Luke

New Zealand summer thread (This was Hāhei Beach in February 2025)

New Anthropic research: Teaching Claude why. Last year we reported that, under certain experimental conditions, Claude 4 would blackmail users. Since then, we’ve completely eliminated this behavior. How?

@RealChalamet Mordor mentioned 🔔

Auckland rain (downpour style) is pretty wild tbh

Can’t fault this logic…

So, @comet browser deals with popups (cookie banners etc). This might be its best feature.

@TheStalwart It seems when an unstoppable force (the Standard and Poor's 500 index driven by 10-15 "AI stocks") meets an immoveable object (American political parties): number go up

Stocks are up

I guess it's because it's easy to produce and publish a newsletter, and even lots of long form video (incl podcasts, review videos, short documentaries). But a good movie, or a quality novel require work before the finished product, so need some risk taken up front by a publisher

Seems strange that we have self-publishing in near-live video (TikkyTokkies), long form essays (Subst*ck), and ~documentaries (YouTube) but are not even close for novels Maybe a few big novels are self-published, but most are still agent + publisher + printing press

Finally getting stuck into The Electrotech Revolution by @ember_energy. This reframing helps when the zeitgeist pushes against morality in energy policy Summary: energy generation, connection, and use is and will continue to be electric due to economics, physics, and geopolitics

Strategists love this one simple trick (making positive forward protections that hold up in practice)

@emollick Butter futures

Hey Claude: "Sentient crabs have emerged from the depths and are causing the apocalypse. But work inside my company must go on. Create a powerpoint for the most prosaic and boring meeting that only somewhat alludes to the Crabpocalypse outside." (It went with pretty dark humor)

We live at a very unusual time

@laserboat999 @substack @chrisbest I dunno. People used to start with a red paper clip before getting the house. Now it’s just “where’s my sports car?”

@shl Very cool opportunity. In person in SF? All dev is open source or retain some Gumroad people to work on it? I've seen companies get annoyed with limited customisation options of Upwork, let alone the lock in. Would be interesting to see if there's a connection to sourcing too.

Looking for a CEO. With 30+ customers and $100K in ARR, Flexile needs someone who enjoys doing sales and marketing on top of shipping product. Send me an email if you’re interested - sahil@gumroad.com (We’d spin out an LLC, invest $1m, and you’d have majority equity ownership.)

@goodworkmb Another win for Big HR 😞

How work affects your brain

The King Charles coins are sloshing around in circulation now (I stumbled upon this 2025 bee £1 in the last 2 weeks) Need to build out the full set. 20p (puffin) and 1p (squirrel) are looking nice (I’m a coin collector not a royalist)

@annarmonaco Cool. Only integrates with Luma for now?

Ran a quick enrichment on our event attendees: - Find linkedin and current role - Interest in design, engineering, or both - Personal portfolio analysis

Data from the @FT here: ft.com/content/ffa16e…

I think it’ll be cool if this cycling boost persists. Riding a bike through London is very fun. And good for you! How to fund public transport is another issue…

During this week’s London tube strikes Lime say they did 50% more trips than the week earlier on Tuesday morning. Forest had 10x usual downloads. 73% more TfL bikes hired. Halfords (bikes and cars?) saw 30% rise in sales in London vs prior week.