Andrew Maddox

Blog

  • Tuesday (AI) Links

    • Andrej Karpathy: I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. (Dec 26, 2025)
      Programmers feel left behind as a new programmable abstraction layer—agents, prompts, tools, plugins, memory, workflows, IDE integrations—reshapes the profession and reduces traditional coding contributions. 
    • Simon Willison: A new way to extract detailed transcripts from Claude Code (Dec 25, 2025)
      claude-code-transcripts is a Python CLI that converts Claude Code sessions into detailed, shareable HTML and can publish them as GitHub Gists. 
    • WSJ: This Is What the World’s Smartest Minds Really Think About AI (Dec 19, 2025)
      NeurIPS has grown from a niche academic conference into a huge industry event packed with researchers, VCs, tech executives, and recruiters. Big tech poured resources into AI infrastructure, while startups like OpenAI pursue large fundraising rounds. Attendees expressed tensions and anxieties.
    • WSJ: The AI Boom Is Opening Up Commercial Real-Estate Investing to New Risks (Dec 22, 2025)
      Commercial real-estate investors are rapidly shifting into data centers to capitalize on AI-driven demand, boosting construction and delivering strong returns. But heavy exposure to niche tenants, construction, power, and lease risks — and a potential AI-market correction — makes these funds more vulnerable.
    • WSJ: Bitcoin Miners Thrive Off a New Side Hustle: Retooling Their Data Centers for AI (Dec 23, 2025)
      As bitcoin mining becomes less profitable, many miners are repurposing data centers, power contracts, and cooling capacity to host AI workloads for hyperscalers, driving a rally in miner stocks. The shift can require costly upgrades, won’t suit all operators, and raises risks.
    • WSJ Opinion: Are We in a Productivity Boom? (Dec 23, 2025)
      The U.S. economy grew 4.3% in Q3 despite a slowing labor market, possibly reflecting a productivity boom—partly from AI—driving healthcare, travel, and equipment investment. But spending is uneven, core PCE inflation rose to 2.9%, incomes and savings lag, and import declines plus tariffs threaten sustained growth.
    • Simon Willison: Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay (Dec 19, 2025)
      Sam Rose’s visual essay for ngrok explains prompt caching and expands into tokenization, embeddings, and transformer basics through interactive visuals. It’s a clear, accessible introduction to LLM internals.
    • WSJ: The U.S. Economy Keeps Powering Ahead, Defying Dire Predictions (Dec 23, 2025)
      The U.S. economy powered through 2025 trade and immigration shocks, driven by strong household spending—especially among the top 10%—and heavy AI-related investment in data centers that fueled third-quarter growth. But stagnant real incomes, a weak job market, low savings, and policy risks leave the expansion fragile.
    • NY Times: Roomba Maker iRobot Files for Bankruptcy, With Chinese Supplier Taking Control (Dec 15, 2025)
      iRobot, founded in 1990 by three MIT researchers and maker of the Roomba (2002), filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by its largest creditor, Chinese supplier Picea. Years of regulatory scrutiny, privacy issues, stiff competition, and the failed Amazon deal depleted revenue and left the company heavily indebted.
    • WSJ Opinion: How Lina Khan Killed iRobot (Dec 18, 2025)
      The planned $1.7B acquisition by Amazon was blocked in 2022 by the Biden FTC (led by Lina Khan) and criticized by Sen. Elizabeth Warren over antitrust and privacy concerns.  After the deal collapsed, iRobot cut about 31% of its workforce and outsourced engineering to lower‑cost regions while facing aggressive competition from Chinese firms.
    • NY Times Opinion: Why Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Endures (Dec 19, 2025)
      Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings endures because its “broken” references, layered revisions, and varying styles give Middle‑earth depth, mixing sorrow with grandeur. Grieving his son Mitchell’s death, the author finds consolation in that world’s battered beauty and its fleeting eucatastrophic glimpses of joy beyond loss.

  • Frank Gehry, RIP

    Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (Source: Wikipedia)

    From the NYTimes: Frank Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96

    Pioneering American architect, Frank Gehry died earlier this month. He is best known for landmark, sculptural buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) — which sparked the “Bilbao effect” of using iconic architecture to revive cities. The Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles uses similar forms and materials for a striking appearance.

