The mirage of visual understanding in current frontier models

When a model achieves a “top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images” you know something is deeply wrong.

We’re all living in the “Mirror World” now ⊗ The AI boom is a polycrisis

No.396 — Tough week for Zuck ⊗ Learning in Motion ⊗ The people pushing back on AI ⊗ A wind-powered tumbleweed ⊗ Books, plants and playgrounds

Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?

Once upon a time, self-hosting used to be a cost-effective thing. Is it still a good option for fending off SaaS as the prices keep creeping up? Today in Tedium: It’s a tough time to be a financially

An appreciation for (technical) architecture

Once upon a time I kept on meeting architects who had ended up working with the web. I asked why. Some good answers: Architects think about how people move between spaces (pages) and what that means f

The Faithful Channel

A translator maintaining a shadow bridge between superpowers discovers something she cannot unsee.

Weekly Top Picks #117

OpenAI's main quest / Anthropic Trumps the DoD / The worst sales pitch ever/ ARC-AGI 3, Spud, and Mythos / The tragedy of AI writing / This is a disaster, so have fun

An Intention Upgrade

By ditching the Mac Pro so close to its 50th anniversary, Apple is making a statement of intent for its next 50 years. A mere six days before the 50th anniversary of Apple, the company quietly did so

🍪 TWiC: TurboQuant, AGI CPU, GF Sues Tower, CPU Price Hikes, 400G SiPho, AAOI, ++

What's your Weissman score?

It’s AI, so I Didn’t Read

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new hot term: AI;DR

Dragoncatcher: Cosleuth

TurboQuant: Inner Workings and Implications

Google's year old research resurfaced in a recent blog post and spooked memory investors.

War and AI, the death of Sora, and 3 ways you can catch me live today

With apologies for the short notice, a few quick announcements:

Grating Coupled COUPE for CPO, and Himax's Fragile FAU Moat

An engineering deep dive into TSMC's COUPE optical engine, explaining why the co-design position of Himax makes them critical near-term suppliers for NVIDIA’s CPO, but without a long-term moat.

How Tech Changed Chess

And why AI won’t end our games

Dragoncatcher: Elemental content

Pluralistic: The cost of doing business (25 Mar 2026)

Today's links The cost of doing business: "Market definition" is a denial-of-service attack on antitrust law. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Union Pacific v model railroad

Pluralistic: Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets" (24 Mar 2026)

Today's links Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the

Good trains

"Gooning Towards the Führer" as policy coordination

The Trumpist administrative style

🌻 why LLMs are bad writers but good editors

my new Atlantic essay + Claude editor setup

The One Thing I Use AI For That Actually Makes Me Smarter

Nobody’s doing this

The Pancake Discussion

When every discussion feels flat, how do you fluff it up? The answer, to me, is to eat fewer pancakes. Pancakes are not my favorite thing to make. They require me to make a messy, gloppy mixture of w

Import AI 450: China’s electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. A somewhat shorter issue than usual as I had t

Pluralistic: Understaffing as a form of enshittification (23 Mar 2026)

Today's links Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marvel v "

pbump.net on The Erosion of Democracy

Visualizing the erosion of American democracy The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg has done this measurement for more than a decade, establishing a consistent metric

404 Media on RIP Metaverse

RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is

Podcast Recommendations

Let's talk podcasts! Here are some of my favorites: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs (music history) - About once a month or so, Andrew Hickey tells a documentary style story of a famous roc

Habermas and his coffeehouses ⊗ The case for radical solar optimism

No.395 — Possibilities literacy ⊗ Proof ⊗ Energy falling below $100 ⊗ Roots and the meaning of life

Yellow-breeched philosophy, or writing like a humble bee

AI Log reviews The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

🍪 TWiC: MU HBM4, OCI MSA, Credo Optics, VCSEL Scale-Up, DGX GB300, NBIS $27B

Hot takes from the AI oven.

Filtered for home security

1. The Amazon Ring Always Home Cam is an indoor security drone for your home. Introduced with this video in 2020: "Yeah, it’s a camera that flies." Sadly not yet on the market. Ok Judge Dredd had Spy-

OpenAI’s Dead

An obituary

A Government Guide to Open Protocols

Public sector teams must go beyond the in-house or off-the-shelf dichotomy to take advantage of open protocols, which offer a unique way to manage both software costs and geopolitical exposure

Hubris

The Lore of the World

Pluralistic: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (19 Mar 2026)

Today's links Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object perman

Beyond GTC: A Deep Dive into Compute, LPX, and the Untold Story of SpecDec

Analyzing the CPU, GPU, and LPU chip ratios unveiled at the Nvidia GTC keynote, the impact of the Groq LPX chip on disaggregated decoding, and its potential for speculative decoding in AI inference

How to Survive the AI Age: A Concrete Guide

Let’s fix this annoying anxiety once and for all

Pluralistic: William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher (17 Mar 2026)

Today's links William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher: The Street Finds Its Own Alternatives For Things. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Prison for spamming; Dotcom layoffs; Et

The past and future of AI standards

Lessons from history

Bloomberg on Battery Prices

Energy Falling Below $100 Shows the World a Way Out Lithium-ion battery prices don’t get constantly discussed the way crude is, but these declines add up to a decisive shift that will determine t