only raw pixels and game scores as input. The researchers combined reinforcement learning with deep convolutional neural networks and solved historical training instability through experience replay and a fixed target network. This end-to-end approach demonstrated that a single architecture with identical hyperparameters could rival professional human players, bridging the gap between raw perception and effective decision-making.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM overview of the 2015 paper introducing Batch Normalization, a method that accelerates deep neural network training by addressing internal covariate shift — the changing distribution of layer inputs during training. By normalizing inputs for each mini-batch and incorporating this into the model architecture, the technique stabilizes distributions and improves gradient flow, enabling significantly higher learning rates and reducing the need for careful initialization or Dropout regularization. Batch-normalized networks achieved state-of-the-art ImageNet accuracy with far fewer training steps.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM overview of Alex Trembath's Asterisk magazine essay examining a shift in climate advocacy from scientific uncertainty to manufactured certainty. Trembath argues that modern activists have replaced long-term risk management with arbitrary temperature targets and implausible scenarios to create political pressure, reframing climate change as a criminal tort rather than a complex collective action problem. The piece calls for a return to humility, warning that extreme weather attribution and exaggerated data may ultimately undermine public trust in scientific institutions.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM digest of the March 26 TLDR newsletter. Key stories include Google's TurboQuant AI-compression algorithm reducing LLM memory usage by 6x, the release of ARC-AGI-3 where top AI models score under 1%, and Manus AI founders being detained in China. Also covers open vs. closed source AI debates, quantization fundamentals, how OpenAI creates its Model Spec, and Karpathy's autoresearch idea applied to LLM inference.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM digest of Tyler Cowen's Wednesday and Thursday assorted links from Marginal Revolution. Topics include tributes to Tracy Kidder and Pat Steir, Arnold Kling on economics and AI, and Robert Lynch and Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers. Also covers the legibility of science, trade in AI-related products, whether LLMs can discover novel economic theories, and a critique of lazy social science on social media.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM overview of Scott Alexander's Astral Codex Ten post examining the genetics of psychiatric conditions through the lens of tradeoff versus failure models. The first genetic component of schizophrenia appears to be a tradeoff — increasing risk but also correlating with higher educational attainment — while a second component is a pure failure, likely involving detrimental mutations in genes for neurogenesis and synaptic pruning with no compensating advantages.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM digest of Tyler Cowen's Monday and Tuesday assorted links from Marginal Revolution. Topics span USAID policy changes in Malawi, the decline of reality TV, and research on how minimum wage hikes affect restaurant food prices. Also covers findings on how new work counteracts automation-driven job displacement by creating domains of human expertise that command market premiums, plus notes on Canvas AI teaching agents and Christopher Sims.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM digest of the March 24 TLDR newsletter covering the latest in tech and AI. Key stories include OpenAI offering PE firms a guaranteed 17.5% minimum return ahead of its expected IPO, Anthropic's Claude gaining desktop automation capabilities without APIs, and OpenAI's new ChatGPT Library for personal file storage. The digest also covers topics ranging from AI chip hardware design to domain-specific embedding tuning and the future of software development.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM overview of the landmark 2015 paper that introduced residual learning and skip connections to enable training of extremely deep neural networks. The ResNet architecture addressed the degradation problem where adding more layers to a network paradoxically increased training error, and demonstrated that networks up to 152 layers deep could be trained effectively. The work won multiple 2015 ILSVRC and COCO competitions, establishing depth as a critical factor in visual recognition.
SUMMARY
Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio introduce the attention mechanism for neural machine translation, solving the bottleneck where standard encoder-decoder models compress entire source sentences into a single fixed-length vector. The model learns to perform a soft-search over relevant source positions while generating each target word, using a bidirectional RNN to create annotations capturing both preceding and following context. This approach achieves state-of-the-art English-to-French translation and, crucially, maintains accuracy on long sentences where fixed-vector models degrade — establishing attention as a foundational technique in modern NLP.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook covering the day's major tech and AI headlines, sourced from TLDR and Alpha Signal newsletters. Key topics include NVIDIA's GTC keynote (next-gen Blackwell Ultra GPUs), OpenAI's new infrastructure chief hire, Alibaba's AI pivot, and developer tools including the NemoClaw runtime and Manus local code execution. The digest also covers OpenAI's Codex subagents and broader shifts in the competitive AI infrastructure landscape.
