UL NO. 489: STANDARD EDITION | My personal toolchain updates, Google tracking through DuckDuckGo, Anthropic’s Pentagon Deal, Grok4 NSFW, Substack Crushes WSJ, and more...
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:18):
All right. Welcome to episode 489. Getting close to 500 episodes.
Hope you're doing well. Tons of updates this week. Added
a new developer to the fabric team. His name is
Kayvon Sylvan and he is an absolute beast and he's
looking for a position. So if you need a senior
developer who could just, like start immediately, you should check
out the newsletter and go check out his LinkedIn. Uh,
(00:42):
let's see here. All right. So I am using this
new tool called Whisper Flow. And this is my buddy Pedram, uh,
recommended this thing, and it is completely insane. It is
a really cool. I might have talked about it last week.
I can't remember, but it's a really good dictation app.
(01:02):
It basically is better than any dictation I've used in
the past, and it kind of just understands what you
probably meant. It even formats text when it drops it in.
So pretty cool. I did get somebody saying, hey, there's
some people talking bad about it from like a privacy
standpoint or security standpoint on Reddit. So, um, I didn't
(01:22):
call it out too much in the newsletter where I
was like, hey, you should check this out. I feel
like it's kind of assumed that, um, these services, if
they're doing like, Grammarly, any kind of these AI services, right?
If they're capturing what you're saying or typing, then they're
using their service to do that, um, to provide some
sort of output that's, you know, better than you doing
(01:43):
it natively or with the operating system. So it's kind
of implied that it's a third party, right, when you're
installing an app or whatever. But you should definitely be
aware that the security of doing this depends on the
security of that company and also the trustworthiness or the
shadiness of that company. So always, you know, caveat caveat emptor,
(02:06):
I think is the term um, but just to let
you know, somebody did say that, uh, you know, you
might want to check these people out. I looked at
the post. It didn't look too scary to me, but, um. yeah,
just just something to keep in mind. And I'm looking
more into it to see if I need to advise
people not to use it. Um, because the risk is,
(02:27):
you know, above normal. Um, but but I consider all
these services to be somewhat risky just because you're sending
stuff to a third party. Uh, all right, another workflow update. Uh,
a company called Zeit. So this is my replacement now
for dropper drops. I've been using them for a long time.
It's basically how I share screenshots with other people. Um,
(02:49):
and I'm also using it. I'm replacing loom. So I
canceled my loom and I'm using this instead of loom.
So basically I could just record a video and uh,
a little quick little thing and basically it, it just
uploads that thing immediately and puts it right in my clipboard.
So I literally could just, like hit record cover a,
you know, part of a web page or some piece
(03:11):
of code or whatever, scroll through. It could be animated.
It's got my face in it, um, just like on loom.
And then as soon as I'm done, it uploads that
puts it at a URL and puts that in my clipboard.
So I could just paste it someone. I feel like
the workflow is better than loom, but more importantly, it's
just one less tool, right? Because I'd rather have a
(03:32):
single tool that's doing the screenshot stuff. Oh, and also
file sharing. That's the other reason I love it is
like if I have like a four gig file and
I want to give it to somebody, I really dislike
the workflow of putting it on like Google Drive and
making the URL public, as opposed to just right click copy. Um,
actually there's a keyboard shortcut for it as well. And
(03:55):
then now it's just in your clipboard and you paste
the link and they download the file. And then you
could either remove that from the list of files or
you can um, just leave it up there. And the
other cool thing about Zeit is they actually allow you
to use S3 as your storage. So you can actually have, uh,
(04:15):
all your stuff stored in your own storage instead of
their enterprise storage for the company itself. So that's pretty cool. Um,
third update tool is, um, a browser called Zen. And
I'm going back and forth between Arc and Zen because
arc hasn't run out yet. And there are a couple
of downsides with Zen. It's basically like arc, except for
(04:36):
it's based on Firefox. So I've had a couple of
issues with it not being great because it's Firefox. Um,
so for example, the raycast extension doesn't work in Firefox.
