weekend ai reads for 2026-02-13

As AI and digital tools make polish effortless, analogue imperfection has taken on new cultural weight. But what does “analogue” actually mean when most things are made, shared, and consumed digitally?

As I see more and more people generating code instead of writing it, I find myself wondering why engineers are so ready and willing to do away with one of the good bits of our jobs (coding) and leave themselves with the boring bit (reviews).

Perhaps people enjoy writing roleplay instructions for computers, I don’t know. But I find it dangerous that people will willingly - and proudly - pump their products full of generated code.

Ms. Hart has become an A.I. evangelist. Through her author-coaching business, Plot Prose, she’s taught more than 1,600 people how to produce a novel with artificial intelligence, she said. She’s rolling out her proprietary A.I. writing program, which can generate a book based on an outline in less than an hour, and costs between $80 and $250 a month.

But right now, what we have is a technology that excels at replication — at doing what humans already do, faster and cheaper — without expanding what’s possible. And an economy built on the assumption that replication equals innovation is an economy built on sand.

In an age of abundance, restraint becomes the only scarce thing left, which means saying “no” is more valuable than ever.

When was the last time you truly thought hard?

By “thinking hard,” I mean encountering a specific, difficult problem and spending multiple days just sitting with it to overcome it.

That’s why Malwarebytes is the first cybersecurity provider available directly inside ChatGPT, bringing trusted threat intelligence to millions of people right where these questions happen.

Simply ask: “Malwarebytes, is this a scam?” and you’ll get a clear, informed answer—super fast.

The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

This is my journey of how I found value in AI tooling and what I’m trying next with it. In an ocean of overly dramatic, hyped takes, I hope this represents a more nuanced, measured approach to my views on AI and how they've changed over time.

Accounts indistinguishable from humans on social media platforms are only one issue. In addition, the ability to map social networks at scale will, the researchers say, allow those coordinating disinformation campaigns to target agents at specific communities, ensuring the biggest impact.

1. The model is completing a text, not answering a question

2. The assistant persona is a fictional character, not the model itself

3. Apparent errors are often correct completions of the world implied by the prompt

1/ Your AI strategy is actually designing your organization.

2/ Most AI strategy still treats AI like an instrumental capability: acquire models, stand up a some kind of platform, define use cases that it seems the tool is suited for, add governance, and policy, and rules-of-use..and then just measure your ROI as the goose lays a bunch of golden eggs for you.

3/ But, that frame is already way too small, and likely to trip you up before it even gets going.

Even casual A.I. use exposes users to a level of praise humans rarely experience from one another, which is not great for any of us but is especially risky for young people still working on their social skills.

Work in progress. This summarizes how I use Claude Code for academic work — lecture slides, R scripts, Beamer-to-Quarto pipelines. I keep learning and updating these files. Sharing what I've figured out so far with friends and colleagues.

Perhaps the most honest answer: this document is an artifact of a collaborative cognitive process that doesn’t map cleanly onto existing categories of authorship. It’s not ghostwriting (the human didn’t have a draft the LLM polished). It’s not dictation (the human didn’t specify what to say). It’s not the LLM’s “own” work (there is no persistent LLM-self that has views on cognitive media).

It’s something new. A residue of thinking-with-a-medium. A projection that required both the human’s direction and the LLM’s generative capacity. The authorship is distributed across the interaction itself, which is now finished and inaccessible—leaving only this trace.

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal. With Anthropic API support, you can now use Claude Code with any Ollama model.

So far, we’ve found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities. We’ve begun reporting them and are seeing our initial patches land, and we’re continuing to work with maintainers to patch the others.

Generate realistic datasets for demos, learning, and dashboards. Instantly preview data, export as CSV or SQL, and explore with Metabase.

We built a Software Factory: non-interactive development where specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review.

The narrative form is included below. If you’d prefer to work from first principles, I offer a few constraints & guidelines that, applied iteratively, will accelerate any team toward the same intuitions, convictions, and ultimately a factory of your own.

this Egregore we made wants constant adulation

so we feed him everything and face the domination

This study aims to describe how adults currently use AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Replika and Character.AI for spiritual or reflective purposes, and how this relates to beliefs, identity and everyday life. The focus is on attitudes and behaviours: how people engage, what they report experiencing and how often. The study is not testing any intervention or evaluating a product. Results will provide a clear picture that can guide future research and public discussion.

let A.i. explain to you why you’re wrong in your petty disputes

free tier includes one free question per day

Each plant has been given its own name and personality, including “Jade, the Vine, the sassy ceiling-swinger of the Tropics House” and “Titus Junior, the Titan Arum, blunt, dramatic and famously foul-smelling”.

Saunders says the ad didn’t save much money and certainly not a ton of time compared to a conventional shoot; the company chose to make the ad this way because of the aesthetic and thematic value. “For us its never been an efficiency play, it’s been a storytelling play; that’s why we’ve always had strong hands on the keyboard,” she says of the spot, which will air just after halftime.