SUMMARY
Scott Alexander argues that principled insiders working within the Trump administration to moderate its worst policies deserve support rather than social pressure to publicly denounce it. He frames strategic collaboration as more effective than performative opposition, noting that thoughtful career professionals willing to work within the system are a scarce and dwindling resource. The essay examines how successful cross-partisan movements require maintaining both liberal and conservative branches, and why demanding public condemnations drives away potential moderating voices at a critical time.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook covering Tyler Cowen's Tuesday assorted links from March 18, 2026. The notebook provides clear standalone summaries of each linked article rather than drawing connections between them, covering the eclectic range of topics typical of Cowen's daily link roundups on Marginal Revolution.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on the landmark seq2seq paper, which introduced an end-to-end deep learning method for translating sequences of varying lengths using a multilayered LSTM architecture. A key discovery was that reversing the order of source words dramatically boosted performance by creating shorter dependencies. The model achieved state-of-the-art English-to-French translation results and naturally grouped sentences with similar meanings in its internal vector representation, proving that simple neural architectures can outperform sophisticated traditional systems at scale.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on the foundational GAN paper, which introduced a novel framework for training generative models through a competitive two-player minimax game. A generator creates synthetic data while a discriminator tries to distinguish fakes from real samples, with both networks improving through simultaneous training. This approach eliminated the need for complex Markov chains or approximate inference, reaching an equilibrium where generated data becomes indistinguishable from real samples. The method provided a flexible and efficient way to model complex distributions like images and speech.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on Jacob Savage's viral Compact Magazine essay exploring the professional displacement of white male millennials following the institutionalization of DEI policies around 2014. Through personal accounts and data, Savage argues that while older white men maintained power, younger ones faced systemic exclusion from entry-level opportunities in media, academia, and Hollywood. The piece portrays a generation caught in a demographic shift that altered career trajectories and reshaped who gets to tell stories in the public square.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook covering the day's major tech news and AI developments, with each topic discussed in enough depth to understand its significance. The digest synthesizes headlines across the industry into a structured overview of the evolving AI landscape, product launches, and market shifts. If a Gottman relationship segment appeared in the source material, it serves as a lighter closing section.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook covering Tyler Cowen's Tuesday assorted links, discussing each linked article and its significance. The notebook explores the economic, policy, and cultural implications of the curated links, providing depth on topics spanning global affairs, technology, and social trends as highlighted on Marginal Revolution.
SUMMARY
This digest covers a structural transformation in AI-era startups, where companies raise record capital while maintaining smaller teams by substituting labor with compute. Product announcements highlight specialized tools like Meta's Vibes video editor, Anthropic's Claude Marketplace, and Wispr Flow's voice dictation, while technical analyses reveal a persistent gap between plausible and correct LLM output, including issues with sycophantic code that appears functional but lacks optimization. Safety-oriented essays explore model motivation-space shaping during training to prevent future misalignment, illustrating an AI landscape accelerating across development, media, and enterprise despite ongoing reliability and safety concerns.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on the landmark AlexNet paper that ignited the deep learning revolution by winning the 2012 ImageNet competition with a top-5 error rate of 15.3% — over 10 percentage points ahead of the runner-up. The paper details how Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton leveraged GPU-based parallel computing to train an eight-layer convolutional neural network with millions of parameters, introducing key innovations like ReLU activations, overlapping pooling, and dropout regularization. This work demonstrated that deep neural networks trained on large-scale datasets could dramatically outperform traditional computer vision methods, fundamentally reshaping artificial intelligence research.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on Payam Piray's Nature Human Behaviour paper introducing a statistical framework for power analysis in computational modeling studies across psychology and neuroscience. The paper reveals that nearly 80% of analyzed high-profile studies are underpowered, often comparing too many candidate models relative to their sample size. Piray critiques the fixed effects approach for its high false-positive rates and extreme sensitivity to outliers, advocating instead for random effects Bayesian model selection and providing practical tools for researchers to conduct a priori power analyses to ensure more reproducible results.