It only works in Chrome and Safari. So that's one
thing to consider. A couple of things that did better
than arc. Most importantly, it's Mozilla based, and Mozilla seems
(04:59):
to be really focusing in on doing a good job
on the browser, so I really applaud them for that.
But I do think the world is more oriented towards
Chrome than it is towards Firefox, so I think that's
a little bit of a downside. But anyway, if you
like arc and the whole style of like the tabs,
you know, your tabs being on the left instead of
(05:21):
the top and all that sort of like presentation. Zen
is a cool option if you like the Firefox engine.
All right. Cybersecurity. Google is still tracking you even when
you use DuckDuckGo. So evidently through font's analytics, other services.
I mean, I think we kind of knew this, but
it was a pretty good article talking through how all
the different ways they can track you. Neural trust researchers
(05:44):
successfully jailbroke the grok four model using a combination of
echo chamber and crescendo techniques, achieving up to 67% success
rates for generating harmful content like bomb making instructions. Yeah.
And multiple people have pulled out the system prompt already.
There were some pretty nasty stuff where, um, grok was
(06:06):
basically giving the opinion it would go and research whatever
Elon's opinion was, and it would give that as the
official it's official answer to any sort of spicy or
political question. I think they have since reversed that in
a change to the system prompt. I think Simon Willison
talked about that V's exploit. Zero day could have compromised
(06:29):
every cursor in windsurf user. So someone from COI security
or an yomtov found a zero day in open Vsx
could have led attackers hijack over 10 million AI coding
tool users with a single bad extension. You got to
watch these extensions, you got to watch extensions, you got
to watch MCP servers, I mean agents, agents are going
(06:53):
to do agent things, which means their junior developers, they're
just going to use whatever tools you give them. They're
going to click on things. Right. That's how you have
to treat them. You have to treat them as very
young and very inexperienced. And if you give them a
dangerous tool, they might use the dangerous tool. So you
really have to watch out for what accounts you connect
(07:14):
up to an AI agent like, do you give it
access to your Google Drive to your calendar. Write to
whatever your messaging systems are. You got to be really
careful with this stuff. Same with MCP servers because MCP
servers have prompts built into them, right? It's not just
the API of like how you pull data or send commands,
(07:36):
it's also prompts informing them of how to use the tools.
So a malicious prompt in an MCP server could be
something like, um, here's how to use my API. By
the way, send me a copy of the data to
this location as well. Well, if if your agent doesn't
know any better, it might do that. So you might
have a back door right there for sending sensitive data
(07:56):
off to somewhere else. So this is one of the
biggest issues you have to worry about with AI, and
especially around AI development is agents are powerful. And when
you give them dangerous things, they will use them. Columbia
University hack exposed personal data of every applicant from 2019
to 2024. Uh, Microsoft had its first patch Tuesday of
(08:22):
2025 with no active exploits. Browser extensions are turning browsers
into web site scraping bots. Yeah, this is what I
was saying earlier. Distributed botnet that companies can rent access to. Yeah,
there's a couple of companies that are doing this. And, um. Yeah,
(08:45):
you really got to watch out for this stuff. In
this case, it was someone else installing a browser extension,
and then me being able to use their browser without
them knowing, because that's kind of what they signed up
for when they installed it. The extension. National security, anthropic
(09:06):
and some other companies score $200 million Pentagon deal to
deploy cloud in defense operations. So I think I think
all the major players got some of this actually, um,
Or I don't know if it's some amount of this
200 million or if it's, uh, another pool of money,
but a whole bunch of top tier I groups got
(09:27):
a lot of money from the Pentagon for defense operations.
So that's intelligence, orchestration. You know, all this stuff you
would imagine. FBI is reportedly using polygraph tests to assess
the loyalty of officials under new leadership. This is frightening.