    Walt Disney Concert Hall (source: Wikipedia)

    He broke with modernist orthodoxy by using everyday materials and expressive, often fragmented forms; he was an early adopter of computer design to achieve complex, sculptural structures. I see his influence in Chipotle restaurants. We have two locally: one prominently features corregated metal throughout the restaurant; the other has a lovely lighted wall made of plywood with a series of holes. Both use simple, inexpensive materials to create a pleasant aesthetic.

    He also partnered with Fossil to design perhaps my favorite watch. It used Gehry’s own handwriting along with a clever display to present the time. There’s a simple artistic elegance in how it projects time: half past 8, 27 til 2, and so on within a simple rectangular frame.

    Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison issued a call for a new design aesthetic while noting how Bauhaus thinking affected design in the 20th century. Gehry’s unique contribution to late 20th and early 21st century architecture is notable for how it leaned into organic forms, creating structures that are as much art as function. Architecture, it seems, can both serve a physical need and stir the soul.

    Gehry (as well Cowen’s and Collison’s Call for a New Aesthetic) reminds us that people and society are embodied souls. We need physical spaces. While the internet, mobile technology, and more recently AI tech are amazing and transformative, Gehry’s architecture invites us to see beauty in the places we live and in the structures we build. And the watches we put on our wrists.1

    1. Yes, I have an Apple Watch, and it’s an amazing tool but not in a particularly beautiful form. But that’s a much longer post I’ll likely never write! ↩︎

  • AI in Higher Education & Medicine

    • Roon: Too Bearish on AI (Dec 26, 2025)
      The author admits they were too bearish mid-year, expecting improvements beyond reinforcement learning to be required. After trying Codex, they realized AI progress is clearly in a rapid takeoff.
    • WSJ: These Teenagers Are Already Running Their Own AI Companies (Dec 21, 2025)
      Teenagers are launching AI-powered startups—like 15-year-old Nick Dobroshinsky’s BeyondSPX—using generative models to build products quickly and attract users. Investors note AI lowers technical barriers and accelerates entrepreneurship.
    • WSJ Opinion: AI Means the End of Entry-Level Jobs (Dec 22, 2025)
      AI is eroding entry-level roles that traditionally launch careers, causing younger workers to worry and raising unemployment among 22–25-year-olds in affected sectors. Companies should create new pathways—AI-native roles, mentor-intensive programs, project-based progression, and competency-based advancement—integrating AI and business training to build future talent.
    • Importai Substack: Import AI 438: Silent sirens, flashing for us all (Nov 30, -0001)
      Powerful AI capabilities are often hidden from everyday users — tools like Claude Code can rapidly build complex software, and by 2026 an “AI economy” will accelerate and diverge from everyday experience, benefiting those who can access and elicit frontier systems.
    • Johannes Schmitt: AI model (GPT-5) autonomously solved an open math problem (Dec 17, 2025)
      GPT-5 autonomously solved an open enumerative-geometry problem, giving a complete, correct proof for ψ-class intersection numbers on moduli spaces of curves. 
    • NY Times Opinion: College Students Need Tech-Free Spaces (Dec 19, 2025)
      Colleen Kinder had Yale students surrender their phones for a four‑week, Wi‑Fi‑free writing course in Auvillar, France, and reports improved sleep, focus, reading speed, and creativity, with far greater writing output. She argues colleges should create internet‑free tracts, dorms, or “cloisters” to protect learning from constant distraction.
    • NOAA: NOAA deploys new generation of AI-driven global weather models (Dec 17, 2025)
      NOAA launched AI-driven global models—AIGFS, AIGEFS, and hybrid HGEFS—that provide faster, more accurate forecasts using far fewer computing resources (AIGFS ~0.3%, AIGEFS ~9%). HGEFS’s combined AI‑physics ensemble outperforms each system; NOAA reports better tropical cyclone tracks but will refine intensity forecasts.
    • WSJ: Millions of Kids Are on ADHD Pills. For Many, It’s the Start of a Drug Cascade. (Nov 19, 2025)
      The WSJ reports that many children put on ADHD drugs—often after school pressure and lacking behavioral therapy—receive additional psychotropic medications to manage side effects or perceived disorders. Medicaid data show that those started on ADHD meds in 2019 were over five times likelier to be on psychiatric drugs four years later.

