Archive
Full Post List
: 2016 Bordeaux at 10 Years: David v Goliath Jancis Robinson’s latest 2016 Bordeaux tasting (10-year retrospective) shows the vintage is aging beautifully. The 2016s tasted at 10 years old are …
: Don't Start By Sidelining Your Own People Hilary Gridley argues that rushing to hire outside consultants to drive AI transformation signals to your team: “I am about to fire you.” Better …
: Google Releases Nano Banana 2: Flash-Speed Image Generation Google DeepMind just launched Nano Banana 2, combining the advanced capabilities of their Pro model with the speed of Gemini Flash. The new image …
: The Wine Industry's Funflation Problem Jason Wilson explores why US wine prices jumped 11% in 2025. The real story: it’s not inflation—it’s that no one is buying cheap wine anymore. …
: Premiere Napa Valley prices slide, cab franc tops cab sauv Premiere Napa Valley’s average bottle price dropped ~39% from 2023, and ,000+ lots disappeared. Cabernet Sauvignon still dominates volume, but …
: Wine tariffs still up in the air after new Section 122 move After the Supreme Court struck down most tariffs, Trump invoked Section 122 to impose a 15% tariff for up to 150 days. The wine industry faces …
: Pragmatic Engineer: six predictions for software engineering with AI Notes from the Pragmatic Summit and a 50-person workshop: 92% of devs now use AI coding tools monthly, and healthy orgs see ~50% fewer incidents while …
: AI safety evals should map failure basins, not just jailbreaks New paper argues safety testing treats jailbreaks as isolated bugs, but failures form large behavioral regions that persist across paraphrases. The …
: OWASP AIVSS adds agentic risk scoring tied to AIUC-1 OWASP’s new AI Vulnerability Scoring System (AIVSS) extends CVSS with agent-specific amplification factors like autonomy, tool access, and persistent …
: AI's Real Unlock: Better Ideas, Not More Work Hilary Gridley makes a sharp case that AI shouldn’t help you do more — it should help you figure out which 2-3 things are actually worth doing. Her …
: OpenAI's First Hardware: A Smart Speaker That Sees and Recognizes Faces OpenAI and Jony Ive’s first physical product will reportedly be a $200-300 smart speaker with a built-in camera and facial recognition for purchases — …
: Claude Code Extension Ecosystem: Skills, Tools, Subagents, and Hooks Explained A practical engineering guide breaking down how Claude Code’s extension ecosystem is layered: Skills own reasoning orchestration, Tools provide scoped …
: Carlo Mondavi's Monarch Tractor Has Shuttered Monarch Tractor, the autonomous electric tractor startup founded by Carlo Mondavi (Robert Mondavi’s grandson), has shut down. The company built …
: SCOTUS Strikes Down Trump's Wine Import Tariffs The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 today that the Trump administration’s reciprocal tariffs imposed under IEEPA were unconstitutional. The case was brought …
: Accenture Is Tracking Weekly AI Tool Usage and Tying It to Promotions Accenture is now monitoring AI tool logins weekly for associate directors aiming for leadership promotions, making AI usage a “visible input” to …
: Google Gemini 3.1 Pro: 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, Topping Claude and GPT-5 Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro, scoring 77.1% on the ARC-AGI-2 reasoning benchmark — more than double its predecessor’s 31.1%, and ahead of Claude …
: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei Refused to Hold Hands at India AI Summit At India’s AI Impact Summit, PM Modi tried to link arms with tech leaders for a group photo — OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei …
: Is Agentic AI Layer 8? A New Framework for Autonomous Systems The classic OSI model ends at Layer 7 (the application layer), where software executes deterministic, predictable operations. AI researcher Ken Huang …
: Tavus Phoenix-4: AI Avatars That Read the Room in Real Time Tavus introduced Phoenix-4, a real-time human rendering model that generates every pixel of an AI avatar’s face from scratch at 40 FPS — with 10+ …
: Google Brings AI Music Creation Into Gemini With Lyria 3 Google rolled out Lyria 3 in the Gemini app — its new AI music generation model that turns a text prompt or photo into a custom 30-second track, …
: Independent security audit: OpenClaw has mitigated 34% of MAESTRO AI threat findings so far DistributedApps.ai applied the CSA MAESTRO framework to OpenClaw’s codebase (Feb 18 review). Of the assessed threats: 34% fully mitigated, 37% …
: Barcelona Wine Week dispatches: five under-the-radar Spanish producers worth finding Jason Wilson’s Barcelona Wine Week report surfaces five new-to-him discoveries worth tracking: Julia Casado’s bright, fresh 100% monastrell from D.O. …
: Figma's "Code to Canvas" turns Claude Code UI into editable design files Figma launched a Claude Code integration that captures live browser UI built in agentic coding sessions and converts it into native Figma layers — …
: Apple fast-tracking three AI wearables: glasses, pendant, and camera AirPods Bloomberg reports Apple is accelerating development of three camera-equipped AI wearables. Smart glasses with dual cameras and no display are …
: Claude Sonnet 4.6 matches Opus performance at 1/5 the cost Anthropic’s new Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 79.6% on SWE-Bench Verified (vs Opus 4.6’s 80.8%), outperforms Opus on agentic financial analysis and office …
