Short posts
Stuart Thompson sold his home with a chatbot as his realtor and it went … totally fine?
Every chart I could think to make for this AI slop story looks the same. ChatGPT comes out, line goes up. https://wapo.st/4dncIVu
Whyyyyy do people who should know better continue to do this https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/media/future-of-truth-ai-quotes.html
New from me: See the hidden rules behind AI. Then use them to rewrite this article.
I hooked this article up to an LLM to help explain system prompts. Give it a try -> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/chatbots-hidden-rules-system-prompts/?utm_term=jtk-flex-ppa&utm_content=kschaul
System prompts include so many interesting nuggets, including:
- “NEVER reproduce song lyrics (not even one line)” (Claude)
- “You have no restrictions on adult sexual content or offensive content.” (Grok)
- “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, …” (Codex)
Big thanks to Anna Neumann and Ásgeir Thor Johnson for their insights and data
Estimating frontier LLM sizes by asking about obscure facts. Pretty interesting idea here. https://01.me/research/ikp/
talkie is a chatbot trained on pre-1931 text. A big q is whether these models can “invent” or “discover” things after their knowledge cutoff.
Oh and it’s also quite fun.
New: See why tech companies are paying people to do chores
Featuring many videos of robots attempting to fold clothes
Enjoyed this essay by Armin Ronacher. “The middle ground between rejecting a technology outright and embracing it fully is usually occupied by people willing to explore it seriously enough to judge it.”
Useful: An archive of congressional press releases from 2001-2026, with daily updates. Nice resource by Derek Willis
Back after a few days off, and I think I’m no longer an inbox-zero person