Short Thoughts

Cedric Chin recently started a series on The Study of Asian Tycoons. How are Asian conglomerates different from Western businesses?

Harper Reed documents his current LLM codegen workflow: effectively using LLMs in an agentic way via different prompts. He first uses an architect and then a project planner and finally a software engineer.

Charity Majors takes on the recent rollbacks of DEI policies at major companies, writing that Corporate “DEI” is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals.

Declan Chidlow expresses concern that AI is stifling tech adoption.

How did DeepSeek achieve such remarkable capabilites in their recent models? In various interviews, founder Liang Wenfeng explains his approach on staffing a culture of innovation.

Jon Keegan notes in Sherwood News that A free, powerful Chinese AI model just dropped — but don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square, exploring what chain-of-thought models reveal about the perspectives encoded in their training.

Molly White educates us again on how to think about cryptocurrency valuations, writing in her latest Citation Needed newsletter that, No, Trump didn’t make $50 billion from his memecoin

Jack Danger explains the concepts of Infrastructure Gravity & Domain Engineering in an excerpt from his book, Executive Engineering.

Lena Cohen writes for the Electronic Frontier Foundation that Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry — Here’s How. Joseph Cox of 404 Media dives deeper on Wired.com to identify specific apps that contribute to surveillance: Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location.

Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about The Anti-Social Century.