weekend ai reads for 2025-07-04

The lifestyle subsidy was a great deal for consumers. Venture capital and zero interest-rate policy supplied a ton of money for any startup that could demonstrate strong growth - even if they were growing by selling customers $20 of services for $10. “We lose money on every sale, but we make it up on volume” was not just a surprisingly-old joke (first recorded in 1833!), but the real pitch to investors.

Is it any different this time around? Interest rates aren’t what they used to be, but investors are still scared of missing out on the next big thing. That investor money is going straight into subsidizing the costs of LLM-based products.

The researchers said the spike in content was driven by consumer-grade AI tools that are available for free online. This easy access helped fuel the campaign’s tactic of “content amalgamation,” where those running the operation were able to produce multiple pieces of content pushing the same story thanks to AI tools.

Since the arrival of ChatGPT, she says there has been a distinct rise in the number of vastly more detailed, lengthy and outwardly credible correspondence to HR departments and employment tribunals. The documents often contain references to legal precedents and other references to the law that don’t always turn out to be accurate but take hours to sort through.

There will also be a digital reworking of the John Woo classic A Better Tomorrow (1986) that, by the looks of the trailer, turns the money-burning anti-hero originally played by Chow Yun-fat into a cyberpunk, and is being claimed as “the world’s first full-process, AI-produced animated feature film.”

Because taste isn’t just what you consume. It’s what you amplify. It’s what you normalize. It’s what you signal to others is worth attention.

You are what you pay attention to.

Everyone has access to a pencil, and likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI, if they aren’t already. It’s how you use the pencil. You see?

Tobi Lutke describes it as “the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.” and he is right.

I think loads of people in this community are being far too cowardly in their communication, especially in the policy world.

It’s quite evident that most legal AI preferred speeding to launch rather than meditation on the facticity of how to structure the technology around confidentiality, which after many errors became a second order consideration.

Summary: Use an LLM to help you write or refine your prompts. Give it your current prompt, examples of good/bad outputs, and ask it to “make this prompt better” or critique it. Benefit: LLMs know “themselves” well and can often suggest effective improvements you might not think of.

Guan recalled one CEO who came to her after the person’s company had to pause a multi-million dollar investment in a custom AI model because employees trained it on dozens of different versions of the same operating procedure.

“When they tried to scale, their data was not clean enough,” she said. “It was garbage in, garbage out.”

Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said.

Looking ahead, most organizations expect 20-30% of their engineering team to be focused on AI, with high-growth companies projecting up to 37%. But survey results show that finding the right talent remains a bottleneck. AI/ML engineers take the longest to hire of any AI-specific role, with an average time-to-fill exceeding 70 days.

For teachers, the main attraction will probably be the expansion of Gemini in the Classroom, which is now available to all Workspace for Education users at no cost. It has more than 30 new functions aimed at speeding up lesson planning and prep work, like generating vocabulary lists on the fly.

The Walton Family Foundation partnered with Gallup to find out how teachers are using AI tools in the classroom and whether AI might have the potential to save them time, alleviate burnout, or address key issues related to student achievement and engagement.

Interactive visualization tool for analyzing causal relationships and counterfactual importance attribution in reasoning chains. Explore how different reasoning steps influence the final answer and downstream reasoning.

What people often call “RAG” is a naive brute force, single-vector semantic search. This definition was pushed heavily by marketing in 2023-2024 because it was simple to sell. Claiming RAG is dead because we’re now using better retrieval tools is, in his words, “akin to claiming HTML is dead because we are now using CSS.”

Producing the highest quality outputs using the limited number of context tokens you have, or in other words, context engineering, is the primary challenge in using coding agents effectively.

We’ve noticed some engineers, in particular at the senior-to-staff level, finding success faster than others. Here we share some top lessons sourced from the experience of our customers and ourselves.

Wright conceived of one of his most monumental and awe-inspiring concepts for Chicago: a mile-high skyscraper titled “The Illinois” that initially included 528 stories—later edited to 365—and would have been four times the height of the Empire State Building. The architect shared the idea in his 1957 book, The Testament, asserting that it was technically possible, even with the technology available at that time, to construct a building of that scope and scale.

ACR takes in everything on your screen, not just TV shows. The built-in ACR software in your TV isn’t just monitoring and reporting on your devotion to Today or even your Netflix binge sessions of Love Is Blind. ACR is capturing anything that appears on your screen, including YouTube videos, personal photos, security or doorbell camera streams, and video or photos you send via Apple AirPlay or Google Cast. ACR can even snag content from other devices connected to your TV by HDMI, including personal laptops, video game consoles, and Blu-ray players.