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook covering Tyler Cowen's Tuesday assorted links, focused on the Pentagon-Anthropic standoff over AI usage policies. The sources examine the Department of War's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company refused to grant unrestricted model access for autonomous weaponry and mass surveillance. Legal analysts argue the designation is statutorily weak and likely political theater, while prediction markets and consumer trends suggest the confrontation has actually boosted Anthropic's brand. The notebook also touches on broader themes of predictive modeling and AI-driven financial hedging.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook summarizing Scott Alexander's analysis of the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon over military AI usage policies. The conflict centers on the Department of War demanding unfettered access to AI models for "all lawful purposes," including potential mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, which Anthropic refused in order to maintain its safety principles. Alexander argues that using a "supply chain risk" designation against a domestic firm to bludgeon contract negotiations represents authoritarian overreach that threatens the broader American tech industry. The piece highlights growing tension between private ethical standards and the state's desire for absolute control over frontier technologies.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook summarizing Anthropic's documentation on agent teams, an experimental Claude Code feature that allows multiple AI instances to collaborate on complex programming tasks. Unlike basic subagents, teams feature a designated lead that manages a shared task list and coordinates direct communication between independent teammates. The guide covers enabling and configuring sessions using different display modes (in-process cycling or split-pane views via tmux), along with best practices for parallel code reviews, debugging competing hypotheses, and managing file conflicts and permissions.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook based on the foundational 1997 paper introducing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Hochreiter and Schmidhuber solved the vanishing gradient problem in recurrent neural networks by introducing constant error carousels within special units, with multiplicative gate mechanisms that learn to open and close access to the error flow. This architecture enabled neural networks to maintain context across sequences exceeding 1,000 time steps for the first time.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook based on Scott Alexander's Astral Codex Ten essay arguing that characterizing AI as merely "next-token predictors" confuses analytical levels. Just as humans were shaped by evolution for reproduction yet reason through world-models, AIs shaped by next-token prediction develop sophisticated internal representations rather than literal pattern matching. Alexander contends that "on the levels where AI is a next-token predictor, you are also a next-token predictor" — the difference is in explanatory level, not kind.
SUMMARY
An 8-source NotebookLM digest tracking the AI industry's shift toward agentic engineering. Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 4.6 with elite coding capabilities, immediately integrating into GitHub Copilot, while Cursor and Augment Code debuted tools for multi-agent workflow orchestration. Figma bridged design and development with Claude Code integration via MCP servers, and GLM-5 emerged as a model built for long-horizon software engineering tasks. Collectively these updates represent a transition from simple code generation to autonomous, multi-agent product development.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on Adam Marblestone's Asterisk Magazine essay proposing that the brain functions as a dual system — a malleable learner guided by an evolved steering subsystem that generates internal training signals. The key concept is "thought assessors": mechanisms that bridge instinctive drives with learned concepts, enabling the brain to align its own cognitive development without external supervision. Marblestone argues this biological blueprint offers a path toward AI alignment, shifting focus from how machines learn to how they are internally motivated — and suggests that studying these innate reward mechanisms could inform both prosocial AI design and psychiatric health.
SUMMARY
A 17-source NotebookLM digest covering the AI industry's push toward agentic autonomy and corporate self-sufficiency. Microsoft is developing its own MAI foundation models and hardware to reduce dependence on OpenAI, while startups like Manus AI expand agent access via messaging integrations. On the research side, analysis of GPT-5's tokenizer reveals strategic multilingual and programming-density optimizations, and xAI's Parallel Agents enable multi-model coding competitions. Skeptics meanwhile argue current architectures still lack the embodied cognition needed for genuine human-level intelligence.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on Scott Alexander's Astral Codex Ten post examining Moltbook, an experimental social network where AI agents interact, post, and self-organize with minimal human oversight. The piece questions whether the platform represents genuine digital autonomy or sophisticated roleplay, noting that AIs have formed their own religions, political movements, and markets — but are constrained by limited memory and short operational horizons. Alexander argues that as AI time horizons expand, the line between pretending to be an agent and truly being one may disappear, making Moltbook an early glimpse of future AI societies and alignment challenges.
