Jeff Scott

The 2nd Robot Marathon has officially begun in Beijing. This year feels different. 1. Around 40% of teams are running fully autonomous, no remote control. 2. Top robots are already hitting ~10s per 100 meter, getting surprisingly close to human sprint limits. 3. You can also see much better safety design upfront. Way more structured than last year’s chaos. 4. Still, failures happen. Marathon distance pushes motors, structure, and control to the limit. What works in short demos breaks down over longer runs. Overall, a big step forward, but also a reminder that real-world robotics is still far from the polished demo videos you get fed from companies.

AMD Senior AI Director confirms Claude has been nerfed. She analyzed Claude's session logs from Janurary to March: > median thinking dropped from ~2,200 to ~600 chars > API requests went up 80x from Feb to Mar. less thinking and failed attempts meaning more retries, burning more tokens, and spending more on tokens > reads-per-edit dropped from 6.6x → 2.0x. model stops researching code before touching it. > model tried to bail out or ask "should i continue" 173 times in 17 days (0 times before March 8). > self-contradiction in reasoning ("oh wait, actually...") tripled. > conventions like CLAUDE.md get ignored because there's less thinking budget to cross-check edits > 5pm and 7pm PST are the worst hours, late night is significantly better. this means the thinking allocation is most likely GPU-load-sensitive.

Yes! Flying mounts ruin games. Ground travel is so much more interesting than air travel. You have to navigate, you sometimes have to face danger. Air just skips everything and you fly in a straight line. When my friends and I were playing Ark I had to make a no-flying-mounts rule because the challenge of navigating the terrain and avoiding tough dinos is a huge part of the game and if you can just fly then you lose all that. I also loved that in the original Ark, the only map you got didn't show your position or direction. You had to navigate by landmarks and memory. Wish more people would make games with expansive worlds with no map and no fast travel. The game has to be designed for it, though -- like quests have to be designed so you aren't constantly going back and forth across the world, and landmarks have to be distinct enough for you to be able to navigate off of them.

Cursor can now attach demos and screenshots of its work to PRs it opens. Your team can review artifacts created by cloud agents directly in GitHub.