Not sure how many people would be interested in this, but it was fun to make so I thought I’d share. This is a Discord bot that provides real-time stock and cryptocurrency information, 30-day price trends, and AI-powered news summaries through slash commands. When you add the bot to Discord you can use the /stock and /crypto commands to get information like this:
Want to add it to your Discord server? Head over here!
This is an essay I think everyone should read, front to back. It’s about all the things we are living through right now, but it’s especially about work (and AI):
I’m not sure hiring can ever be much more efficient, because neither side has reason to show themselves as they really are, warts and all. Idealistically, both would come straight; pragmatically, it is a game of chicken. Candidates polish résumés and present curated versions of their abilities, listing outcomes and impact statistics with dubious accuracy and provenance. Companies do the same, putting culture and mission front and center while hiding systematic dysfunctions and looming existential risks. When neither side is forthcoming, you’re left with proxies: a famous logo on a resume, a polished culture deck.
Source: Selling Lemons →
Wild story:
Multiple people we spoke to for this story lamented feeling “ganged up on” as a partner used chatbot outputs against them during arguments or moments of marital crisis. One of these sources, a man who’s now in the process of selling his home as he and his spouse barrel toward divorce, recounted feeling voiceless as his partner turned to ChatGPT to pathologize their relationship. “I was really hurt by the way [ChatGPT] was being used against me,” said the man, speaking through tears. “I felt like it was being leveraged… like, ‘I didn’t feel great about whatever happened, and so I went to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT said that you’re not a supportive partner, and this is what a supporting partner would do.’”
I think we have to realize that non-tech people don’t have a good understanding of the sycophantic nature of LLM bots, so we’ll see more and more examples like this.
Source: ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce →
(Mild spoilers ahead for The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler)
I recently finished the novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (see Andrew Liptak’s excellent review here). On the surface it’s about discovering an octopus colony that evolved into a self-aware, intelligent community—and trying to communicate with them. But as with all good novels it’s actually about other things. It’s about loneliness, understanding each other, conservation—and yes, our relationship with AI.
First, to get the AI thing out of the way… I don’t want this blog to sound like I am anti-AI. I use AI every day both at the chat / thinking partner level and the prototyping / vibe coding level. I am a fan of using AI for the things that it’s good at. I just worry that we are not teaching people outside of the tech bubble what those things are. And that’s why we are seeing so many tragic stories right now about chat agents “guiding” people to horrific actions (see, for example, Let’s Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis and ‘I Feel Like I’m Going Crazy’: ChatGPT Fuels Delusional Spirals).
With that as background, the book does a good job of highlighting some of the dangers of using AI for things it’s not good at. First, this is a good point about how with every new technology we have to think about what can go wrong, not just what can go right:
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.[1]
Following from that, this quote about the main character “killing” their AI companion stood out to me…
That’s how this works. That’s how addictive this is—this need to feel like there is always someone there, unconditionally. Someone to talk to. Someone who understands. To not have to do the work myself to make myself understood. Instead, I just kept on with this self-deception, pretending I had someone when I did not. I know the doctors who prescribed you to me meant well. They thought they were helping me through a dark time. But in the end, you aren’t anything but a prosthesis. You can’t replace real support.
The other major theme in the book centers around our connectedness with each other and the world, how language can get in the way of connection, and how lonely we’ve become as a society[2]. I love this call to empathy as a way to get ourselves out of that dilemma (emphasis mine):
Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.
A book about discovering intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture might seem like a weird premise. But it works really well here. It gets pretty heavy-handed towards the end, but it still made me think a lot about the “loneliness epidemic”, our relationship with AI, and the continuing role of empathy in making sure we stay connected with each other. Recommended!
This line of thinking reminds me a lot of Kevin Kelly’s 2010 (!) book What Technology Wants in which he makes a similar point that technology is never “neutral”. That’s ok, but we have to be prepared for it. ↩
I don’t think that’s a controversial statement any more. See articles like The Anti-Social Century ↩
Here’s Leah Tharin with a good reminder of what it means to ship, and how AI can (and cannot) help. In short, building is only one part of creating valuable products. Shipping involves:
- Ideation: There’s an idea
- Development: You build the idea
- Validation: You validate whether what you think the idea does is actually happening
Yes, vibe coding tools like Lovable et al. help you to ship things faster, but only as long as these ideas struggle with the “development” part and don’t need Ideation and Validation.
Source: AI’s “Just Ship it.” problem →
This is some really interesting data.
In a new paper, several Stanford economists studied payroll data from the private company ADP, which covers millions of workers, through mid-2025. They found that young workers aged 22-25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT. Notably, the economists found that older workers and less-exposed jobs, such as home health aides, saw steady or rising employment. “There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote the paper with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, told the Wall Street Journal.
Source: The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger →
I almost skipped this Michael Lopp piece, but I’m glad I didn’t. It’s one of his best in a long time, especially if you’re a manager. Reframing the act of working with AI as “making the robots dance” is so good. But there’s more to it than that. Just read it, ok?
Robots don’t lie. Lying requires intent to deceive, and when a robot provides you with plausible-sounding, but incorrect statements, it’s either following its programming or making an error. Or both. Humans lie. They boast, they are tragically optimistic, they exaggerate, they forget, I could go on for a long, long while. It’s a list of foibles that make them familiar… that makes them human. What do I do as a leader to work with these troublesome humans? Well, here’s a short, essential list:
- I speak clearly and specifically, so my intent is clear.
- I frame conversations with context so everyone understands my ideas.
- I understand errors are part of the process and work to build tools to prevent them.
- I debate and plan big ideas before I begin.
Source: Every Single Human. Like. Always. →
This is some fascinating research.
Researchers at Oxford University and King’s College London tested LLMs using game theory, giving LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic prompts that mimicked the setup of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma.
They found that Google’s Gemini is “strategically ruthless,” while OpenAI is collaborative to a “catastrophic” degree. Their paper, published on the preprint repository Arxiv (and not yet peer reviewed), claims that this is due to OpenAI model’s fatal disinterest in a key factor: how much time there is left to play the game.
Source: Gemini Is ‘Strict and Punitive’ While ChatGPT Is ‘Catastrophically’ Cooperative, Researchers Say →
Don’t let the clickbait title put you off. Related to my link about AI killing jobs in tech, here Cal Newport produces some compelling “both sides” receipts about how AI is helping + hurting software development. His conclusions are solid:
My advice, for the moment:
- Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.
- Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing.
- Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they’re saying.
AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.
Source: No One Knows Anything About AI →
I think we’ve all seen the internal Shopify memo on requiring teams to use AI. This is a great article on what happened next. I especially love the internal tools Shopify built to make adoption easier:
Employees can use the LLM proxy to build the workflows they need. They can select from different models, which are updated with the latest versions as soon as they’re released. There’s a collection of MCPs, and all it takes is asking the proxy (or another tool like Cursor) to access them. There’s even a stable of agents already created by other people for anyone to use. It’s a one-stop shop for everything someone needs to use AI.
Source: From Memo to Movement: Shopify’s Cultural Adoption of AI →