Replace grades with kindergarten-style smiley stickers and you don’t eliminate credentials. You create a vacuum. That vacuum won’t be filled by thoughtful companies designing bespoke, rigorous assessment systems. It will be filled by “ed-tech” startups, racing to be unicorns as quickly as possible. An attempt to make education less credential-driven could end up creating an even more opaque, arbitrary, and less reliable credentialing system, that, ironically, adds to the burden on students. We will end up with something considerably worse than the status quo.

The secret to getting off of calls you don't want to be on is to hang up in the middle of your own sentence. Only a maniac would hang up on themselves, so you must have gotten disconnected.

BREAKING: OpenAI has hired an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users' chats, per 404Media

Anthropic's new threat report reveals that a cell in northern Yemen (highly likely Houthi-linked) used Claude Code as a substitute for an entire missile engineering team. They ran multiple Claude instances simultaneously — one writing code, one researching, one reviewing — to develop guidance software for a tactical guided rocket, a 2,000+ km ballistic missile, and a hypersonic glide vehicle variant called "R2000." The specific tasks: integrating open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing navigation and control software, running six-degree-of-freedom trajectory simulations, and using reinforcement learning to tune flight-control algorithms. They compiled everything into a standalone offline executable so they could keep working without Claude. They actually test-fired a guided rocket in Yemen. It appears to have failed. Within hours they were back in Claude doing post-test failure analysis on the telemetry data. Anthropic's safeguards blocked many requests but the operators evaded them by hiding the end use, splitting work across many sessions, and using other workarounds. Linked accounts were banned. Anthropic says there's no evidence they fielded an operational weapon — but they already had an offline toolkit that no longer needed Claude. This is one of six conventional-weapons cases in the report (three China, two Russia, one Yemen), alongside cyber ops, influence campaigns, a Mali-linked mass surveillance platform, bio-misuse attempts, and Chinese labs illegally distilling Claude.

A peak, a fountain, a whirlpool, a dimple: four faces of one symbol. ∇f = ∂f/∂x x̂ + ∂f/∂y ŷ + ∂f/∂z ẑ steepest rise ∇·v = ∂vx/∂x + ∂vy/∂y + ∂vz/∂z net outflow ∇×v local swirl of a vector field ∇²f = ∂²f/∂x² + ∂²f/∂y² + ∂²f/∂z² net curvature They become Maxwell’s equations, the heat equation, and fluid flow. ∇ is how space itself is differentiated.

The chip journey, simplified.

one of the strangest things about moving from sf to new york was realizing how little new york gives a fuck about whether what you’re doing is actually important i lived in sf for four years. people were building an ai scheduling app in rooms surrounded by people dressed like they had just lost a fight with a laundry basket new york is almost the opposite you can spend an entire day moving icons around in powerpoint, but if you do it forty floors above manhattan, wear the right jacket, and have dinner somewhere impossible to book, nobody really cares what the powerpoint was about the actual economic activity may be negligible, but phenomenologically you are inside the late roman empire the west village is full of people whose primary productive activity is having extremely specific preferences about lamps the city is not especially interested in the distinction between substance and spectacle i've been to parties where almost nobody had built anything used by millions of people, but everyone behaved as though they had personally resolved the crisis of modernity in sf, someone will casually mention they built the database underlying half the internet and then ask if you want to split an uber in new york, someone runs a substack with 3,800 subscribers and enters the room like hegels spirit has finally become conscious of itself this is not criticism. quite the opposite new york understands something sf does not: no one gives a fuck importance is not an intrinsic property. it is produced through ritual, architecture, clothing, proximity, lighting, reservations, and a sufficiently difficult door policy sf still clings to the naive enlightenment belief that value should correspond to some underlying productive reality. very protestant. very embarrassing new york on the other hand, does not gve a fuck a 26-year-old wearing margiela tabi boots and saying "we're thinking about doing something in media" has already achieved symbolic capital equivalent to a series b sf still wants to know whether something is important new york doesn’t give a fuck it just wants to know if it’s interesting

If you write a public piece with AI, you should disclose that in the first sentence: “AI wrote this for me.” unforgivable for a public figure to publish an AI-written piece without a clear disclosure in the first sentence. 🤦 Undermines the entire premise of publishing a thought piece, because we can’t tell what’s yours and what’s the magic black boxes’ thoughts. Proofreading and research? Sure, have at it. More from NOTUS: “Pangram, an AI detection tool, found that Druckenmiller’s op-ed had been written using artificial intelligence, according to multiple social media posts. In an interview with NOTUS, Druckenmiller said “of course I used AI” when writing the column, and argued he didn’t see a problem with doing so. “There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major,” Druckenmiller said. “I’m not embarrassed by it … I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”

The best career advice for young people is to just focus relentlessly on 3 things: 1. Get skilled. Technical skills, writing skills, people-orchestration skills, everything. 2. Get involved contributing to a mission you're aligned with. It doesn't have to be pure bliss and your contribution doesn't have to match your top strengths exactly. But at the end of the day you have to feel some pride in what you did or what you learned. If you can find something like that while becoming skilled in a number of different ways then you'll find ways to increasingly wrap your skill profile around it (and you'll find/develop strengths in your skill profile that you never expected). 3. Pick up momentum. If you do (1) and (2) right then you've got direction and potential and all that's left is to sprint forwards and achieve it. The more momentum you pick up, the better you get, the more real value you produce, the more opportunities you create, the more you get noticed, the more value you capture into your own life, the more effort you want to put in... you create a virtuous cycle with so much momentum behind it that it becomes an unstoppable virtuous cyclone.

We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis. It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%. anthropic.com/research/riema…