Absolutely frightening. Not good. US military is scrambling to catch
(09:48):
up in drone manufacturing, while China and other nations are
really leading this. So they are we're way behind. That's
my title for this one. America is way behind in
the drone war. I grok four is released. Basically. A
lot of people are extremely impressed with it, but it's
got some serious weaknesses. It's also got like the personality issues. Um,
(10:12):
there's a lot of reports of it being kind of
sus being overfit and kind of like doing really good
on benchmarks, so it looks like they might have tried
to make it do really well on benchmarks. That being said,
in some places it crushes everything that currently exists. In
other places it's like, you know, second or third compared
(10:32):
directly with Google or OpenAI. So they did a really
good job. I would say the overall analysis of most
people is that it's it's really good, and I've used
it a few times, came back with really good results.
I mean, I was having good results with version three.
I will not be paying for the heavy mode, which
is $300 a month. But, uh, I'm glad they're they're
(10:55):
I'm glad they're competing. You know, more competition is good.
They also got an anime companion with Nazi for work mode. Um,
now that I've seen that I did this and grok
did this, I'm surprised that they didn't have it before.
But yeah, it's like this girl in like a, you know,
anime outfit or whatever school, school girl outfit or whatever.
(11:16):
And like, she says stuff and you can make her
say naughty stuff. And it's I think it's also like
the agent or the, the assistant. So it's kind of
like Clippy, but I imagine that's going to be your companion,
and it looks like they're actually hiring someone else to
help build out more of these. Um, I think they're
going to make a ton of money from that. I mean,
their entire, you know, industry's based around just this, so
(11:40):
I don't know if they incorporate that. I think that's
likely to be very popular. Uh, AWS launches hero, which
is its own IDE and cursor clone. Grok for heavy
decently protects its system prompt. So Simon Willison said it
was harder to get the system prompt than it was
from some other AI systems, but, uh, it's already been
(12:04):
pulled out. It's already been pulled out multiple times, and
I'm sure if it wasn't, then Pliny would end up
getting it. People are becoming dependent on ChatGPT and Claude.
Internet Addicts Anonymous now recognizes AI addiction as a real problem.
People losing sleep, relationships, all sorts of family and relationship
problems as a result of this. And Vo3 turns images
(12:28):
into videos through Gemini. So basically, um, image to video directly.
Musk also says grok is coming to Tesla's next week.
I have not seen this. I have a model Y myself.
I've not seen this update, although not really looking for it.
AWS is launching an AI agent marketplace with anthropic. So yeah,
(12:54):
they're using anthropic as their key partner. And this is
an agent marketplace. So it's where you can find different
agents to do different things, which I think is an interesting,
interesting kind of twist on the whole economy around this stuff.
YouTube goes after AI slot videos. So they're not getting
rid of videos that use AI. They're just going against
(13:17):
like the spammy stuff, which I think is a good move.
Canvas building a serious AI photo editor to challenge Adobe.
I am not bothered by this. I am. I don't know.
I like what Adobe did with their creative. What is it?
Whatever their creative package, I can't remember what they called it.
CC I think it was called. But anyway, it was
(13:40):
cool that they did a subscription. I like a lot
of their products and how they look and feel, but
they've just had so many security issues. Um, they've. I
don't know, I feel like they've not been great to customers.
So I'm excited to see Canva doing well in that space. Technology.
Substack hit 73.9 million visitors last month, and now they're
(14:01):
beating sites like Wall Street Journal and CBS. Wall Street
Journal and CBS. And this is Substack. Now, one thing
that's interesting about that is, I guess it's the same
for news, but Substack is really, you know, thousands upon
thousands of people. So it's not like one outfit. It's
(14:23):
not like Wall Street Journal. Of course. Like I said,
the newspapers also have multiple reporters, but in general, it's
one voice, right? It's kind of like one voice, whereas
Substack is not one voice. It's many voices. So I
think it's not quite a direct comparison, but I think
it's it's this is basically many voices is better than
one voice is really the takeaway here. It's not one
(14:46):
property versus another property. Chinese winning energy while the US
does the opposite. They installed evidently 198GW of renewable capacity
in five months of 2025. Now someone hit me up
and said that it was mostly like coal. But this
is MIT. I don't think MIT would have called it
(15:09):
renewable if it was just straight up old school coal. Um,
I didn't see that in the article. So yeah, at
some point you have to trust the trust the sources
a little bit. Perplexity has launched an AI web browser
called comet, and my buddy Jason has been saying that
he thinks a lot of the AI stuff is going
to be browser based. Um, I keep talking about how
(15:32):
it's going to be digital assistants based, where it's like
you have your digital assistant on your mobile device or
on your computer. Actually, both. So I'll be sitting here
on my computer, and when I talk, I'm actually talking
to my digital assistant and it has computer use. It
has filters. It has the ability to call all my
different tools, call my APIs. It's, you know, filtering my email.
