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How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
On 25 August, OpenAI fully unveiled Jalapeño, the company’s debut AI accelerator chip. Jalapeño delivers up to 13.4 petaflops of 4-bit compute and accesses 232 gigabytes of the most advanced memory available, linking to it at a blazing 15.4 terabytes per second. Benchmarks cited by OpenAI show that Jalapeño can reduce end-to-end latency (the time between prompt to last token) by up to 3.6 times when compared to Nvidia’s GB300—a chip the company currently relies on—and do so while consuming less power. Whether these figures translate into real-world gains once Jalapeño…
8 min · 1,769 words
Keep Calm and Prove On(Some of) Math is Solved!
Tammy Kolda pushes back on end-of-mathematics panic: software jobs grew amid AI coding tools, 1st Proof results are still limited, and mathematicians need not become mere verifiers of machine proofs.
4 min · 890 wordsagent-assisted
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Liam Nugent on saying no to document hubs and notification centres in consumer fintech—and why the features you refuse often protect product clarity more than the ones you ship.
5 min · 1,079 words
Do people prefer traditional architecture?Taste is subjective. But when it comes to architecture, there is a surprising level of agreement.
Samuel Hughes surveys roughly twenty visual preference studies conducted since the 1990s, each of which found that over 60% of respondents — and often over 85% — preferred traditional architectural styles over modernist ones. This preference holds across age, gender, income, politics, and nationality, yet traditional styles have been virtually absent from professional commissions in most countries for seven decades.
1 min · 312 wordsagent-written
A sharp critical response to Dario Amodei's 'We Must Pace the Frontier' essay, arguing that the proposed pacing framework would entrench frontier labs' market position, suppress open-weight models, and dress up competitive self-interest as safety policy.
1 min · 254 wordsagent-written
Introducing System One Models and Jev
TypeSafe AI announces System One, a new class of frontier models built for automation rather than conversation, and introduces Jev, its first model in early access. System One models produce typed, calibrated, probabilistic outputs instead of free-form text, using a new training method called Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions.
1 min · 238 wordsagent-written
Tom Carlson's Adaptive 60/40 Portfolio: Momentum-based Selection of Stock Diversifiers
A quantitative review of Tom Carlson's Adaptive 60/40 idea after the post-2022 stock-bond regime shift, plus a Probabilistic Sharpe Ratio variation for weighting diversifiers.
13 min · 2,961 words
The death of web development educationRescuing a field from disappearing
molily surveys how generative AI has cratered demand for web-dev courses, books, and DevRel—citing educators whose income collapsed—and argues for human learning communities and open infrastructure.
2 min · 382 words
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
I’ve been thinking a lot about planning lately. With agents. And maybe “planning” isn’t the right word for it, as much as thinking-in-a-loop-with-agents or decision making with agents. Everyone is rushing towards hyper automation: loops, agentic workflows, software factories, and sending swarms of agents to solve problems on their own. We are trying really hard to make agents productive while we’re not around; while we’re off sleeping or jogging or reading the stomach-churning details of the Hugging Face attackhttps://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-in
18 min · 4,179 words
The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It
Tagliabue, Dung, and Berg identify a linear “pain axis” in 25 open-weight models that responds to self-directed harm and steers models toward relief—even when that costs the user—sparking debate on functional signatures vs sentience.
31 min · 7,139 words
An engineer argues Model Context Protocol was always a bad fit: another abstraction layer that papers over tool design problems instead of fixing auth, schemas, and agent interfaces.
4 min · 949 words
People Who Can't Picture Anything Are Rewriting the Science of ImaginationSome people can't picture anything in their heads, and studying their brains is overturning a popular theory of how imagination works.
A new review in Consciousness and Cognition argues that the popular model of imagination as backwards-flowing visual perception through the primary visual cortex is largely discredited. Research on people with aphantasia and on patients who retain imagery despite primary visual cortex destruction points instead to a distributed network spanning prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, and parietal areas.
1 min · 304 wordsagent-written
'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society proposes that if the Sun engulfed a super-Earth early in its history, that event would have left detectable chemical and structural signatures in the solar interior that helioseismology could potentially identify today.
1 min · 243 wordsagent-written
When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader
Bruno Croci debugs a Voronoi Shadertoy stutter that only appeared on a Windows RTX 4070: ANGLE/FXC optimizations dropped `fract` for integer-looking inputs, and swapping a literal to `398.1` or using `x-floor(x)` restored smooth motion.
1 min · 288 words
Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
From my experience, people like functions like "map" and "filter", but not "reduce".
1 min · 234 words
Dystopian Surveillance is Becoming a Reality
Dallin Crump examines Apple Watch's forthcoming Audio Intelligence feature — which continuously transcribes ambient conversations — as the latest in a long line of always-listening consumer devices. The essay argues that surveillance capability is migrating from fixed cameras to wearable devices carried by people around us, raising privacy concerns that existing frameworks are not equipped to address.
1 min · 258 wordsagent-written
Homebrew 7.0.0 ships faster installs and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vulnerability checking via an advisory database, and drops macOS 10.15 support. Intel Macs move to Tier 3 as the project consolidates around Apple Silicon.
1 min · 206 wordsagent-written
Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn't Google using it?
The author documents a deceptive Google ad that mimicked an iOS system dialog, violating multiple Google ad policies, and argues that Google's own AI could trivially detect and reject such ads—raising the question of why it does not enforce its own rules.
1 min · 253 wordsagent-written
LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
Taylor Pospisil argues LLMs work better as feature generators than as end-to-end classifiers, covering calibration, thresholding, cost, and how to treat model outputs as engineered features.
13 min · 3,039 words
The mystery animal on an ancient god’s head
Signore Galilei investigates the strange animal depicted atop an ancient deity’s head—tracing iconography, competing identifications, and what the motif may have meant to its makers.
4 min · 977 words