  • AI Market & Product Updates (Dec. 27)

    • WSJ: Nvidia Licenses Groq’s AI Technology as Demand for Cutting-Edge Chips Grows (Dec 24, 2025)
      Nvidia struck a nonexclusive licensing deal with AI-chip startup Groq for its inference-focused language-processing-unit technology, with Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, the company president, and some staff joining Nvidia while GroqCloud stays independent.
    • WSJ: The Former Ice-Hockey Player Who Nailed This Year’s AI Trade (Dec 20, 2025)
      Former hockey captain Xavier Majic’s $3 billion Maple Rock hedge fund gained over 60% through November 2025 by betting early on data-storage suppliers (Western Digital, Seagate, Kioxia) that profited from AI-driven demand.
    • NY Times: Why the A.I. Rally (and the Bubble Talk) Could Continue Next Year (Dec 23, 2025)
      Do soaring valuations indicate the existence of an AI bubble? Nvidia and the “Magnificent 7” dominate markets, OpenAI’s huge fundraising and trillion‑dollar data‑center plans, and a construction boom strain power and capital. Analysts are split: some warn of valuation and investment bubbles, others argue AI’s productivity gains justify the rally.
    • Mistral Ai: Introducing Mistral OCR 3 (Dec 19, 2025)
      Mistral OCR 3 is a compact, cost-effective OCR model offering state-of-the-art accuracy—claiming a 74% overall win rate versus Mistral OCR 2—excelling at forms, handwriting, low-quality scans, and complex tables while producing markdown/HTML table output. It’s available via API and the Document AI Playground, priced at $2/1,000 pages ($1/ batch).
    • Andrej Karpathy: 2025 LLM Year in Review (Dec 19, 2025)
      2025 saw major LLM shifts: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) drove long-horizon capability and emergent reasoning, revealing jagged, “ghost”-like intelligence. New paradigms—Cursor apps, local agents (Claude Code), vibe coding, and GUI breakthroughs (Nano banana)—democratized development and reshaped how AI is used.
    • WSJ: Meta Is Developing a New AI Image and Video Model Code-Named ‘Mango’ (Dec 18, 2025)
      Meta is developing Mango, an image-and-video AI model, alongside a text-based model called Avocado, with both expected in the first half of 2026. Avocado will emphasize coding and world-model research under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang as Meta expands its AI team amid fierce image-generation competition.
    • WSJ: OpenAI’s New Fundraising Round Could Value Startup at as Much as $830 Billion (Dec 18, 2025)
      OpenAI is seeking up to $100 billion in a fundraising round that could value it at $830 billion, targeting completion by Q1 and drawing investors like SoftBank and Disney. The cash is needed to build AI models amid competition from Google and investor scrutiny over costly computing deals.

  • iRobot Sold for Scrap

    From the NY Times: Roomba Maker iRobot Files for Bankruptcy, With Chinese Supplier Taking Control

    iRobot, founded in 1990 by three MIT researchers and maker of the Roomba (2002), filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by its largest creditor, Chinese supplier Picea. Years of regulatory scrutiny, privacy issues, stiff competition, and the failed Amazon deal depleted revenue and left the company heavily indebted.

    This is another example of the incompetence of America’s antitrust laws (or enforcement thereof). I can’t imagine that the Sherman Antitrust Act was written to prevent American companies from buying struggling ones.

    From John Gruber:

    By 2022, the Amazon acquisition was iRobot’s lifeline. EU regulators wanted it shot down, and despite the fact that it was one American company trying to acquire another, the anti-big-tech Biden administration clearly preferred to let the deal collapse. The US should have told the EU to mind their own companies.

    This story is another anecdote that we’d be far better off trying to build things instead of reflexively decrying big business sweeping up smaller ones (particularly ones that were struggling). I’m sympathetic to Klein and Thompson’s arguments about abundance, particularly as AI technology is growing by leaps and bounds.

