Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well. Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sponsors Gemini 3 is the first model I’ve used that can find connections I haven’t anticipated. I…

Photo: Koch Films Is it true that you were thinking of quitting acting before you got the call from director Joachim Trier? Yes, literally the day after I made my decision! It was so strange. I had a big lying in bed moment followed by the release of “OK, I’m done. I’m not going to do this anymore”.…

Even before Covid hit, Nicolette Ross, now 40, was contemplating a move. She was part of a community of artists and entrepreneurs in Chicago—she managed a printmaking studio and freelanced as a printmaker and custom binder—for a decade. But in 2020, because of Covid social isolation, Ross and her…

REVIEW ESSAY Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang W.W. Norton, 2025, 304 pages What forces created such an awe-inspiring material civilization? What administrative and intellectual systems created the conditions for this development? Is such an [end-state] the result of…

Photo by Richard Jaimes on Unsplash Attraction is mostly physical. We’re told by scientific studies, and an impressive amount of research, that body shapes signalling fertility, symmetrical faces, and clear skin are all signs of human attractiveness. We tell women to wear red lipstick. We tell men…

Published: November 24, 2025 This is Part 3 of Modern JavaScript for Django Developers. Welcome to Part 3! In case you missed it—in Part 1 we covered how to organize a JavaScript codebase inside a Django project, and in Part 2 we provided a crash course in JavaScript tooling. And now we finally…

Over the past year, I’ve had many disquieting realizations — that the American voter is more forgiving of insurrections than inflation, that being 37 means having one bad knee (and another not particularly good one), and that the New York Mets made a pact with Satan in the fall of 1986, for which…

I’m excited to publish this post co-authored with Timothy Lee, one of my favorite writers on technology and artificial intelligence. His Substack Understanding AI is a fantastic guide to how AI works as a technology and a business. Photo by Gertrūda Valasevičiūtė on Unsplash In the last few weeks,…

Our newest model, Claude Opus 4.5, is available today. It’s intelligent, efficient, and the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use. It’s also meaningfully better at everyday tasks like deep research and working with slides and spreadsheets. Opus 4.5 is a step forward in what AI…

Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain–computer interface…

The Android operating system is incredibly versatile. Beyond smartphones, it officially powers tablets, watches, TVs, cars, and XR headsets. However, it has virtually no presence on traditional PCs, where Google instead relies on ChromeOS. Despite Google’s efforts to challenge the dominance of…

I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model. It is very good. But rather than give you benchmark numbers, I’m going to show you how far AI has come in three years by asking the AI to demonstrate it. It has been slightly less than three years since the release of ChatGPT. A few days before that…

Issues involving the care of vulnerable people are some of the few issues that still resonate across the political spectrum. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned to victory on universal child care, among other affordability concerns. On the campaign trail in 2024, President Donald Trump’s…

Anthropic released its most capable artificial intelligence model yet on Monday, slashing prices by roughly two-thirds while claiming state-of-the-art performance on software engineering tasks — a strategic move that intensifies the AI startup's competition with deep-pocketed rivals OpenAI and…

We’re going to largely skip markets again, because the sweater is rapidly unraveling in other areas as I pull on threads. Suffice it to say that the market is LARGELY unfolding as I had expected — credit stress is rising, particularly in the tech sector. Many are now pointing to the rising CDS for…

Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult 24th November 2025 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call “best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use”. This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant…

Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets is often cited, perhaps apocryphally, as having said that there are four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. Japan, an island lacking natural resources and defeated in war, had every reason to be underdeveloped. Argentina,…

The future of AI agents is one where models work seamlessly across hundreds or thousands of tools. An IDE assistant that integrates git operations, file manipulation, package managers, testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines. An operations coordinator that connects Slack, GitHub, Google Drive,…

The PivotNine Blog 19 September 2025 Justin Warren Blog NPM FOSS npm open source parasocial xz It is a remarkable triumph of free and open source software (FOSS) that it is so useful and so reliable that it has become ubiquitous. So reliable, in fact, that organisations of all shapes and sizes have…

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people’s beds. A little…

There have been a few discussions about what Flathub should do to push developers to maintain their apps on the latest versions of the published runtimes. But most of those lack important details around how this would actually happen. I will not discuss in this post the technical means that are…

Five months ago, my lifelong profession of software development changed completely. My profession was born in the 1940s, created to help fight demons. Our first encounter with the strange new angels of agentic AI is changing every aspect of it. Hardly anyone has noticed yet. The Profession Built on…

SSDs have all but replaced hard drives when it comes to primary storage. They're orders of magnitude faster, more convenient, and consume less power than mechanical hard drives. That said, if you're also using SSDs for cold storage, expecting the drives lying in your drawer to work perfectly after…

Determinism is a key concept to understand when writing code using durable execution frameworks such as Temporal, Restate, DBOS, and Resonate. If you read the docs you see that some parts of your code must be deterministic while other parts do not have to be. This can be confusing to a developer new…

Home Health Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Tal Sharf’s lab used organoids to make fundamental discoveries about human brain development. November 24, 2025 Tal Sharf (right, senior author), Tjiste van der Molen (middle, postdoctoral researcher), and Greg Kaurala (left, staff…

Google has resumed work on JPEG XL in Chromium, but there is no timeline for Chrome release News Venkat Tech Journalist News 2 min. read Nov 22nd, 2025 3:41 PM EEST XINSTALL BY CLICKING THE DOWNLOAD FILE A message from our partner Fix Windows 11 OS errors with Fortect: Download Fortect and install…

Japan's high-stakes gamble to turn island of flowers into global chip hub 50 minutes ago Suranjana TewariAsia business correspondent, Hokkaido, Japan Getty Images Hokkaido is a tourism and agricultural region, but Rapidus is making chips there too The island of Hokkaido has long been an agricultural…

This essay is half of a 2-part series about ego, empathy, and humility for developers and technical leaders. For advice on how to execute the ideas in this essay, you might also enjoy My Working Principles For Managing Ego, Empathy, And Humility. In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious…

I know, this title might come as a surprise to many. Or perhaps, for those who truly know me, it won’t. I am not a fanboy. The BSDs and the illumos distributions generally follow an approach to design and development that aligns more closely with the way I think, not to mention the wonderful…

I haven't done a full-system backup since back in the olden days before Dropbox and Git. Every machine I now own is treated as a stateless, disposable unit that can be stolen, lost, or corrupted without consequences. The combination of full-disk encryption and distributed copies of all important…

Remember when you thought age verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond are about to blow you away. It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians…

Here is an exuberant, garrulous, self-aware picture about an ageing and egomaniac film director and his two grownup daughters; it comes from Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, who gave Cannes the marvellous romantic drama The Worst Person in the World in 2021, starring the award-winning Renate…

See all topics Email Link Copied! In taking on the role of a filmmaker in his latest movie, Stellan Skarsgård sniffed a chance at payback. “I mean, what an opportunity for revenge,” the Swedish actor said, his eyes lighting up. Sprinkle an idiosyncrasy here, a mannerism there, soaked up from seven…

Graph showing unequal income growth Global changes in real income by income percentile - v1 The Elephant Curve, also known as the Lakner-Milanovic graph or the global growth incidence curve, is a graph that illustrates the unequal distribution of income growth for individuals belonging to different…

As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their…

Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. Fraudulent voting rings circumvented our algorithms, selling access to our front page, and threatening our lives over modifications…