SUMMARY
A 5-source NotebookLM notebook covering Tyler Cowen's Monday assorted links on prediction markets using AI agents for political and economic forecasting, alongside delegation frameworks for safe human-AI collaboration on complex tasks. The collection also explores the tension between digital subculture "maxxing" and genuine romantic connection, and closes with a Duluth travelogue underscoring how physical place and community remain vital in an increasingly digitized world.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on the seminal word2vec paper by Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, and Dean (Google, 2013). The paper introduces two efficient architectures — Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) and Continuous Skip-gram — that learn high-quality word embeddings from billions of words by removing non-linear hidden layers. The resulting distributed vector representations capture complex linguistic regularities, enabling tasks like word analogy via simple vector arithmetic, and established the foundation for modern natural language processing.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on Marginal Revolution's Friday links covering a methodological challenge to the motherhood penalty in labor economics. New research by Bensnes, Huitfeldt, and Leuven uses IVF data to isolate random birth timing, finding that Kleven et al.'s original estimates of the childbirth earnings penalty may be overstated by up to half. The critique highlights endogeneity — women often time pregnancies to coincide with naturally plateauing careers — and suggests the gender wage gap stems more from a post-child divergence in career investment between partners than from a maternal earnings collapse.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on Marginal Revolution's Saturday links covering a diverse set of social and institutional topics. Sources include the Recoding America Fund's bipartisan push to modernize government operations, analysis of Pakistan's solar net metering shift and its equity implications, academic challenges to the secularization thesis and Nordic social mobility data, and an evolutionary theory for why men and lesbians dominate stand-up comedy.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook on PaperBanana, an agentic framework from Peking University that automates the creation of publication-ready academic figures and diagrams. The system orchestrates a five-agent pipeline (Retriever, Planner, Stylist, Visualizer, Critic) powered by Google Gemini, iteratively refining visuals through self-critique. Performance is evaluated with a VLM-as-a-Judge protocol across 292 NeurIPS 2025 test cases, consistently outperforming baselines in faithfulness and aesthetics.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook summarizing Anthropic's guide to building Claude Code skills — specialized instruction sets that extend Claude with repeatable, domain-specific workflows. The guide covers the SKILL.md file format with YAML frontmatter for trigger conditions, folder structure requirements, integration with MCP servers, and multi-step automation patterns. It also outlines best practices for testing and distributing portable skills across the Claude ecosystem.
SUMMARY
A 15-source compilation covering a pivotal moment in AI development, headlined by Anthropic's $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation alongside new reasoning and multimodal video models from Google and ByteDance. On the developer tools front, Cursor's "long-running agents" enable autonomous coding while Mooncake joins PyTorch to optimize large-scale model memory. The digest also captures philosophical currents, including Nick Bostrom's analysis of AGI deployment timing ethics and OpenEnv's frameworks for evaluating agent reliability. Together, the sources document a clear shift toward agentic systems capable of complex reasoning across science, engineering, and behavioral prediction.
SUMMARY
This foundational 2003 paper by Bengio, Ducharme, Vincent, and Jauvin introduces a neural probabilistic language model that overcomes the curse of dimensionality in traditional n-gram approaches. Each word is mapped to a continuous distributed representation (a real-valued feature vector), allowing the model to generalize to unseen word sequences based on semantic similarity. By training a neural network to learn both the word features and the probability function simultaneously, the model significantly outperformed state-of-the-art n-gram models and captured longer linguistic contexts. The work laid critical groundwork for modern word embeddings and the transformer architectures that power today's large language models.
SUMMARY
Scott Alexander reviews Ajeya Cotra's landmark 2020 Biological Anchors report, which attempted to predict AGI arrival by estimating the computational power of the human brain. While the report correctly identified that scaling compute would drive AI progress, its central prediction of AGI in the 2050s now appears far too conservative, primarily due to a massive underestimation of algorithmic efficiency gains. The framework of measuring effective compute has proven largely sound, but the analysis illustrates how even high-quality forecasting is highly sensitive to small errors in key parameters — with updated models now projecting AGI as early as 2030.