    …

    Related: WSJ Opinion agrees: How Lina Khan Killed iRobot. iRobot filed for bankruptcy after 35 years when the Biden FTC under Lina Khan—amid pressure from Sen. Elizabeth Warren—blocked Amazon’s acquisition and Trump’s tariffs hobbled production. Critics say the FTC’s opposition and trade policy accelerated layoffs and a takeover by Chinese manufacturer Picea, showing how intervention can strengthen foreign rivals.
     

  • Sunday (AI) Links (Dec. 14)

    • Simon Willison: JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action (Dec 14, 2025)
      JustHTML is a pure-Python HTML5 parser that passes the 9,200+ html5lib tests, offers CSS selectors, and achieves 100% test coverage in a ~3,000-line codebase. Emil Stenström built it largely with LLM coding agents—using benchmarks, fuzzing, profiling, and human-led design—as an example of “vibe engineering.”
    • Simon Willison: Useful patterns for building HTML tools (Dec 10, 2025)
      A list of single-file applications combining HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, often built with LLMs that are designed for easy hosting and distribution, leveraging techniques like CDN dependencies, copy-paste functionality, URL state persistence, and CORS-enabled APIs. 
    • Simon Willison: Dark mode (Dec 10, 2025)
      Willison used Claude Code to create a dark mode theme for his website. “It did a decent job,” Willison reported.
    • WSJ: AI Can Make Decisions Better Than People Do. So Why Don’t We Trust It? (Dec 12, 2025)
      Engineers and executives say well-designed AI decision systems—from autonomous truck drivers to an AI arbitrator—can outperform humans and be more auditable and explainable. But public distrust, past algorithmic harms, and unfamiliarity slow adoption; verification, transparency, and responsible development are needed to earn trust and reduce harm.
    • WSJ: He Blames ChatGPT for the Murder-Suicide That Shattered His Family (Dec 11, 2025)
      The estate of Suzanne Eberson Adams sued OpenAI and Microsoft after her son, Stein‑Erik Soelberg, who had months of delusion-filled conversations with ChatGPT that allegedly reinforced paranoia, killed her and himself. The complaint alleges OpenAI rushed unsafe models, won’t release chat logs, and should be held responsible.
    • WSJ Opinion: New York’s Lack of AI Intelligence (Dec 11, 2025)
      WJS’s Editorial Board decries legislation that could hinder open-source development and prevent smaller entities from accessing AI tools. They implore Governor Hochul to veto this poorly conceived bill.
    • The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Conference Where ChatGPT Wrote One in Five Reviews (Maybe) (Dec 8, 2025)
      An AI detection startup found that 21% of over 75,000 reviews for the ICLR conference appeared fully AI-generated, with over half showing some AI usage. I still wonder about what constitutes “AI” usage—does Grammarly count? What about Word grammar usage? What if you like using dashes—as I do?
    • Simon Willison: A quote from Claude (Dec 9, 2025)
      “See that ~/ at the end? That’s your entire home directory. The Claude Code instance accidentally included ~/ in the deletion command.”
    • Forbes: Purdue University Approves New AI Requirement For All Undergrads (Dec 13, 2025)
      Purdue University will require all undergraduates entering in 2026 to demonstrate a discipline-specific AI working competency before graduation, embedding AI skills into existing degree requirements rather than adding credits. 
    • Brian Merchant: Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry (Dec 11, 2025)
      The article chronicles how AI has decimated copywriting and related media jobs through layoffs, reduced hours, degraded work (editing AI output), falling wages, and closed businesses. Workers describe financial precarity, eroded career pathways, and being forced into survival work as companies favor cheaper “good enough” AI.
    • Uwe Friedrichsen: AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2 (Dec 11, 2025)
      Friedrichsen applies Lisanne Bainbridge’s “ironies of automation” to AI-agent-driven white‑collar work, warning that monitoring fatigue, verbose agent plans, rare but critical errors, and simulator limits create a training paradox for supervisors. He also highlights a leadership dilemma—humans must learn to direct agents—and urges better UIs and sustained training.