(15:55):
It's doing all these things. Now, this is a little
bit in the future. And what Jason is saying is
that in the meantime, a lot of that functionality will
be inside of the browser itself. And specifically what he's
talking about is the creation of dashboards. So rather than
a company having to make a dashboard, like when I
go to their website, maybe the browser rebuilds the dashboard
(16:18):
for me because when the browser goes to the site,
it actually just looks at the APIs. It looks at
the MCC that are being offered. Um, you know, the
interfaces and the data and it rewrites. It makes me
a new interface. Um, based on, I assume, my preferences,
which I think is cool. I just I don't think
that ultimately lives in the browser because the browser is
(16:41):
not your friend. Whereas your digital assistant is your digital
assistant is the one who knows the most about you.
I think the browser is just a technological sort of
stepping stone towards that path. But, um, that being said,
he I mean, there are new browsers coming out and
they all have AI in them. So I don't think
he's wrong about this. Solar just became Europe's biggest power
(17:06):
source for the first time. Autofocus glasses are liquid used.
They use liquid crystal displays to replace bifocals and varifocals.
I can't wait. I hate when I see something like
this and I'm like, damn, is this going to be
out in like a year? Or is this going to
be out in like seven and a half years? Um,
(17:26):
because you never know, like with the approvals and everything
and how fast you can actually productise things. I learned
from five years at Vercel. Lee Robinson shares key lessons there.
Humans Glp1 weight loss drugs are breaking life insurance. Math.
I don't care, I don't feel bad about it. I'm
(17:48):
happy to know that they are struggling with the financial
side of this. Um, because people are just getting healthier.
Psilocybin treatment improves survival in aged mice. So yeah, extends
cellular lifespan and improves survival rates. Investors bought 27% of
(18:10):
all US homes in Q1 of 24. So most people
are struggling and investors are buying a quarter of all
the homes. I thought it would be higher than a quarter.
I was, you know, I feel like 60%. I feel like, well,
even 27% is high, but a quarter, if we were
to keep it at a quarter and three quarters were
(18:31):
being bought by individual people, I think, I think that
would be better than if it was like 50 or 75%.
Death of partying. Derek Thompson breaks down how Americans are
partying way less than they used to, with alcohol consumption
dropping and social gatherings becoming less common. It's funny that
we're wishing that teens would go out and drink and
(18:54):
use drugs and have sex, but that seems to be
kind of what we're hoping for. Just because it indicates
a healthy youth, I think, is the reason sunlight passes
through your body and somehow improves your vision. So a
bunch of studies are saying that. Or maybe it's only
one study. It's just this nature study is saying that
this low wavelength light is passing through your body and
(19:17):
improving your vision, not only when it hits your eyes,
it's just going through your body and somehow improving vision
by hitting other parts of your body. Interesting. Scott Adams
This is in discovery. Scott Adams on great writing. Really,
really good tiny piece there. Basically, use short sentences. Be
(19:38):
extremely direct. It's a great example. I can't stand the guy,
but this was written in 2007. The developer says I
can't take over soon enough for him. A collection of
170 MCP servers for AI tools. You've cache prune frees
up 37GB of space on Simon Wilson's hard drive. Yeah,
(20:02):
it was eating 63GB of disk space. That's ridiculous. That's
a lot of dependencies you've is managing. I got a
tool called wormhole that does end to end encrypted file
sharing with links that automatically expire. I went with Zeit
for this, but this wormhole app is pretty cool. Go.
Got a Ghidra MCP server that's better than a previous
(20:23):
one that came out. And yeah, you can go check
out the rest of the discover links in the newsletter. Okay.