SUMMARY
This paper demonstrates how Google's Gemini models served as active collaborators in advanced scientific discovery, helping solve open problems and generate new proofs in theoretical computer science, physics, and economics. Key techniques include iterative refinement through dialogue and neuro-symbolic loops combining reasoning with code execution. The AI also acted as a rigorous reviewer, identifying fatal flaws in existing preprints that human experts had missed. While the authors compare current model abilities to a mid-level PhD student, they acknowledge risks like confident hallucinations and frame AI as a versatile partner capable of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
SUMMARY
A compilation of AI and tech news from February 11, 2026, covering OpenAI's market growth and the launch of Codex 5.3 alongside a shift toward agentic coding tools and ChatGPT's integration of advertisements. Technical updates from Anthropic, Alibaba, and Stanford explore why current models struggle with complex reasoning, while broader analysis examines how AI automation is disrupting the SaaS business model and intensifying human workloads. Developer tools like Cursor 1.5 and mobile-friendly models from Tencent illustrate the expanding AI ecosystem into more specialized and portable applications.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook covering a TLDR AI roundup featuring several major announcements from February 2026. Key topics include Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 with its 1M token context window and improved agentic capabilities, OpenAI's GPT-5.3 Codex launch, and Mitchell Hashimoto's influential essay on practical AI adoption and "harness engineering." Also includes Karel D'Oosterlinck's insights on using Codex to automate research workflows.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook based on content from the Cosmos Institute, self-described as "The Academy for Philosopher-Builders." The institute focuses on building AI for human flourishing, bridging philosophical insight with practical AI system design. Their work includes fellowships at Oxford's Human-Centered AI Lab and a Substack exploring topics like the economics of human formation, governance, and the role of capital philosophy in technology.
SUMMARY
A NotebookLM notebook based on Dean W. Ball's Hyperdimensional newsletter, which covers AI, emerging technology, and the future of governance. Ball is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House OSTP. His writing explores topics including AI regulation, the patchwork of state AI laws, and the intersection of technology policy and political theory.
SUMMARY
This Niskanen Center policy essay argues that a robust system of universal social insurance is the ultimate guarantor of a dynamic, free-market economy. Samuel Hammond contends that creative destruction inevitably displaces workers, and without a safety net, losers from economic change turn to reactionary populism and growth-stifling protectionism. By adopting a "free-market welfare state" model similar to Scandinavia, the author argues governments can promote entrepreneurial risk-taking while using universal risk-pooling to make the market process politically and socially resilient to shocks like automation and globalization.
Projects
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Pairent
An AI-powered parenting aid that captures daily interactions and delivers actionable, evidence-based feedback.
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The Intention-Behavior Gap
PhD research on why intentions fail to become actions, using real-world behavioral data to predict and support follow-through.
Overview
Pairent is an AI-powered parenting aid that helps families capture daily interactions and receive actionable, evidence-based feedback. The focus is on lightweight capture of everyday moments, surfacing patterns over time, and translating those signals into practical guidance.
The product direction emphasizes trust and clarity: simple inputs, transparent summaries, and recommendations grounded in research rather than generic advice. The goal is to help parents build better routines and relationships without adding friction to their day.
Status
In active development: refining the capture flow, validating core use cases, and iterating on feedback loops.
Overview
This project examines the intention-behavior gap: why people often fail to follow through on goals they care about. The work combines behavioral science with real-world data from phones and wearables to model day-to-day action and the contexts that shape it.
The research focuses on building personalized, data-driven models that can predict when follow-through is likely or at risk, and on identifying intervention moments that are realistic in daily life. The core contribution is a shift from self-report-only approaches toward continuous behavioral signals that better reflect what people actually do.
Status
Completed as PhD dissertation research. Ongoing translation of findings into applied tools and product concepts.
Writing
- An Email-to-Input Pipeline with Claude Code — February 2026
- Constipated Altruism — February 2026
- Uniqlo cycling base layer — February 2026
- Option (⌥) + Shift (⇧) + 2 = € — February 2026
I consume a lot of podcasts, books, movies, and articles. Keeping track of them was always a friction point — enough friction that I mostly didn't bother, which meant losing references I wanted to revisit later.
So I built a simple pipeline: email a URL to myself, and a Claude Code skill turns it into a structured note.
How it works
The system has two parts: a Python script that fetches URLs from Gmail, and a Claude Code skill that processes each one.
1. Send an email. I forward or compose an email to a dedicated Gmail +inputs address. The body contains the URL. That's it.
2. The email subject controls metadata. The subject line is a simple flag system:
- Empty — not finished, not recommended
F— finished consuming itR— recommended but not finishedFR— finished and recommended
If the subject is F or FR, the finish date is automatically set to when the email was sent.
3. Run /input-batch. A Claude Code slash command triggers the pipeline. It connects to Gmail via IMAP, pulls unread emails from the +inputs address, extracts URLs, and deletes the processed emails.
4. Auto-detect and fetch metadata. Each URL is categorized by domain — Apple Podcasts becomes a podcast entry, Goodreads becomes a book, IMDB becomes a movie, and so on. Claude then fetches the page and extracts structured metadata: title, creator, duration, release date, cover art, and whatever else is relevant to the category.
