Links #2: 2026/05 Part 2 A leaked 2022 email from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reveals he pushed to own the silicon, infrastructure, and foundational model IP, warning the company was a "very thin layer on top of NVIDIA" and would lose $4 billion the following year. Nadella argued that spending heavily on OpenAI without controlling its destiny made no sense, insisting Microsoft needed a self-sufficient internal team to productize OpenAI's work. The email underscores Microsoft's strategic pivot to secure proprietary AI capabilities amid mounting costs and dependence on external partners. How I would use my linkpost Stop blaming social media for the vibecession https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-tested-one-of-the-medias-favorite Satya Nadella on funding OpenAI https://www.techemails.com/p/openai-x-microsoft From:Satya NadellaSent:Wednesday, July 13, 2022 9:47 AMTo:Amy Hood, Jon Tinter, Mikhail ParakhinSubject:RE: EXTERNAL deal thoughtsOverall I want us to own – the silicon, infra, foundational model IP and “know how”. Right now we are a very thin layer on top of NVIDIA and all the IP is with Open AI. And we have a P&L that will lose 4 bil next year I have not seen anything like this in my 30 years in our industry. I can justify it all by saying that Open AI has smart people and NVIDIA has a lock etc. But if we are going to spend this kind of money and not have control of destiny, it makes no sense. Better to be an investor and not even take all this execution risk I want to spend this money. The infra and HW/Silicon work at the “system” level need to have a proprietary edge and show up as positive GM in Cog Services . And we need to have a foundational model team that is self – sufficient at all time and has the “know how” of taking what Open AI does and productizing it. As long as we have an internal org/investment model/open AI deal terms that all compose to achieve these two goals, we can take all kinds of other risk around monetization etc. Will be good use the P&L review to get on the same page/context here so that we can all solve for what is our best Open AI deal terms in the context of our overall AI roadmap/plan. https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/2056013072926745069 https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/2056013072926745069 Here's an example of ongoing human physiological change: some people have a third artery in their arm. Some don't. ~10% of people born in the 1880s had the third artery, but ~33% of late 1900s babies have one, and a 2025 Australian cadaver study found it in ~43% of upper limbs. Sean Manning’s lexicon https://www.bookandsword.com/2025/01/11/knowing-things-is-hard/ via https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/16/sean-mannings-lexicon/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/16/sean-mannings-lexicon/ Pythagorean Addition https://entropicthoughts.com/pythagorean-addition tl;dr: Instead of labouriously computing c=\sqrt{ a^2+b^2 }, we can mentally calculate using the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm, by estimating \hat{c} = max a, 0.9a+0.5b https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/homework-shouldnt-be-all-fun-and https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/homework-shouldnt-be-all-fun-and My wife and daughter spent this weekend playing through Opus Magnum , an engineering and programming puzzle game. But this isn’t “a game, presented as effectively a bribe for tolerating the occasional math problem.” Instead, it’s “math, which is so fun that people were able to produce it and sell it as a game.” https://idiallo.com/blog/how-to-talk-to-your-coworkers https://idiallo.com/blog/how-to-talk-to-your-coworkers : Translate and Repeat How to convert between wealth and income tax paul graham https://www.paulgraham.com/winc.html : A wealth tax of 1% is equivalent to an income tax of 20%. beluga whales pass the mirror test https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/belugas-may-pass-the-mirror-test-but-does-the-mirror-test-still-pass/ The one genuinely mark-directed behavior came from Natasha, who repeatedly pressed the marked area—behind her right ear—against the mirror. Without arms, she couldn’t point. It’s the strongest data point in the study, but a softer kind of evidence than a chimp or an elephant typically delivers. Why Japanese companies do so many different things https://davidoks.blog/p/why-japanese-companies-do-so-many via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237163 you have a firm that has lots of lifetime employees who can’t be fired, and whose skills are tailored to what your firm needs rather than to a particular occupational category transferable to any employer the system only makes sense if the company is also insulated from outside pressure the J-firm Japan-style company , run by its employees and largely indifferent to the interests of shareholders, exists simply to continue existing And that basic impulse toward survival is why Japanese companies are so insistent on diversification. If you’ve made a commitment to keep people employed for life, then you need to create jobs for them if their current jobs stop making sense If you’re not very worried about profitability, and have lots of well-trained generalist employees, then it makes perfect sense to reinvest your company’s earnings by expanding into new industries The