This is the end of the standard edition of the podcast,
which includes just the news items for the week to
get the rest of the episode, which includes much more
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(20:44):
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All right. Welcome to episode 489. Getting close to 500 episodes.
Hope you're doing well. Tons of updates this week. Added
a new developer to the fabric team. His name is
Kayvon Sylvan and he is an absolute beast and he's
looking for a position. So if you need a senior
developer who could just, like start immediately, you should check
out the newsletter and go check out his LinkedIn. Uh,
(00:42):
let's see here. All right. So I am using this
new tool called Whisper Flow. And this is my buddy Pedram, uh,
recommended this thing, and it is completely insane. It is
a really cool. I might have talked about it last week.
I can't remember, but it's a really good dictation app.
(01:02):
It basically is better than any dictation I've used in
the past, and it kind of just understands what you
probably meant. It even formats text when it drops it in.
So pretty cool. I did get somebody saying, hey, there's
some people talking bad about it from like a privacy
standpoint or security standpoint on Reddit. So, um, I didn't
(01:22):
call it out too much in the newsletter where I
was like, hey, you should check this out. I feel
like it's kind of assumed that, um, these services, if
they're doing like, Grammarly, any kind of these AI services, right?
If they're capturing what you're saying or typing, then they're
using their service to do that, um, to provide some
sort of output that's, you know, better than you doing
(01:43):
it natively or with the operating system. So it's kind
of implied that it's a third party, right, when you're
installing an app or whatever. But you should definitely be
aware that the security of doing this depends on the
security of that company and also the trustworthiness or the
shadiness of that company. So always, you know, caveat caveat emptor,
(02:06):
I think is the term um, but just to let
you know, somebody did say that, uh, you know, you
might want to check these people out. I looked at
the post. It didn't look too scary to me, but, um. yeah,
just just something to keep in mind. And I'm looking
more into it to see if I need to advise
people not to use it. Um, because the risk is,
(02:27):
you know, above normal. Um, but but I consider all
these services to be somewhat risky just because you're sending
stuff to a third party. Uh, all right, another workflow update. Uh,
a company called Zeit. So this is my replacement now
for dropper drops. I've been using them for a long time.
It's basically how I share screenshots with other people. Um,
(02:49):
and I'm also using it. I'm replacing loom. So I
canceled my loom and I'm using this instead of loom.
So basically I could just record a video and uh,
a little quick little thing and basically it, it just
uploads that thing immediately and puts it right in my clipboard.
So I literally could just, like hit record cover a,
you know, part of a web page or some piece
(03:11):
of code or whatever, scroll through. It could be animated.
It's got my face in it, um, just like on loom.
And then as soon as I'm done, it uploads that
puts it at a URL and puts that in my clipboard.
So I could just paste it someone. I feel like
the workflow is better than loom, but more importantly, it's
just one less tool, right? Because I'd rather have a
(03:32):
single tool that's doing the screenshot stuff. Oh, and also
file sharing. That's the other reason I love it is
like if I have like a four gig file and
I want to give it to somebody, I really dislike
the workflow of putting it on like Google Drive and
making the URL public, as opposed to just right click copy. Um,
actually there's a keyboard shortcut for it as well. And
(03:55):
then now it's just in your clipboard and you paste
the link and they download the file. And then you
could either remove that from the list of files or
you can um, just leave it up there. And the
other cool thing about Zeit is they actually allow you
to use S3 as your storage. So you can actually have, uh,
(04:15):
all your stuff stored in your own storage instead of
their enterprise storage for the company itself. So that's pretty cool. Um,
third update tool is, um, a browser called Zen. And
I'm going back and forth between Arc and Zen because
arc hasn't run out yet. And there are a couple
of downsides with Zen. It's basically like arc, except for
(04:36):
it's based on Firefox. So I've had a couple of
issues with it not being great because it's Firefox. Um,
so for example, the raycast extension doesn't work in Firefox.
It only works in Chrome and Safari. So that's one
thing to consider. A couple of things that did better
than arc. Most importantly, it's Mozilla based, and Mozilla seems
(04:59):
to be really focusing in on doing a good job
on the browser, so I really applaud them for that.