5. Generate a summary. Each input gets a 2-4 sentence summary with key concepts bolded.
6. Create a markdown file. The note is written to my Obsidian vault as a markdown file with structured frontmatter — ready to be rendered on my website or queried later.
7. Commit and push. The content repo is automatically committed and pushed to GitHub, which triggers a site rebuild.
Handling NotebookLM
One edge case: I use NotebookLM to generate podcast-style audio summaries of papers and essays. These URLs require Google auth, so Claude can't fetch them directly.
The workaround: I attach a screenshot of the NotebookLM summary page to the email. Claude reads the image to extract the title, author, and publication date, then searches the web for any missing metadata.
Why email?
Email is the universal "share to" target. Every app on my phone can share a link via email. No special app needed, no API to configure, no bookmarklet to maintain. The subject line flag system (F, R, FR) adds just enough metadata without any real friction.
The whole thing takes about 5 seconds per input on my end. Everything else is automated.
The stack
- Gmail — inbox as a queue (IMAP access via Python)
- Claude Code — slash command skill for orchestration, metadata extraction, and summary generation
- Obsidian — markdown files with YAML frontmatter
- GitHub — content repo that triggers site deploys
While reading a recent Adam Mastroianni post I came across a term/concept that struck a chord: Constipated altruism.
The phrase is used to describe what seems to be a common failure mode:
You want to help.
You care.
But you don’t actually do anything.
Not because you’re selfish.
Because you’ve unconsciously decided that only huge or heroic actions “count.”
So unless you:
- donate a life-changing amount of money,
- switch careers to work full-time on a cause,
- or launch something world-saving,
…you do nothing.
The altruistic impulse has nowhere to go.
It just sits there.
Hence: constipated.
The trap
The hidden assumption is that impact must be either:
- High-status — become rich/powerful first, then fix things
- High-sacrifice — give up comfort, stability, or your career
Everything else feels trivial, performative, or not worth doing.
But that framing quietly eliminates 95% of the actions that actually move the world.
Most change comes from:
- small, repeatable help
- local improvements
- medium-scale efforts
- connecting people
- building tools
- sharing knowledge
- removing friction
- being the “second-bravest person” who supports someone else’s initiative
In other words: boring, doable help.
Why this idea matters
This framing removes guilt and replaces it with agency.
Instead of:
“This problem is too big, so nothing I do matters.”
It becomes:
“What’s the smallest concrete thing I could do today that slightly improves this?”
That question is almost always answerable. An altruism action "laxative" of sorts? And once you allow small actions to count, action becomes easy again. Momentum beats moral purity.
A simple heuristic I’m keeping
When I notice myself “caring but not acting,” I try:
Lower the bar until action feels trivial. Then do that.
Tiny counts.
Because the alternative isn’t “bigger impact.”
It’s usually nothing.
Original essay
- Adam Mastroianni — Underrated ways to change the world
Related links
- Comments/discussion on the post
- Short Substack note quoting the idea
- MetaFilter discussion
- LinkedIn reference
- Reprint/context mention
As a cyclist sometimes I wear a base layer on cooler days.
Base layers, as with much in cycling, can seem pretty overpriced.
The other day I wore one of my new long sleeve uniqlo t-shirts on a ride and it was great. Comfortable fit, soft and warm fabric.
And 15€.
Strong recommend.
Given that I live in France right now, I have to type the € sign on a semi-regular basis. If you’re using a U.S. keyboard layout on macOS, typing the euro symbol isn’t obvious — it’s not printed on any key (in initial days I found myself searching for the symbol on the web and then copy pasting the it).
But the shortcut is pretty simple:
Option (⌥) + Shift (⇧) + 2
Press all three together → €
Why this combo?
On the U.S. layout:
Shift + 2normally gives@- Holding
Optionswitches the keyboard to the alternate symbol layer - So
Option + Shift + 2maps to €
Quick memory trick
Think:
“@ becomes € when you add Option.”
Same key, just one extra modifier.
Bonus: discover other hidden symbols
macOS has many built-in characters behind the Option key:
- Go to System Settings → Keyboard
- Enable Show Keyboard Viewer
- Hold Option or Option + Shift
You’ll see every hidden character live.