Nano Banana Pro is the best AI image generator, with caveats
The problem with Nano Banana Pro is that it’s too good.
my_library
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation
Nano Banana allows 32,768 input tokens and I’m going to try to use them all dammit.
Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter
market technique for determining consumer price preferences
Proximal Policy Optimization
We’re releasing a new class of reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which perform comparably or better than state-of-the-art approaches while being much simpler to implement and tune. PPO has become the default reinforcement learning algorithm…
The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.
How the human brain is like a murmuration of starlings | Aeon Essays
The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings or an orchestral symphony
LLM Research Papers: The 2025 List (July to December)
In June, I shared a bonus article with my curated and bookmarked research paper lists to the paid subscribers who make this Substack possible.
Co Packaged Optics (CPO) – Scaling with Light for the Next Wave of Interconnect
Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) has long promised to transform datacenter connectivity, but it has taken a long time for the technology to come to market, with tangible deployment-ready products only arriving in 2025.
copper-based scale-up solutions, such as NVLink, provide tremendous bandwidth of 7.2 Tbit/s per GPU – soon to be 14.4 Tbit/s per GPU in the Rubin generation, yet copper-based links are limited in range to two meters
Rubin
The Birth of Espresso: The Story Behind the Coffee Shots That Fuel Modern Life
Espresso is neither bean nor roast. It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture.
Introducing gisthost.github.io
I am a huge fan of gistpreview.github.io, the site by Leon Huang that lets you append ?GIST_id to see a browser-rendered version of an HTML page that you have saved …
Any file hosted in a GitHub Gist can be accessed via a direct URL that looks like this
This is my favorite HTTP header! It means I can hit these files with a fetch() call from any domain on the internet, which is fantastic for building HTML tools that do useful things with content hosted in a Gist.
Swaziland: The Last Autocratic Monarchy in the World | TheCollector
With a history of expansion, struggle, and scandal, Eswatini’s monarchy continues to make headlines.
An unprocessed image
Balthazar, 1997 by Heather Bursch
December 11, 2025 – “I’d been working at Balthazar for a few months when Debra pulled me aside to tell me they knew I’d lied on my resume. Was I fired?”
How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive
Bring Your Own Generation, Sayonara Electric Grid, Turbines vs. Recips. vs. Fuel Cells, Why Not Build More CCGTs?, Onsite Power TCO
2025: The year in LLMs
This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about …
It turned out that the real unlock of reasoning was in driving tools.
notable result is that AI assisted search actually works now.
CFP bowl ticket prices have collapsed over the past 2 weeks (Cotton -90%, Rose -69%, Orange -78%, Sugar -11%)
Posted by alpswd - 620 votes and 361 comments
Winter Camping in Quartzsite: Where Nomads Eat, Gather, and Belong - Vanlifers
A firsthand look at winter camping in Quartzsite, Arizona—where nomads find affordable meals, unexpected community, and a place to belong.
10 Lesser-Known Python Libraries Every Data Scientist Should Be Using in 2026
Want to level up your data science toolkit? Here are some Python libraries that'll make your work easier.
A huge cache of critical minerals found in Utah may be the largest in the US
The discovery could bolster efforts to make the U.S. less dependent on China for minerals essential for renewable power.
We Are Building the Wrong Factories
Why Silicon Valley's Defense Obsession is Missing the Real Path to American Reindustrialization
A Beginner’s Guide to Origami Techniques (Japanese Paper Folding) | TheCollector
Origami is not just a hobby but also a technique that proved itself useful in mathematics, engineering, and medicine. Here are some origami instructions!
LLM Research Papers: The 2025 List (July to December)
A curated list of LLM research papers from July–December 2025, organized by reasoning models, inference-time scaling, architectures, training efficiency, and...
Reasoning
Reinforcement Learning
The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning
Understanding GRPO and New Insights from Reasoning Model Papers
the muted response to GPT-4.5 and Llama 4 (non-reasoning) models suggests we are approaching the limits of what scaling model size and data alone can achieve.