: Ethan Mollick's guide to AI in the agentic era — models, apps, and harnesses Mollick’s latest framework for navigating AI: think in terms of Models (the brains — GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro), Apps (the interfaces), …
: How Codex is built — and why OpenAI engineers are now 'agent managers' Gergely Orosz got inside access to the Codex team. Key findings: 1M+ devs use Codex weekly (5x growth since January); 90%+ of the app’s code is …
: You.com founders: the LLM revolution has been 'mined out' You.com co-founders Richard Socher and Bryan McCann (among the most-cited AI researchers in the world) released 35 predictions for 2026. Three that …
: Alibaba's Qwen-3.5 rivals frontier models at 60% lower cost with open weights Alibaba released Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open-weight vision-language model using a sparse MoE architecture that activates only 17B of its 397B …
: OpenAI adds Lockdown Mode to ChatGPT to block prompt injection attacks OpenAI launched an optional ‘Lockdown Mode’ in ChatGPT designed for high-risk users like executives and security teams. When enabled, it …
: Anthropic and the Pentagon are heading toward a breakup over AI guardrails The Pentagon is reportedly close to designating Anthropic a ‘supply chain risk’ — a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries — over the …
: GPT-5.2 Makes Original Theoretical Physics Discovery OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 independently discovered that a widely accepted answer in particle physics was wrong, proposed the correct formula, and autonomously …
: QSAF: Qorvex Security Framework for Agentic AI Hammad A. and Ken Huang present Qorvex’s security framework for agentic systems. Security-first approach to agent development. Source: Agentic AI …
: Spanish Wine Tales: Beyond Verdejo Jason Wilson on Spanish winemaking and the Verdejo question. First dispatch from Spain exploring regional wine culture. Everyday Drinking newsletter.
: RALPH vs OpenClaw: Process vs Session Control in Agentic AI DistributedApps.ai explores fundamentals of agentic loop control. Comparing OpenClaw (session-level) vs RALPH (process-level) approaches to agent …
: Agentic AI Native Organizations: 2026 Trend Ken Huang explores how organizations are structuring themselves around agentic AI. ‘AI adoption’ becomes an understatement as agentic systems reshape …
: MAESTRO Sentinel Tool: Threat Modeling for Agentic AI Distributedapps.ai releases MAESTRO Sentinel, a threat modeling tool built specifically for agentic AI systems. Security-first approach to agent …
: Securing the Agentic Pipeline: The Ackuity Approach Ken Huang on deploying agentic AI systems securely in 2026. As agentic AI moves from PoCs to production, security infrastructure becomes critical. …
: The Rise of Napa Merlot and the RTD Cocktail Boom Wine-Searcher covers the enthusiastic US market for ready-to-drink cocktails, plus the rise of Napa Merlot and Bourbon’s fall from grace. Wine …
: The Creator of Kotlin Is Building a New Language to Keep Humans in Control in the AI Era Andrey Breslav, creator of Kotlin and founder of CodeSpeak, shares lessons from designing Kotlin and why he’s building a new programming language …
: Grady Booch: Software Engineering Is Entering a Third Golden Age Thanks to AI Gergely Orosz sits down with Grady Booch to put today’s AI automation claims in historical context. Booch argues software engineering is entering …
: Steve Yegge on AI Agents, the 8 Levels of Adoption, and Why Big Companies May Be Doomed Steve Yegge lays out 8 levels of AI adoption for engineers and argues that big companies are effectively dead on innovation. Interesting takes on the …
: OpenClaw and Recursive Self-Improvement: Where It Stands Today Ken Huang explores whether OpenClaw qualifies as a recursive self-improvement (RSI) architecture. The answer: it supports self-modification at the …
: 🍷 It’s almost time for wine geek Christmas: Premiere Napa Valley 2026 (Feb 18-21). 30th anniversary, 250 wineries, 1,000 trade members. The big draw? …
: 💡 Real talk about AI-assisted development from someone building with agents in 2026: Agents love formal specs—feed them ECMA-376 docs and watch them …
: 🍎 Apple just made coding agents mainstream with Xcode 26.3. These aren’t just autocomplete tools—they autonomously generate Swift code, refactor …
: Daily Digest — 2026-02-05 🌤️ SF Weather: Mostly sunny, 67°/49°F, light winds 📱 Apple’s AI Revolution: Xcode 26.3 introduces autonomous coding agents that can generate Swift …
: AI for Managers: big week ahead (Hilary Gridley) Why I think this matters: practical AI-for-managers tactics + events. Also Dropbox is explicitly mentioned. Highlights: Course: How to Become a …
: Daily Digest — 2026-02-04 Daily Digest — 2026-02-04 Weather: San Francisco: clear, ~46°F (8°C), light north breeze 🤖 AI for Managers — Big week ahead (Hilary Gridley) …
: AI for Managers: big week ahead (Hilary Gridley) Why I think this matters: practical AI-for-managers tactics + events. Also Dropbox is explicitly mentioned. Highlights: Course: How to Become a …
: Daily Digest — 2026-02-04 Daily Digest — 2026-02-04 Weather: San Francisco: clear, ~46°F (8°C), light north breeze 🤖 AI for Managers — Big week ahead (Hilary Gridley) …