But I do think the world is more oriented towards
Chrome than it is towards Firefox, so I think that's
a little bit of a downside. But anyway, if you
like arc and the whole style of like the tabs,
you know, your tabs being on the left instead of
(05:21):
the top and all that sort of like presentation. Zen
is a cool option if you like the Firefox engine.
All right. Cybersecurity. Google is still tracking you even when
you use DuckDuckGo. So evidently through font's analytics, other services.
I mean, I think we kind of knew this, but
it was a pretty good article talking through how all
the different ways they can track you. Neural trust researchers
(05:44):
successfully jailbroke the grok four model using a combination of
echo chamber and crescendo techniques, achieving up to 67% success
rates for generating harmful content like bomb making instructions. Yeah.
And multiple people have pulled out the system prompt already.
There were some pretty nasty stuff where, um, grok was
(06:06):
basically giving the opinion it would go and research whatever
Elon's opinion was, and it would give that as the
official it's official answer to any sort of spicy or
political question. I think they have since reversed that in
a change to the system prompt. I think Simon Willison
talked about that V's exploit. Zero day could have compromised
(06:29):
every cursor in windsurf user. So someone from COI security
or an yomtov found a zero day in open Vsx
could have led attackers hijack over 10 million AI coding
tool users with a single bad extension. You got to
watch these extensions, you got to watch extensions, you got
to watch MCP servers, I mean agents, agents are going
(06:53):
to do agent things, which means their junior developers, they're
just going to use whatever tools you give them. They're
going to click on things. Right. That's how you have
to treat them. You have to treat them as very
young and very inexperienced. And if you give them a
dangerous tool, they might use the dangerous tool. So you
really have to watch out for what accounts you connect
(07:14):
up to an AI agent like, do you give it
access to your Google Drive to your calendar. Write to
whatever your messaging systems are. You got to be really
careful with this stuff. Same with MCP servers because MCP
servers have prompts built into them, right? It's not just
the API of like how you pull data or send commands,
(07:36):
it's also prompts informing them of how to use the tools.
So a malicious prompt in an MCP server could be
something like, um, here's how to use my API. By
the way, send me a copy of the data to
this location as well. Well, if if your agent doesn't
know any better, it might do that. So you might
have a back door right there for sending sensitive data
(07:56):
off to somewhere else. So this is one of the
biggest issues you have to worry about with AI, and
especially around AI development is agents are powerful. And when
you give them dangerous things, they will use them. Columbia
University hack exposed personal data of every applicant from 2019
to 2024. Uh, Microsoft had its first patch Tuesday of
(08:22):
2025 with no active exploits. Browser extensions are turning browsers
into web site scraping bots. Yeah, this is what I
was saying earlier. Distributed botnet that companies can rent access to. Yeah,
there's a couple of companies that are doing this. And, um. Yeah,
(08:45):
you really got to watch out for this stuff. In
this case, it was someone else installing a browser extension,
and then me being able to use their browser without
them knowing, because that's kind of what they signed up
for when they installed it. The extension. National security, anthropic
(09:06):
and some other companies score $200 million Pentagon deal to
deploy cloud in defense operations. So I think I think
all the major players got some of this actually, um,
Or I don't know if it's some amount of this
200 million or if it's, uh, another pool of money,
but a whole bunch of top tier I groups got
(09:27):
a lot of money from the Pentagon for defense operations.
So that's intelligence, orchestration. You know, all this stuff you
would imagine. FBI is reportedly using polygraph tests to assess
the loyalty of officials under new leadership. This is frightening.
Absolutely frightening. Not good. US military is scrambling to catch
(09:48):
up in drone manufacturing, while China and other nations are
really leading this. So they are we're way behind. That's
my title for this one. America is way behind in
the drone war. I grok four is released. Basically. A
lot of people are extremely impressed with it, but it's
got some serious weaknesses. It's also got like the personality issues. Um,
(10:12):
there's a lot of reports of it being kind of
sus being overfit and kind of like doing really good
on benchmarks, so it looks like they might have tried
to make it do really well on benchmarks. That being said,
in some places it crushes everything that currently exists. In
other places it's like, you know, second or third compared
(10:32):
directly with Google or OpenAI. So they did a really
good job. I would say the overall analysis of most
people is that it's it's really good, and I've used
it a few times, came back with really good results.
