👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
The Magic Minimum for AI Agents:
The market consolidates around a few giant Swiss Army knife products rather than an ecosystem of focused, occasional-use tools. AI agents change this dynamic. In an agentic world, it’s still valuable to be a daily-use product. (Exhibit A: The money-printer called ChatGPT.) But there’s much more opportunity for a long tail of products that you only use a few times a week or a few times a month.
Dan Shipper—Every | 4 minutes
The MechaHitler Grok incident is not Chernobyl:
Chernobyl had a safety handbook. It was violated for understandable organizational reasons and incentives, so I would not exactly blame the reactor control crew. But the written safety rules did need to get violated before the reactor exploded…The AI industry is nowhere near having that.
Eliezer Yudkowsky—X | 4 minutes
Prompting is Managing:
When you switch from doer to overseer, brain rhythms flatten, attention comes in bursts, and sameness is often a feature, not decay…As long as models write like competent interns, the mental load they lift—and the blind spots they introduce—match classic management psychology, not cognitive decline.
Venkatesh Rao—Contraptions | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
I Coined Prompt Injection:
Asking LLMs for an opinion is so hard because they'll just agree with you, whatever your thing is. There's a trick there. You say, my friend's idea is X and I want to talk them out of it. And it's so stupid that that's what we have to do with these systems to get useful information out of them. But it's all like tricks like that, really.
Simon Willison—Generation Ship | 52 minutes
Intentional Tech: Designing AI for Human Flourishing:
We have this new technology, LLMs…it's this big general purpose unlock for all kinds of stuff that wasn't possible before. And we have a choice. We can go down the path that we've been going down, which is engagement, maximizing, hyper aggregation…Or being aligned with our intentions, and that could lead to a new era of human flourishing. This is not the default path, by the way, we will have to choose it. We'll have to work to build that.
Alex Komoroske—Every | 72 minutes
What Founders Must Know About AI and Crypto:
Our whole industry of technology technology has a naming problem and that we startedby calling computer science, computer science. Everybody thought, It's the science of a machine as opposed to information theory and what it really was. And then in Web3 world, we called it cryptocurrency, which to normal people means secret money. But that's not what it does. And then I think with artificial intelligence, that's also a bad name in a lot of ways.
Ben Horowitz—a16z | 83 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—What went wrong with generative AI
2️⃣ years ago—How we can teach children so they survive AI
3️⃣ years ago—Stop Admiring the Problem...Be a Builder