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Reading Recap: November 2025
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire I had this one on my list for a long time. Some good insights on how to evolve the student-teacher (manager-direct) relationship. Overall, I found it a bit long winded and intellectual. I think reading this with a discussion group vs solo would probably have helped. The Code…
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GPT Chat’s Path to Profit: Jailbreaking the App Store
AI Agents are a broad and often confusing topic. As we continue thinking about monetizing consumer GPT chatbots, let’s focus on AI Agents’ ability to take actions. Many people have seen agents that operate like a human using a computer or a browser. These are a useful demonstration of what will be possible to automate,…
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GPT Chat’s Path to Profit: Modalities and Mobile
The conversational nature of GenAI chat lends itself to voice modalities much more naturally than web search engines do. Speaking a keyword query and having results URLs read back to you feels very stilted. Search is a discrete action and doesn’t carry state from one search to the next. A voice conversation with a search…
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GPT Chat’s Path to Profit: Advertising
Advertising is coming for GenAI consumer chatbots. In part 1, we looked at the parallels between web search and information retrieval with chatbots. Chatbots already have a rich collection of user data that can be leverages for ad targeting. Let’s take a look at how they can build an advertising platform to monetize usage. The…
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GPT Chat’s Path to Profit: Web Search
Consumer-facing GPT chatbots will inevitably start to monetize their products. Cost pressures from burning through cash and the high costs of inference may accelerate this change. But even without the cost pressure, it seems unlikely that tech companies will leave any potential profits on the table. The standard game plan for tech companies providing “free”…
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Learning isn’t Free
AI Agents are often characterized as smart workers who learn and improve with practice. This can be true, but it isn’t automatic, and the “learning” doesn’t happen in the way I see a lot of people assume it does. Let’s start with what makes an AI Agent: 🌍An understanding of the world (Large Language Model)…
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Porcupine Leadership
The mighty lion is often held up as a standard for leaders to follow. He is the master of his domain, and his roar cements his power. Leaders need to be strong. The male lion sits and guards his territory while the lionesses go off and do the work of hunting for everyone. Although, I’m…
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Hallucination isn’t a thing; it’s just what we call a thing.
Lemme explain. There is no feature or any different behavior when GenAI “hallucinates”. GenAI is always using probability to predict the next token to output. We just choose to call it a hallucination when it does something we don’t want. Why is this distinction important? I heard a training explaining hallucination as I did above,…
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Why GenAI Systems are Biased
There are two categories of AI systems: Symbolic AI and Deep Learning. Symbolic AI requires the builders to define the rules it will apply. If you are trying to understand language, you would need to add grammatical rules. Deep Learning, on the other hand, starts with no rules and creates rules that match the patterns…
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The Lonely Struggle of Parenting in the Digital Age
Protecting my kids from digital harms and protecting their personal data often makes me feel like an isolated eccentric. Even before kids, I followed how the attention economy profited off of adults in ways that damaged mental health. In the quest for never-ending growth and profit, children are exposed to the same addictive harms that…