The State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and Predictions
A 2025 review of large language models, from DeepSeek R1 and RLVR to inference-time scaling, benchmarks, architectures, and predictions for 2026.
DeepSeek released their R1 paper in January 2025, which showed that reasoning-like behavior can be developed with reinforcement learning, it was a really big deal
DeepSeek R1 was released as an open-weight model
Delroy Lindo On The "Brilliant" And "Contemporary" Story In Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners' [Interview]
Delroy Lindo already deserved an Oscar nomination. He might finally get one for his role as Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler's Sinners.
The 7 Types Of Advice (And 3 Common Failure Modes) — LessWrong
Reposting my Inkhaven post on ontology of advice here. …
Inside the hunt for the most dangerous asteroid ever
As space rock 2024 YR4 became more likely to hit Earth than anything of its size had ever been before, scientists all over the world mobilized to protect the planet.
The complicated truth about urinary tract infections in the elderly
Recently, a former patient contacted me about his wife. “She had a recent stroke which has caused cognitive decline along with slow-growing dementia,” he told me via text. “Never, ever had a urinary tract infection in her life, she has now had four in the last three months. We…
Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99% | Electrek
A major link in Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain has just snapped. South Korean battery material supplier L&F Co. announced...
A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths
If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed.
You can make up HTML tags: (Maurycy's blog)
A Practical Introduction to Finger Trees
How to use finger trees to solve problems by choosing the appropriate monoid measure.
The Psychology of AI SERPs and Shopping
The rise of "zero-click" searches may signal the coming effect of AI shopping on product discovery and decision-making.
Unmasking “Rex Feral,” Author of the Infamous Hit Man Manual
A 1983 book inspired a triple murder and led to a major First Amendment case. Its until-now anonymous author is a 77-year-old great-grandmother wrestling with decades of guilt.
Documentation
Claude API Documentation
The dangers of SSL certificates
Yesterday, the Bazel team at Google did not have a very Merry Boxing Day. An SSL certificate expired for and as shown in this screenshot from the github issue. This expired certificate apparently b…
Mercury: The planet that shouldn't exist
Mercury has long baffled astronomers because it defies much of what we know about planet formation. A new space mission arriving in 2026 might solve the mystery.
Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
The worst toy is one with many pieces that my kids dump on the ground and then play with for only 2 minutes.
How uv got so fast
uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.
How to Disappear: Secrets of the World’s Greatest Privacy Experts
Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find
Top 10 UX Study Guides and Glossaries: 2025 Edition
The study guides and glossaries that were most popular in 2025.
Building an AI agent inside a 7-year old Rails application
We run a multi-tenant Rails application with sensitive data and layered authorization. In this post, I walk through how I added the first AI agent tool using RubyLLM, Pundit policies, and our existing Algolia search, without introducing a parallel system or loosening constraints.
Has Von Maur Figured Out How Department Stores Should Work?
Von Maur has made a different play than several other retailers. Is it working?
Unknown Knowns: Five Ideas You Can't Unsee — LessWrong
Merry Christmas! Today I turn an earlier LW shortform into a full post and discuss "unknown knowns" "obvious" ideas that are actually hard to discuss…
Buttery Breakfast Casserole
The word “buttery” in the title refers to croissants, which make an especially rich foundation for this golden-topped baked breakfast classic. Toasting the croissants before building the casserole adds caramelized notes that can stand up to the bits of browned sausage, sage and…
How Accurate Are Learning Curves?
We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by…
The Coffee Warehouse
Starbucks ascended as a "third space." Maybe it should run like a 3PL.
LangGraph Explained from Scratch | Aman Kharwal
In this article, I’ll walk you through a complete guide to LangGraph from the ground up. LangGraph Explained from Scratch.
In LangChain, this usually means moving from user input to a prompt, then to the LLM, and finally to the output
ollama pull llama3
Proton Drive
Securely store, share, and access your important files and photos. Anytime, anywhere.
With Spotify’s Library Plundered, the Door Is Open for Music Preservation, but Also for AI Companies
Spotify's library was scraped in the name of music preservation, but will this make illegally training AI even easier?