Ben Greenberg

@staysaasy isn't this called gambler's ruin?

One of the most important things to do in any endeavor with stochastic results (like writing, investing, comedy…etc) is to keep going. Time and repetition is what helps you both improve and also see wins at a frequency that inspires you to keep going. Once you know that the next win is probabilistically not that far if you keep trying, you’re incredibly inspired to keep going. It’s a positive feedback cycle. The other big thing to do is to be around people who are doing the same thing. You can’t really internalize their batting average from a distance, you only see wins. Up close, their at-bats and wins also serve as a way to understand the effort required and that the payoff is out there.

@staysaasy Danny Go is amazing. Laurie Berkner has some great tracks, and Pancake Manor would have been a hit band in the early 2000s.

Only parents will fully appreciate this, but there's a huge range in quality when it comes to kids music. Most of it is awful but a few "artists" like Danny Go or PJ Masks would get real radio time if the lyrics were about getting bitches instead of being a triceratops.

@rpondiscio The benefit of merit pay is to recruit and retain talented teachers rather than have them work somewhere that recognizes and rewards them better.

I dislike merit pay for a different reason. It suggests that teachers could get better outcomes if we just made it worth their while. The actual problem is we've pushed the job beyond the capacity of mere mortals to do effectively.

@adeelorama @magicschoolai This slop makes your product look bad and you look not smart.

Yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude for Teachers, and @magicschoolai built a plugin to support the the launch. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and now Anthropic are all building for K-12. As a former teacher and principal, I'll say plainly: this is good news. The most capable technology companies in the world are recognizing the value of AI for educators. But if there's one thing I've learned serving millions of educators and partnering with thousands of districts, it's this: the model was never the hard part. The hard part is everything around it. It's the reality of a K-12 school: a building with hundreds of kids on varying levels, IEPs and 504s, local district policy and reporting processes, changing annual instructional priorities, and a teacher making a thousand decisions a day. It requires standards alignment, integrations, and district-level governance. And underneath all of it, the student privacy and compliance infrastructure schools are legally bound to: FERPA, COPPA, state data privacy laws, board policy. In K-12, safety isn't a feature. It's the price of admission. That's the work of a K-12 focused platform like MagicSchool: taking powerful general-purpose models and making them safe, aligned, and deployable in real classrooms at scale. We've learned biggest part of that work isn't technical at all. It's human. Our team is full of former teachers, principals, and district leaders who sit with schools to redesign workflows, train staff, build governance, and manage the change that comes with putting AI in front of thousands of classrooms. You can't ship that in a model update. You have to earn it, district by district. Better models make everything we build better. More investment in educators is more belief in educators. What turns that into student outcomes is the layer we've spent three years building: educator expertise, school-grade infrastructure, and trust.

@DPearsonPHL @TheStalwart @nicolegelinas Another denomination could take it over!

@TheStalwart @nicolegelinas The problem is that there’s no actual plan to save the church. It certainly is beautiful and I’m sure it will be missed. But unless there’s going to be a Presbyterian resurgence in manhattan, what’s the alternative?

This ad is kind of painful to watch (but it’s a political ad, so…) That being said. Seeing all the YIMBYs get mad at it is weird to me. It seems normal to want to preserve an old church. I don’t get pointedly associating your brand with historic demolition.

@staysaasy they finally have the time to tweak agent configurations

I've got a few friends who are completely Hermes/Claw botted out and they swear it's changed their lives, but at least from the outside their lives don't look different at all

@EricMoo47406033 @akses_0x00 if passkeys could get shared or migrated they wouldn't have a security advantage over passwords. And you can make as many passkeys as you want in as many password managers as you like

@akses_0x00 Everything microsoft does is bad for users. Here's a hint, passkeys are locked to your password manager and cannot be removed making them not yours to control. Passwords are controlled by you and can be written down and moved between password managers.

Probably a good thing(?), and probably good to be aware this is going on too

@signulll and actually I think Claude pulled this play smarter because they added Code to the Claude app... ChatGPT added Work to the Codex app. The old app is now abandoned isn't it?

