UPDATES
Hey! Hope you all are doing well!
A few personal updates:
I feel extremely privileged to look forward to Mondays. And I see it as a core part of my mission to get as many people as possible to that state. It’s a powerful heuristic.
My girl and I just crossed 32 years together! Since we were teenagers! Love her so much, and our relationship is better than it’s ever been. Feel extremely blessed to have someone to go through all this chaos with.
Ok, major news: I’m so pleased to finally announce general availability of Surface!
Introducing Surface: Get an Unfair Advantage via Merit-based Content Discovery
Surface is my updated personal system for content discovery across the internet (it’s my replacement for Threshold). It works by following over 4,000 of the best sources across outlets, aggregators, and individual thinkers, and objectively rating their content on a 1-100 scale.
This means (depending on where you set your quality level) you’ll see brilliant content from unknown/lesser-known sources but you won’t see mediocre content from famous people.
Using this app means you avoid two failure modes none of us can afford anymore:
You spend hundreds of hours finding this content yourself
You never get to benefit from the best content out there
More than any time in history, it’s important to have access to the best ideas in the world to give yourself an advantage. That’s why I built Surface and use it every day.
UL Members get 25% off (get the code in UL Chat).
And due to Threshold being unmaintained for so long, anyone who bought Threshold in the past is getting a free year of Surface for free (check your email) Thank you for your patience! 🫶🏼
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My Slides from the [un]prompted Conference:
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If you’re doing anything with AI, and especially if you’re building with it, read this post and let it soak into your bones. People who do this well will be FAR more effective.
TL;DR: Don’t tell AI how to do things anymore; instead tell them what outcome you want.
Sponsor
AI Remediation developers will actually use
Are you confident you're using AI in the right places, or could your workflows be even faster, more simple, and more secure?
On March 12th, Tines and The Hacker News are teaming up for a webinar to explore how to strike the right balance between speed, flexibility, and security in modern AI-driven workflows.
In this webinar, you’ll learn:
How to identify where human-led, rules-based, and agentic workflows fit best
How to avoid over-engineering with AI
How to design secure, auditable workflows that improve real-world outcomes
Practical examples of how leading teams are putting AI to work thoughtfully and at scale
CYBERSECURITY
RankClaw says 1 in 14 agent skills is malicious. RANKCLAW HOMEPAGE
Sponsor
AI Remediation developers will actually use
Everyone's tried to make vulnerability remediation advice work. Nobody has. You're probably still burned by "upgrade version 18.04 to 22.01" guidance that ignores your environment.
We just launched AI remediation agents that find where one fix resolves many CVEs and deliver the fix your developer would actually use. The one you’ll use. The real one.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Drone strikes cause first wartime cloud outage, says Pragmatic Engineer. THE PULSE NEWSLETTER
China and Iran are quietly expanding energy and trade cooperation. CHINA-IRAN RELATIONS ARTICLE
AI
The biggest thing that happened in AI this week by far was Karpathy’s release of autoresearch. It’s basically the start of automation of the Scientific Method. Full thread here.
Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files WALL STREET JUST LOST $285 BILLION BECAUSE OF 13 MARKDOWN FILES
Context is the actual AI moat now. INTELLIGENCE IS A COMMODITY. CONTEXT IS THE REAL AI MOAT
DSPy replaces prompt guesswork with self-optimizing pipelines. Replacing prompt engineering with agentic workflows. Doesn’t matter which framework you use, but this is the way things are moving. Transparent workflows that AI understands and can execute. DSPY WORKFLOWS
TECHNOLOGY
Taste, prompts, and distribution power the one-person product This argues a solo builder can ship real products fast if they decide taste upfront, prompt with specifics not micromanagement, pick a stack once, and grind distribution. THE ONE-PERSON STACK | SHER | TEENAGE MANUAL
AI won’t just speed work; it’ll reshape how cognitive work is organized. MORE IS DIFFERENT FOR INTELLIGENCE
HUMANS
US job losses surprise with 92,000 cut in February. BBC ARTICLE
Why suffering, chosen hardships, and meaning matter for a resilient life. WHY SUFFERING IS IMPORTANT | ARTHUR BROOKS (YOUTUBE)
GLP-1 drugs show cross-substance anti-addiction effects in massive VA study A physician-scientist analyzed VA records for 600,000 people and found GLP-1 drugs cut overdose, hospitalizations, deaths, and new addictions across alcohol, opioids, nicotine, cocaine, and cannabis. GLP-1 DRUGS MAY FIGHT ADDICTION
Adjusted for trauma care, violence barely fell since 1980. LESSWRONG POST
The $3T nonprofit blind spot, and why donors can’t see impact. THE $3 TRILLION BLIND SPOT
Leisure increased via school and retirement, not shorter weeks. SLOW BORING MAILBAG
IDEAS
Rick Rubin as a model for the future of work This piece argues Rick Rubin’s producer mindset—curation, taste, subtraction, and ruthless focus—maps to knowledge work as AI floods us with options. I really think this is correct. It's using one's taste and judgment and experience as their main value proposition, but I do think it will be combined with more pure creation at the same time. RICK RUBIN IS THE FUTURE OF WORK
Why AI's greatest power is amplifying human potential TECHRADAR ARTICLE
Everything is signaling, and that changes how you act This argues most behavior is about signaling status, competence, or tribe, and shows how to spot signals in work, relationships, and online life so you can respond intentionally. EVERYTHING IS SIGNALING
Money Is The First AI — And We Never Noticed GITHUB ARTICLE
Escaping efficiency to reclaim meaning from finite time. THE MARGINALIAN ARTICLE
Outtelligence is a compounding human edge AI can’t match. OUTTELLIGENCE ARTICLE
Creativity needs time, forgetting, and incubation to become original. OLIVER SACKS ON CREATIVITY
Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity This is a great article, but let me ask you which one is going to come first: Teaching people to go against their base instincts of rewarding shitty complexity, or AI being in charge of companies and preferring simplicity because it's actually better? NOBODY GETS PROMOTED FOR SIMPLICITY
AI becomes the last interface, dissolving apps into intent. Like we’ve been saying. UX DESIGN ARTICLE
Play the internet like a compounding reputation game. THE GREAT ONLINE GAME
Incentives make proxies into the real job. INCENTIVES DRIVE EVERYTHING
The benefits of oversharing I’ve always believed this, but only for certain people. Now I advocate it for almost everyone. TIME: THE BENEFITS OF OVERSHARING
Find the simplest thing that works, then delete requirements first. NAVAL ARTICLE
DISCOVERY
Retro: Lightweight meeting notes to GitHub issues. GITHUB REPO
Oath adds cryptographic human-in-the-loop approvals to AI agent actions. GITHUB REPOSITORY
How I think as a personal operating system for decisions. HOW I THINK
Lightweight Go crawler that outputs a clean JSON sitemap. GITHUB REPO
Adaptive text boss battle driven entirely by conversation. THE AUGUR LANDING
Go-based OpenClaw engine brings simpler builds. GOCLAW GITHUB REPO
LLMs are pushing testing toward autonomous, self-verifying agents. SOFTWARE TESTING IN THE LLM ERA
RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
Re-task everything you’re doing with AI to follow Bitter Lesson Engineering.
APHORISM OF THE WEEK
The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.
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