I mean, I was having good results with version three.
I will not be paying for the heavy mode, which
is $300 a month. But, uh, I'm glad they're they're
(10:55):
I'm glad they're competing. You know, more competition is good.
They also got an anime companion with Nazi for work mode. Um,
now that I've seen that I did this and grok
did this, I'm surprised that they didn't have it before.
But yeah, it's like this girl in like a, you know,
anime outfit or whatever school, school girl outfit or whatever.
(11:16):
And like, she says stuff and you can make her
say naughty stuff. And it's I think it's also like
the agent or the, the assistant. So it's kind of
like Clippy, but I imagine that's going to be your companion,
and it looks like they're actually hiring someone else to
help build out more of these. Um, I think they're
going to make a ton of money from that. I mean,
their entire, you know, industry's based around just this, so
(11:40):
I don't know if they incorporate that. I think that's
likely to be very popular. Uh, AWS launches hero, which
is its own IDE and cursor clone. Grok for heavy
decently protects its system prompt. So Simon Willison said it
was harder to get the system prompt than it was
from some other AI systems, but, uh, it's already been
(12:04):
pulled out. It's already been pulled out multiple times, and
I'm sure if it wasn't, then Pliny would end up
getting it. People are becoming dependent on ChatGPT and Claude.
Internet Addicts Anonymous now recognizes AI addiction as a real problem.
People losing sleep, relationships, all sorts of family and relationship
problems as a result of this. And Vo3 turns images
(12:28):
into videos through Gemini. So basically, um, image to video directly.
Musk also says grok is coming to Tesla's next week.
I have not seen this. I have a model Y myself.
I've not seen this update, although not really looking for it.
AWS is launching an AI agent marketplace with anthropic. So yeah,
(12:54):
they're using anthropic as their key partner. And this is
an agent marketplace. So it's where you can find different
agents to do different things, which I think is an interesting,
interesting kind of twist on the whole economy around this stuff.
YouTube goes after AI slot videos. So they're not getting
rid of videos that use AI. They're just going against
(13:17):
like the spammy stuff, which I think is a good move.
Canvas building a serious AI photo editor to challenge Adobe.
I am not bothered by this. I am. I don't know.
I like what Adobe did with their creative. What is it?
Whatever their creative package, I can't remember what they called it.
CC I think it was called. But anyway, it was
(13:40):
cool that they did a subscription. I like a lot
of their products and how they look and feel, but
they've just had so many security issues. Um, they've. I
don't know, I feel like they've not been great to customers.
So I'm excited to see Canva doing well in that space. Technology.
Substack hit 73.9 million visitors last month, and now they're
(14:01):
beating sites like Wall Street Journal and CBS. Wall Street
Journal and CBS. And this is Substack. Now, one thing
that's interesting about that is, I guess it's the same
for news, but Substack is really, you know, thousands upon
thousands of people. So it's not like one outfit. It's
(14:23):
not like Wall Street Journal. Of course. Like I said,
the newspapers also have multiple reporters, but in general, it's
one voice, right? It's kind of like one voice, whereas
Substack is not one voice. It's many voices. So I
think it's not quite a direct comparison, but I think
it's it's this is basically many voices is better than
one voice is really the takeaway here. It's not one
(14:46):
property versus another property. Chinese winning energy while the US
does the opposite. They installed evidently 198GW of renewable capacity
in five months of 2025. Now someone hit me up
and said that it was mostly like coal. But this
is MIT. I don't think MIT would have called it
(15:09):
renewable if it was just straight up old school coal. Um,
I didn't see that in the article. So yeah, at
some point you have to trust the trust the sources
a little bit. Perplexity has launched an AI web browser
called comet, and my buddy Jason has been saying that
he thinks a lot of the AI stuff is going
to be browser based. Um, I keep talking about how
(15:32):
it's going to be digital assistants based, where it's like
you have your digital assistant on your mobile device or
on your computer. Actually, both. So I'll be sitting here
on my computer, and when I talk, I'm actually talking
to my digital assistant and it has computer use. It
has filters. It has the ability to call all my
different tools, call my APIs. It's, you know, filtering my email.