@signulll Claude did it first. I actually struggle to think of any smart moves ChatGPT did before Claude (aside from the original launch), I can think of some stupid ones though.

openai using chatgpt to grow codex (aka “chatgpt work”) is roughly the same exact playbook instagram (fb) used to grow threads, with mostly the same mechanics. anytime someone updates the chatgpt app, they’re now a codex or “chatgpt work” user too by default. it’s smart. the facebook ethos is alive & well, even outside of facebook. no judgement, just stating the similarities which are quite undeniable.

@financedystop Well they can take out a loan, that's what upper middle class people do when they buy something expensive.

Upper-middle-class families are in a weird dead zone with college. They make too much to qualify for meaningful financial aid, but not enough to casually write $100,000 checks every year without it completely changing their life. So the kid looks rich on paper, gets little help, and the parents are expected to absorb the cost of a house down payment every single year. College pricing has also obviously become absurd.

@staysaasy I keep remembering how Marc Benioff declared 2025 the "Year of the AI agent" but, midway through 2026, nobody knows how to build an agent that reliably does anything useful besides coding.

115 years ago we had hundreds of different types of cars - steam powered, with or without steering wheels, with or without roofs, electric motors, everything under the sun. AI is basically at the same stage of the cycle, which is why all of these language models are all over the place in performance, cost, behavior. Eventually someone will discover the dominant form-factor and architecture (i.e. the 1996 Honda Civic), but until then it's going to be wild and crazy.

@saketme PMs can't stop making software for PMing.

Block moved all its documents to Notion two years ago. Huge upgrade over Confluence, but a lot of us still don't love it because it keeps trying to be an operating system instead of just... being a good document editor.

@matthewcp would you even trust another human to do that for you without some kind of back and forth?

The fact that you can't type into the chatbox of your choice "Book me a vacation to __ on August 15-22nd" and it just happen, instantly, shows how far behind we are on AI.

@brandur These concerns seem very valid for a downstream user utilizing software in a mission critical capacity.

It's telling that the critics of the Bun Rust rewrite can't point to problems with the result, and so attack perceived procedural issues. We've unfortunately reached a point where your average non-technical friend has better takes on technical subjects than your average HN user.

@jongeeting @JerusalemDemsas @TheArgumentMag Philly is not ready for center-left takes, West Willy would eat them alive.

Wow @JerusalemDemsas said she considered starting @TheArgumentMag in Philly but was worried the labor market couldn’t support it! God damn, can’t even compete for Substack company HQs 😭 open.spotify.com/episode/5G1J76…

@DavidKPiano That is the story with Teams, not at all with Slack. It was grassroots, winning over teams that then forced the enterprise to buy.

Slack and Microsoft Teams are proof that you don't need to be the best or most loved product to win You just have to win over one exec with the authority to force it on their entire organization

@Noahpinion @2AAtheist Would a world of self-driving cars take up more space than the status quo of drivers, taxis, rideshare?

@2AAtheist Flying cars use too much energy, self-driving cars are great for commuting but take up too much space for downtowns.

The entire reason NYC is fun is that it's built around trains. That's it. If other American cities built themselves around trains they'd be equally fun.

@EduardoRazettoB @signulll I like this approach, but I need to be at my laptop and can't share context with others. What's the cloud version of this?

@signulll Obsidian paired with QMD by Tobi Lutke. Let Claude do most of the setup

what app do you guys use to create context for ai? e.g. where do you share your links to articles you want to remember, thoughtful/fun images or memes, things you want to read, things you want to watch (youtube vids, tiktok’s, reels), things you want to listen to, interesting tweets, spotify tracks, even clever musings you write to yourself, etc. this is all so fragmented right now. ideally you’d love a place where all of this magically lives & is highly queryable / organizable, etc. i.e. when you use claude/gpt, it should able to reference this database easily for context too. there needs to be a first class citizen here but i think it’s sorta missing.

@uriahz @ChuckFlay @HedgeDirty you cant build without capital

@ChuckFlay @HedgeDirty capital doesn't build anything at all

The lesson here is: if you settle for 0.5% less growth because you think you've got it made, in 20 years you'll find yourself on the B team, in 40 you'll a be moribund backwater, and in 60 you'll have fallen so far it doesn't even occur to anyone you used to be a big deal

@staysaasy same dynamic is killing journalism and politics

The most gross thing I’ve seen in my career is people prioritizing their personal brand over their company/team.