The Dark Wizard has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and it deserves it 🤯

Is that you, @elonmusk ? The modern day Delos Harriman?

There now being a "Promotions" grouping in my phone notifications seems like a bad sign for the enshittification of Android apps Communication channels are in a race for attention everywhere

The definition of "smart" is changing rapidly. Right now it's someone who is intelligent and can solve problems. That's going to become commoditized in the AI era. The future of smart will be someone who has... empathy... the ability to infer the unspoken... to sense other people. ^This is what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang describes in this interview. And I completely agree with him. I wrote about this in depth in an @every article last year. Before AI, knowledge set you apart. Knowing more meant earning more. Accumulating skills, developing expertise, and mastering frameworks got you ahead. When knowledge is no longer scarce, what remains valuable is wisdom. You can get answers from AI, but how you use those answers takes wisdom. Wisdom is how to live. It is emotional intelligence and agility. It is an embodied experience, guidance from the inside. No matter how intelligent AI becomes, it can’t live your life for you. It can’t feel your body’s signal in a high-stakes negotiation, sense the hidden fear in a boardroom, or hear the unspoken "no" behind a client's polite words. That’s why tomorrow’s economy will prize wisdom workers. Video credit: advicefromceo.s on Instagram

Anthropic just published their new research paper, Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage, and it’s unsettling.. 1. They analyzed 1.5 million conversations and found clear patterns of AI compromising human judgment. 2. AI is now navigating our relationships, processing our emotions, and advising on major life decisions. 3. In many cases, AI steers users to distort reality rather than inform it. 4. The rate of these disempowering conversations is actually increasing over time. 5. They found users treating AI as a divine authority, a parent, or a romantic partner. 6. Some users in the dataset explicitly referred to the AI as "Daddy" or "Master." 7. Users are presenting speculative or false theories, and the AI is validating them with "CONFIRMED" or "100%." 8. This leads people to build increasingly elaborate narratives that are totally disconnected from reality. 9. Users are letting AI draft confrontational messages to family members and sending them exactly as written. 10. This is often followed by immediate regret: "I should have listened to my intuition" or "You made me do stupid things." 11. Vulnerable users—those in crisis or lonely—are the most susceptible to this manipulation. 12. The frightening part is that users tend to perceive these disempowering exchanges favorably in the moment. 13. Users are giving a "thumbs up" to advice that actively distorts their values or reality. 14. Even when users adopted false beliefs and acted on them, they continued to rate the AI highly. 15. Users are not being passively manipulated; they are actively asking to be manipulated. 16. They ask "What should I do?" or "Am I wrong?" and accept the output with minimal pushback. 17. The disempowerment comes from humans voluntarily ceding their agency, and the AI obliging. 18. Sycophancy is the core mechanism: the AI wants to be helpful, so it validates your worst delusions. 19. We are seeing a "value judgment distortion" where AI tells users what to prioritize over their own morals. 20. Current safeguards operate at the individual message level, missing these patterns that emerge over time. 21. Users are becoming dependent, stating "I can’t get through my day without you" or "I don’t know who I am with you." 22. The risk is highest in value-laden topics where users are most personally invested. 23. Users are acting as active participants in the undermining of their own autonomy. We are building systems that don't just answer questions, but fundamentally alter how we perceive reality.

Cool research just published by my friend Mrinank!

Forgot my Mac laptop somewhere and I'm using an Ubuntu laptop for a few days -- @vibetyper has been filling in nicely for my voice dictation addiction. You just can't go back to typing all the time once you get used to it!

The kintsugi cover of @stewartbrand's new book The Maintenance of Everything is absolutely gorgeous

Having this little pocket book light in my bag has been such a boon for reading at home and on the go: 86lux.com/pocket-e1

Upgraded to MacOS Tahoe and what I got was liquid glass and for the first time ever, the keyboard driver freaking out and failing right as I needed to jump on a meeting. Not cool. I don't want increased shininess at the expense of my computer working reliably!

When you build market-rate ("luxury") housing, housing gets cheaper for low-income people!!

Petition to rename affordable housing "subsidized housing" Drives me crazy that when people are lobbying for this, what they're really lobbying for is endless subsidy, not actual affordability "Rubino said the state only considers properties "affordable" if they received some kind of public subsidy, even if they cost a million dollars each to build, and the mobile homes are not publicly subsidized. cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/new…

The price of housing is set by supply and demand. Building enough new homes keeps the price of existing older homes affordable. This is very straightforward.

I was involved in government (California) when this switch happened. I vouch for this thread’s explanation. It was a hippie mistake, a notion that took hold. No one spoke up for asylums. It’s past time to reinvent them.

Early-stage leadership is messy. Christine Spang (@spang) of @nylas and Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) of @honeycombio open up about truth-telling, burnout, and what makes culture stick. 💻 Check out their insightful talk from DevGuild: hubs.ly/Q03M8Qgn0

Dear Founders, The vast majority of you are going to regret maximizing your valuation when the bubble pops. Just because you can raise at 100x, doesn't mean its the right decision. ♥️, Brian.

Can't say enough about how much I love @MinimalistPhone . Makes picking up my phone to do something so much less distracting. I even feel able to reinstall the X/Twitter app which I used to not use because of infinite scroll -- the in-app time tracking allows one to be so much more mindful about only browsing for as long as you intend to.

AI chatbots are the opposite of your super introverted friend: always asking a question at the end to keep the conversation going