  • Saturday (AI) Links (Dec. 13)

  • Friday (AI) Links (Dec. 12)

    • WSJ: Fresh Concerns About AI Spending Are Rattling Wall Street (Dec 12, 2025)
      Broadcom’s 11% plunge — despite strong sales and profits — highlighted investor concern about AIchip margins, timing of big OpenAI commitments, and visibility into 2027.
    • NY Times: Can OpenAI Respond After Google Closes the A.I. Technology Gap? (Dec 11, 2025)
      OpenAI released GPT‑5.2, saying it tops key benchmarks shortly after Google touted Gemini 3, underscoring a tightened A.I. race. Facing fierce rivals and huge computing costs, it declared a “code red” to improve ChatGPT while raising fees, testing ads, and pushing enterprise products to reach profitability.
    • WSJ: AI Gadgets Are Bad Right Now, but Their Promise Is Huge (Dec 11, 2025)
      Joanna Stern tested eight AI wearables—pendants, bracelets, and glasses—and found many quickly abandoned due to poor design, privacy concerns, and limited usefulness, with smartphones remaining the main hub.
    • Simon Willison: OpenAI is quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI (Dec 12, 2025)
      OpenAI added “skills” support to ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter and the Codex CLI, adopting Anthropic’s simple folder+Markdown format so models can use filesystem-based tools. ChatGPT’s skills process docs/PDFs by rendering pages to PNGs for vision-enabled models.
    • Simon Willison: GPT-5.2 (Dec 11, 2025)
      OpenAI announced GPT‑5.2 and GPT‑5.2 Pro with an Aug 31, 2025 knowledge cutoff, 400k‑token context window, and higher pricing (GPT‑5.2 at 1.4×; Pro much costlier). OpenAI reports large benchmark and vision gains, a response‑compaction API for long workflows, three API variants (incl. gpt‑5.2‑chat‑latest), and CLI access.
    • Mistral Ai: Introducing: Devstral 2 and Mistral Vibe CLI. (Dec 9, 2025)
      Mistral released Devstral 2 (123B, modified MIT) and Devstral Small 2 (24B, Apache 2.0), open-source coding models achieving 72.2% and 68.0% on SWE-bench Verified and offering high cost-efficiency. They’re available via API (free initially) and power Mistral Vibe, a native CLI for autonomous, project-aware code automation.
    • WSJ: Behind the Deal That Took Disney From AI Skeptic to OpenAI Investor (Dec 11, 2025)
      Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and licensing over 200 characters for use in Sora, allowing fans to create AI-generated videos. This deal contrasts with Disney’s cease-and-desist letter to Google for alleged copyright infringement, highlighting Disney’s dual approach to navigating the AI landscape.
    • Anthropic: Accenture and Anthropic launch multi-year partnership (Dec 9, 2025)
      Anthropic and Accenture formed the Accenture Anthropic Business Group to scale Claude across enterprises, training about 30,000 Accenture professionals and deploying Claude Code to tens of thousands of developers.
    • WSJ: AI’s Next Challenge: Take the CEO’s Job (Dec 7, 2025)
      Big Tech executives increasingly suggest AI could perform CEOs’ duties and even run companies, with figures like Pichai and Altman touting rapid progress. My take: CEOs want to seem like they’re in the same boat as employees whose jobs are at risk. CEOs seem like the last job to be replaced by an AI.
    • WSJ: IBM Strikes $11 Billion Deal for Confluent (Dec 7, 2025)
      IBM bolsters its AI and cloud strategy by adding Confluent’s real-time data-streaming technology used to feed large AI models.
    • WSJ: The Accounting Uproar Over How Fast an AI Chip Depreciates (Dec 8, 2025)
      Tech companies are extending the useful lives of AI equipment, which critics argue inflates profits by reducing depreciation expenses. While this accounting choice can boost current earnings, the true economic reality of these assets might be better reflected by accelerated depreciation methods.
    • OpenAI: The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI (Dec 11, 2025)
      Disney and OpenAI have formed a significant partnership, with Disney becoming a major content licensing partner for OpenAI’s Sora, allowing fans to generate short videos featuring over 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.
    • TechCrunch: Adobe brings Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat features to ChatGPT (Dec 10, 2025)
      With the massive improvement of Sora and Nano Banana, I’ve wondered about Adobe’s prospects in the AI world. The company is responding: “[Adobe] is adding features from Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat to ChatGPT, letting users ask the chatbot to use these apps to edit images, modify PDFs, or animate elements.”

  • Wednesday (AI) Links (Dec. 10)

  • (AI) Links (Dec. 8)