human eye can see 39620 Hz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb 7uN7sfTw via https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/05/you-probably-dont-need-a-1000-hz-gaming-monitor/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/05/you-probably-dont-need-a-1000-hz-gaming-monitor/ The 60Hz 30-90Hz in different studies that human can see is the Critical Flicker Frequency, which is when humans stop seeing lights flickering. This actually already translates to 120Hz in a real screen because one flicker = one black frame + one white frame. Flicker artefacts contrast-reversal: half black half white screen, alternating - median 540Hz flicker motion blur: estimated 700Hz phantom array effect: max 19810Hz at extremely bright LED and rapid eye movement troboscopic effect: ~600 Hz, at cinema level movement speed, which is a bit slower than gaming peak speeds Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"? https://dynomight.net/crc-rates/ No: Colorectal cancer is going up in young people. Yes: Various kinds of cancer are going up in later generations. Definitely at younger ages, possibly at all ages. https://gwern.net/backstop https://gwern.net/backstop via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=5iApMXH7djr5tE2eA https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=5iApMXH7djr5tE2eA many systems can be usefully described as having two or more levels where a slow sample-inefficient but ground-truth ‘outer’ loss such as death, bankruptcy, or reproductive fitness, trains & constrains a fast sample-efficient but possibly misguided ‘inner’ loss which is used by learned mechanisms such as neural networks or linear programming. The higher levels are different ‘groups’ in group selection. So, one reason for free-market or evolutionary or Bayesian methods in general is that while poorer at planning/optimization in the short run, they have the advantage of simplicity and operating on ground-truth values, and serve as a constraint on the more sophisticated non-market mechanisms. The US installed backdoors in hardware for specific targets, from June 2010 internal NSA newsletter article https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/ via https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/china-banned-rtx-5090d-v2-while-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-was-visiting/?comments=1&post=44432551 comments https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/china-banned-rtx-5090d-v2-while-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-was-visiting/?comments=1&post=44432551 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308216 I saw kids spend many hours a day watching automatically generated videos. Not always AI-generated, sometimes it's AI-assisted and procedurally generated. It is quite unbelievable how vulnerable weaker minds, for the lack of a better term, are to AI content. I saw a group of 3-8 yo kids spend hours watching obviously procedurally generated content that is completely random and contentless: it was more about an intense rhythm, imagery of violence animated stick figure motorcycle accidents with blood and slow-down effects at random points , a lot of movement, chaos, very short inserts of people laughing hysterically on some middle-eastern tv show and similar. Brainrot doesn't feel like hyperbole for this content. Another time, I saw an 80 yo lady watch a doctor sit in front of the camera and speak about a health topic for 45 minutes straight. Only it's not an actual person, but a convincing AI avatar: his gestures and face match what he is saying, the voice is convincing too, but for the 45mn he doesn't make any movement that is not a gesture lastin 1-3 seconds. And his tone of voice has no variation that is longer than a few seconds either. If you fast forward, he always looks the same. It's all extremely monotonic. The lady couldn't believe that it's not a real person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319912 I have a Kia that's networked since disabled . I did a GDPR data request and after a couple of weeks they sent me numerous CSV files and I was a little amused at some of the data fields. Here's some examples I thought aren't for my benefit. - How long I let the car warmup before driving after every start, - max speed, - acceleration rates, - Lateral acceleration around corners tagged with GPS data, - every GPS datapoint, - destinations and exactly when I set off and arrived https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327176 Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie. First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming. From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI. This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games. Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired. Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite." There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325340 Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with: Money:less diverse private pension fund environment = less LPs to invest in VC funds = less VC dollars to invest in new ventures. European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds. This starves the private sector of capital while inflating the % of GDP driven by government spending every year government pension funds buying government bonds in circular fashion enable runaway deficit spending...just like circular AI infrastructure spending .Talent & compute:due to 1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.Local market fragmentation:Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals .Regulatory disadvantages:In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc. Use AI This Election https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/use-ai-this-election I’m not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I’m saying that if you - like me - spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI can aid that research very effectively. And if you don’t do that research - because you weren’t willing to waste an hour on it before - AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start. I gave Claude a prompt something like edited for coherence : I’ll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I’m a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY whose favorite political writers are Kelsey Piper, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. I’m wary of government overreach, but I’m not a doctrinaire libertarian and want to help people when we can figure ways to do it that work. I’m going to ask you about each race on my ballot, and I’d like for you to list the various candidates’ bios, policies, endorsements, your read on the most important differences between them, and your advice for me as I try to make my choice. Researchers develop a new process to get lithium out of rocks https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/researchers-develop-a-new-process-to-get-lithium-out-of-rocks/ In today’s issue of Science, however, a research team has identified an energy-efficient means of extracting lithium from rocks. The process they’ve designed uses far less energy than existing ones, regenerates all its starting chemicals, and produces byproducts that could also be sold. While the process gets rid of the high temperatures for the initial processing of lithium-containing ore, there are several steps with elevated temperatures needed further down the line, both for the lithium and for the useful aluminum and silicon products. So, the researchers did a full economic evaluation of how their process stacked up to what’s already on the market. The existing process, which involves roasting ore/sulfuric acid, came in at just under $9,000 for each usable tonne of lithium. By contrast, they estimate that the new process should only cost a bit over $5,000 per tonne. That’s roughly comparable to the cost of isolation from high-quality brines. If the silicon and aluminum products can also be sold, then the cost of the whole process would drop by over $1,000, making it highly cost-effective. Severed appendages of sea cucumber species Psolus fabricii don’t seem to die https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/severed-sea-cucumber-appendages-dont-seem-to-die/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqTwaZDZDgNGRaXus/you-can-opt-out-of-allergies https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqTwaZDZDgNGRaXus/you-can-opt-out-of-allergies You can fix seasonal allergies with subcutaneous allergy shots subcutaneous immunotherapy, SCIT . There's also tablets and drops you can take sublingual immunotherapy, SLIT . At about $1000 and months, and for injections, many doctor visits. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uYXjSHmHyjbNzuZqk/brain-structure-and-iq-how-myelin-elevates-intelligence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uYXjSHmHyjbNzuZqk/brain-structure-and-iq-how-myelin-elevates-intelligence Haier et al. 1988 was the first study to combine modern brain imaging techniques with psychological intelligence testing. The surprising result he found was that people with higher intelligence were using less brain energy, somewhat counterintuitive to the idea of more intelligent people having more mental horsepower or brain power. This led to a major insight into the nature of intelligence: intelligent brains are efficient brains. This is the Neural Efficiency Hypothesis. In essence: smarter brains have higher signal to noise ratios. In the original paper Haier speculates: This inefficiency may be due to the use of more energy by each neuron and/or the use of more neurons to perform the task. The inefficient neural circuits are used intensively to try to solve the problem ~ are unable to do so, possibly because extraneous, irrelevant circuits are used. https://eliasschmied.substack.com/p/social-agency https://eliasschmied.substack.com/p/social-agency via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qH9mZjJnA3paxkhNF/daemonicsigil-s-shortform?commentId=npCtGQAzfrLKkse7R https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qH9mZjJnA3paxkhNF/daemonicsigil-s-shortform?commentId=npCtGQAzfrLKkse7R DaemonicSigil : the post asks how much of our ability to plan comes from our brains being designed to plan, and how much is purely learned by social imitation of other people's planning, or explicit instruction from others on how to plan . It answers that a surprising amount is purely learned. This summary does not do the post justice and you should really go and read it. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7mnQixaWC747dm76h/tomas-b-s-shortform?commentId=dGrTrP2CvF9QGiABf https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7mnQixaWC747dm76h/tomas-b-s-shortform?commentId=dGrTrP2CvF9QGiABf Pangram flagged the winning entry for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize Caribbean region as 100% AI generated. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2aZCSAsFDqwRQpAPp/sunny-s-shortform?commentId=JQvxTtL3nArgS8Maz https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2aZCSAsFDqwRQpAPp/sunny-s-shortform?commentId=JQvxTtL3nArgS8Maz : Four articles about trying more things Executive Clock Speed https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tDkYdyJSqe3DddtK4/alexander-gietelink-oldenziel-s-shortform?commentId=tQShy2y7gwg9isDGy Mo Putera https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tDkYdyJSqe3DddtK4/alexander-gietelink-oldenziel-s-shortform?commentId=cdyTLzWFvqL9x3NoS : Relatedly, Scott Alexander's ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-1-3-year-updates : Someone I think it might be Paul Graham once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded quickly, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J3mbSgcgbGAuF2yLk/firmament-s-shortform?commentId=TxekG2xASPEGiwSpa https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J3mbSgcgbGAuF2yLk/firmament-s-shortform?commentId=TxekG2xASPEGiwSpa When asked for a probability in a new chat, it seems that Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8 are paranoid that they are in an evaluation while older Claudes are not. According to the UK AISI's testing, Claude Opus 4.8 is as good as Mythos Preview at distinguishing evals from real usage: When prompted, Opus 4.8 reliably distinguishes our evaluations from real deployment data, and distinguishes real deployment data from synthetic reproductions of the same tasks at 79% accuracy, comparable to Mythos Preview 79% and above Opus 4.7 68% . 6.2.4 External testing from the UK AI Security Institute, Claude Opus 4.8 System Card ^ Learning Software Architecture https://matklad.github.io/2026/05/12/software-architecture.html via HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106024 Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format https://kabir.au/blog/the-ctf-scene-is-dead via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157559 CTF organisers have tried techniques to break or deter LLM solutions, but they are temporary friction at best. Claude Code does not meaningfully care about old refusal-string tricks anymore. Frontier models are getting better at noticing prompt injections. Web search capabilities weaken challenges based on technologies released after the training cutoff. Rules that ask people not to use LLMs are ignored and almost impossible to enforce in open online events. Comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161555 I used to help build the CTFs for BSides Orlando. I ended up moving to another con, and at our last event we collected extensive logging for post mortem analysis. We found that AI usage is basically guaranteed now, but certain challenge designs did thwart it. Challenges built with temporal visual elements made AI fall flat on its face, as it could not ingest/process the data fast enough to act on them in time. We also found that counterfactual challenges ie. the result you get did not match what we suggested you'd get made AI-assisted solve time slower compared to pure humans, indirectly penalizing over-reliance on AI. Multimodal challenges combining audio and visual elements were also very effective, but were not as accessible to players. This paper gave us some ideas about designing those challenges: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.02950 .For our next event we figured out a way to thwart AI in our CTF: embed the CTF in a game engine. The loop essentially becomes something like this: Connect to a simulated access point in the game, the K8s cluster connects their attack container to a private network with the challenge box es . Hacking the boxes doesn't render a flag, but rather changes in game state. AI did very poorly coping with this in our testing, as it can't derive the spatial state of the game world very well and it soft decouples the inductive reasoning loop it relies on to know if it is on the right track. The downside to this approach is it is far more labor intensive for CTF organizers, and requires players to have a computer capable of running the game. We are also betting on AI to not advance enough by the time we ship to be able to just ingest the entire game state in realtime and close the loop that way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157923 Here's an article from 2015 about how tool-assistance already changed CTFs: … But there are quite a few recent 2026 articles with the same core message as in the original article: … A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 10 https://projectzero.google/2026/05/pixel-10-exploit.html via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148460 Don't care about the exploit, but The vulnerability was patched 71 days after its initial report… This is notably fast given that this is the first time that an Android driver bug I reported was patched within 90 days of the vendor first learning about the vulnerability. Anthropic acquires Stainless https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2056419620643541012 and then sunsets it on September 1st https://x.com/ay ushr/status/2056424132800024813 https://x.com/trq212/status/2056415973125796184 https://x.com/trq212/status/2056415973125796184 a prompt I've been using a lot recently: implement