Today
- Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery. In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious. First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”:...
- I’m Robin Sloan, a writer, printer, & manufacturer. The best thing to do here is sign up for my email newsletter: This website doesn’t collect any information about you or your reading. It aspires to the speed and privacy of the printed page. Don’t miss the colophon. Hony...
- When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to some people, but it’s actually a…
- Agents are great at producing code. The valuable work left for you is deciding what should exist, how it should behave, and what you're willing to trade for it....
Yesterday
- After a GPU shortage and memory shortage driven by AI companies, we’re now experiencing a CPU shortage, thanks to AI agents using a lot more CPU with tool usage....
- Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS lets you replicate your own voice or design one from a sentence, then direct delivery line by line....
- If I’ve been missing from the internet it’s because I’ve been spending my evenings grinding on a game from Butterscotch Shenanigans called How Many Dudes? Hot off the heels of the release of their massive multi-year sequel project Crashlands 2, the family+ operation at BS turned...
- Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried about isn’t a future machine deciding to wipe us out. It’s today’s AI, being wired into everything, carelessly and fast. Cyber attacks...
- Human collaboration, like most things, improves with feedback. But it's not obvious how to make feedback effective. Anuja Karnik and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe pass on a bevy of tips for healthy feedback, based on the principle that both praise and criticism should be seen as...
- No, Transformers Won't End the Human Race lol In 2022, I used to get calls from journalists asking, with great sincerity, what our lives would look like in the metaverse. How would we work, socialise, buy property, and fall in love once we had all moved there? The crypto...
- I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber. They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite...
This week
- Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it...
- Jev is a useful zero-shot classifier, but its probabilities can't be calibrated for your data. Calibration depends on your data distribution, which Jev never sees, so treat its outputs as scores and recalibrate them on your own labeled examples.
- You could summarize 33% of my career over the last 2.5 years as “classifying queries with LLMs.” I teach a whole course on it . So, I took jev out on a query classification test drive. What am I classifying, exactly? The Wayfair WANDS dataset has labeled query-document pairs....
- Blog About Moonbound This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. September 23, 2026 I found David Cheng’s thoughts about his recent China trip fascinating — textured and surprising. These two linked...
- Yesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It’s …
- 22 Sep, 2026 Books I grew up in a house stuffed full of books, with no television, and electricity for only an hour or two per day (while the generator was running). There were shelves full of old science fiction (Asimov and Heinlein), as well as books on history, some good old...
- I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on...
- Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev, their first example of a new category of model that they are calling “System One models” (I’m with Maggie Appleton, I think “decision models” …
- September 20, 2026 In my last post, I talked about the fun of making native macOS apps with AI agents. I have made a few macOS apps before, all on my own, but I found the process very taxing; I simply don’t know the idiom. But, I love a good, simple, fast desktop app! So this...
- John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone X iPhone 12 Mini iPod Touch Notes: How do you not put the OG iPhone at the top spot?...
- I wrote previously about upcoming design changes to Apple’s 27 series of OSs, but I didn’t run any of the betas myself. From afar, the changes all looked great to me. After having installed the updates at launch on Monday, I’m very happy with just about every visual tweak. But,...
- I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. — Jacob...
- “System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958, but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a…
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