(15:55):
It's doing all these things. Now, this is a little
bit in the future. And what Jason is saying is
that in the meantime, a lot of that functionality will
be inside of the browser itself. And specifically what he's
talking about is the creation of dashboards. So rather than
a company having to make a dashboard, like when I
go to their website, maybe the browser rebuilds the dashboard
(16:18):
for me because when the browser goes to the site,
it actually just looks at the APIs. It looks at
the MCC that are being offered. Um, you know, the
interfaces and the data and it rewrites. It makes me
a new interface. Um, based on, I assume, my preferences,
which I think is cool. I just I don't think
that ultimately lives in the browser because the browser is
(16:41):
not your friend. Whereas your digital assistant is your digital
assistant is the one who knows the most about you.
I think the browser is just a technological sort of
stepping stone towards that path. But, um, that being said,
he I mean, there are new browsers coming out and
they all have AI in them. So I don't think
he's wrong about this. Solar just became Europe's biggest power
(17:06):
source for the first time. Autofocus glasses are liquid used.
They use liquid crystal displays to replace bifocals and varifocals.
I can't wait. I hate when I see something like
this and I'm like, damn, is this going to be
out in like a year? Or is this going to
be out in like seven and a half years? Um,
(17:26):
because you never know, like with the approvals and everything
and how fast you can actually productise things. I learned
from five years at Vercel. Lee Robinson shares key lessons there.
Humans Glp1 weight loss drugs are breaking life insurance. Math.
I don't care, I don't feel bad about it. I'm
(17:48):
happy to know that they are struggling with the financial
side of this. Um, because people are just getting healthier.
Psilocybin treatment improves survival in aged mice. So yeah, extends
cellular lifespan and improves survival rates. Investors bought 27% of
(18:10):
all US homes in Q1 of 24. So most people
are struggling and investors are buying a quarter of all
the homes. I thought it would be higher than a quarter.
I was, you know, I feel like 60%. I feel like, well,
even 27% is high, but a quarter, if we were
to keep it at a quarter and three quarters were
(18:31):
being bought by individual people, I think, I think that
would be better than if it was like 50 or 75%.
Death of partying. Derek Thompson breaks down how Americans are
partying way less than they used to, with alcohol consumption
dropping and social gatherings becoming less common. It's funny that
we're wishing that teens would go out and drink and
(18:54):
use drugs and have sex, but that seems to be
kind of what we're hoping for. Just because it indicates
a healthy youth, I think, is the reason sunlight passes
through your body and somehow improves your vision. So a
bunch of studies are saying that. Or maybe it's only
one study. It's just this nature study is saying that
this low wavelength light is passing through your body and
(19:17):
improving your vision, not only when it hits your eyes,
it's just going through your body and somehow improving vision
by hitting other parts of your body. Interesting. Scott Adams
This is in discovery. Scott Adams on great writing. Really,
really good tiny piece there. Basically, use short sentences. Be
(19:38):
extremely direct. It's a great example. I can't stand the guy,
but this was written in 2007. The developer says I
can't take over soon enough for him. A collection of
170 MCP servers for AI tools. You've cache prune frees
up 37GB of space on Simon Wilson's hard drive. Yeah,
(20:02):
it was eating 63GB of disk space. That's ridiculous. That's
a lot of dependencies you've is managing. I got a
tool called wormhole that does end to end encrypted file
sharing with links that automatically expire. I went with Zeit
for this, but this wormhole app is pretty cool. Go.
Got a Ghidra MCP server that's better than a previous
(20:23):
one that came out. And yeah, you can go check
out the rest of the discover links in the newsletter. Okay.
This is the end of the standard edition of the podcast,
which includes just the news items for the week to
get the rest of the episode, which includes much more
of my analysis, the ideas section, and the weekly member essay.
(20:44):
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