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theaspiringnerd.com
Neurodivergent AI Product Manager & Dataviz Nerd 🤓 Tiohtià:ke/Montréal 🚀
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Deep Research is available to ChatGPT Plus users

Equally funny and terrifying!

Privacy advocates have long resisted attempts by governments and corporations to collect and store citizens' personal data. This is the reason. To prevent authoritarian, unaccountable, secret police from knowing everything about our lives and using our data against us.

a friend asked "how do I add a directory to my PATH" and I couldn't find any directions I liked so I wrote up a quick guide: jvns.ca/blog/2025/02...

"Claude the Eagles won the superbowl, do something to celebrate, make it amazing." (boringly sane) "Make it more Philly" (adds its attempts at Philly slang, cheese steak, Liberty Bell) "Even more Philly!" (adds greased poles, batteries being thrown at Santa who is being boo'ed, Gritty, etc)

This was such a good listen. Make sure you stay till the end when Doctorow sums up the crucial difference between hope and optimism.

Every 4 years, a team of libraries & research organizations work together to preserve material from U.S. government websites during the transition of administrations. 🗳️ Get the latest on the 2024/2025 End of Term Web Archive @eotarchive.org ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/02/06/u...

As someone trained as a trade economist, it is my duty to share the 1929-1933 Kindleberger Spiral, showing the month-month decline in global trade due to the combined factors of the (global) Great Depression and retaliatory tariffs. Smooth Hawley is implemented mid-June 1930.

Genuinely unsure how OpenAI survives. GenAI doesn't have a killer app. It assumed you needed hundreds of billions of capex, which turned out to be untrue. OpenAI's left with using DeepSeek's tech, which is an admittance of defeat, or continuing with its own expensive and uncompetitive models.

Here's a fun prompt injection challenge: can you get DeepSeek R1 running on chat.deepseek.com to leak its system prompt? I'm finding it's pretty robust at reasoning about how it shouldn't do that

No matter how much you fight it, I find that the visible chain-of-thought from DeepSeek makes it nearly impossible to avoid anthropomorphizing the thing The visible first-person "thinking" makes you feel like you are reading a diary of a somewhat tortured soul who wants to help. Weird interaction

Newsletter: No, Trump didn’t make $50 billion from his memecoin. www.citationneeded.news/trump-memeco...

to recap: — Trump was *for* the TikTok ban — which the GOP Congress passed — and the GOP Supreme Court upheld — and even though Biden said he wouldn't enforce the ban, TikTok shut down anyway — so that Trump could "save" it — and the media fell for it we really do live in the dumbest fucking country

I'd been waiting for someone to write something practical on using o1 and I think this piece by Ben Hylak nails it. (Obviously do read the OpenAI docs and so on, but o1 is something you have to really treat differently to get the most out of.) www.latent.space/p/o1-skill-i...

American teens are flocking to a new video app

My notes on the new OpenAI ChatGPT scheduled tasks feature, including a copy of the new tool instructions from a leaked system prompt simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/15/...

If you are an academic, it can be instructive to work on a paper with AI. Pretend you are working with a grad student & see what happens. Generally o1 is best for well-defined heavy intellectual tasks, Gemini for synthesizing lots of text, and Claude for writing & theorizing. This varies by field.

My 8000-word note on agents: huyenchip.com//2025/01/07/... 1. An AI-powered agent's capability is determined by its tools and its planning ability 2. How to select the best tools for your agent 3. How to augment a model’s planning capability 4. Agent’s failure modes Feedback is much appreciated!

Risky post... here are my 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for LLMs/AI, expanded from my appearance on the Oxide and Friends podcast (My confidence in my ability to predict the future is extremely low) simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/10/...

For those of us Product Managers who are a little less tech-savvy than software engineers, here’s a short blog post I wrote about how I turned an idea into a working app in just a few hours of tinkering with Claude and ChatGPT. #llm #chatgpt #claude #productmanagement

The Breachies 2024 highlights the most significant data breaches of the year, focusing on those with novel information, notable security flaws, or massive impact. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Here's why "alignment research" when it comes to LLMs is a big mess, as I see it. Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".

New year, new blog post: I had a random question, what happens when LLMs are prompted to write better code, again and again? Do they actually write better code? The answer is yes*! minimaxir.com/2025/01/writ...

Every year on 1 January, Public Domain Day celebrates the artistic works that enter the public domain, becoming free for everyone to use, share, and adapt. Wikimedia volunteers are at the forefront of sharing these works while navigating copyright restrictions. ➡️ w.wiki/CbAe

I think everyone who has an opnion, good or bad, about LLMs, should read how @simonwillison.net has summer up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space. simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

Eight Clams Control This Polish City’s Water Supply. “If the waters are clean, these [cyborg] mussels stay open and happy. But when water quality drops too low, they close off and shut the water supply of millions of people with them.” [kottke.org]

Zoomers: "Hey why these mf so good at command line interfaces" Millennials: "You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me"

All this dystopian x-risk AGI futurist BS is (1) an expression of male technological ego and (2) a distraction from present-tense crisis. Fascism is upon us, folks. Stop with your p-doom doomer bullshit and pay attention to now.

This year, we worked swiftly to save legacy media sites Vice.com and MTVNews before decades worth of valuable journalism could be erased. These sites are now searchable on the Wayback Machine! Help us in saving these resources:: https://archive.org/donate/?origin=blsky-eoy2024

I’ve been doing that for years too! At some point, I turned it into a weekly email wrap-up but couldn’t keep up with the pace. I’m back at it whenever I can now.

New AI Snake Oil essay: Last month the AI industry's narrative suddenly flipped — model scaling is dead, but "inference scaling" is taking over. This has left people outside AI confused. What changed? Is AI capability progress slowing? We look at the evidence. 🧵 www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-prog...

Today's post by @vale.rocks is one of my favourites because it's fun and interesting, and I learned something new! htmhell.dev/adventcalend...

The new ChatGPT Canvas mode adds a 2nd way to execute Python inside ChatGPT - using Pyodide+WASM, where Code Interpreter uses server-side Python in a Kubernetes sandbox And Pyodide can make network requests! I wrote about how exciting and confusing this is here: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/10/...

Canvas and Projects might be what was missing for me to pick ChatGPT over Claude as my daily tool.

Incredible project!

A terrific essay about how and why we should understand AI as a political project injected into our technology

Tired of wrestling with complex RAG pipelines? 🚀 Enter Roaming RAG: a simpler way to make your LLMs find answers in well-structured docs. No vector databases, no headaches—just rich, structured context. 👉 Read how it works: arcturus-labs.com/blog/2024/11...

Product Managers: if you’ve used both Claude and ChatGPT, I’m curious—do you have a favourite? And why? I’m currently paying for ChatGPT Plus because I use custom GPTs, but I’m questioning if it’s worth the money. #productmanagement

Thanks to LLMs, I no longer have to ever relearn regex. That alone is worth $20/month.