650: Revenge of the Blue Collars, Tokenmaxxing is Out, GPT-5.6 Cuts Its Own Costs, Why Slower Memory Was 3.45× Faster, Groq's Return on Luck, Google’s AlphaFold Brain Drain, and IMAX Archeology
"babies driving trucks"
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
—Linus Pauling
🏋️♂️ At the beginning of June, I told you that I was disappointed by how little I had been working out in May, and that I would make an effort to turn it around in June.
I didn’t forget! I was just slow to tell you. 🐌
June was much better, not quite matching the volume of July 2025, but close. Public commitment worked! (If you’re curious, the app I used to track things is Hevy)
🦺 Speaking of exercise, my son prefers bodyweight exercises to using weights. He starts most mornings with push-ups, pull-ups, and squats.
He’s recently also started doing muscle-ups and pullovers at the park (because the bars we have at home don’t have the clearance above to allow it). He’s been training a lot more this summer, and when he told me he’d done hundreds of pull-ups that day, I suggested a weighted vest so he could make the same exercises harder without needing so much volume.
He loved the idea.
After some research, we ordered this one. The first few days after we got it in the mail, I thought he was going to sleep with it! He now uses it for a lot of his training.
🧠🥣 Humans make plenty of slop too. AI slop gets all the attention because it’s new, but most ‘content’ has been slop for a long time.
The same aunts and uncles forwarding you AI-made videos of cats moonwalking and babies driving trucks also loved plenty of pre-AI garbage.
I suspect that AI didn’t lower their standards.
To be clear, past a certain scale, sheer quantity can become qualitative. You can create superstimuli with new technology. Give a candy bar and a cheeseburger to a caveman and see what happens. It’s true that AI can make slop cheaper, more plentiful, and more addictive.
I just don’t think the divide between soulful human creations and soulless AI garbage is as black and white as some people claim. ☯︎
💔 I miss Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. They were a very interesting part of the public AI conversation, but they’ve mostly been radio silent since they joined Meta.
💚 🥃 The paid subscription includes the full feed, every podcast, Zoom Q&As with me, and access to the private Discord clubhouse, where a core group of us hang out and discuss the interesting stuff we find:
🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴
🧰👨🔧 Revenge of the Blue Collars 🧑🏭🛠️
As software engineers worry that AI is coming for their jobs, the same AI is a big customer for many types of scarce physical labor (at least until the robots come 😅).
The bits are sexy, but they run on concrete, copper, and overtime! 🏗️🏗️👷♂️
