Posts, newsletters, book notes, and travel stories by Rico Trebeljahr
Last week passed so fast, I can barely believe that it was real. But I keep the memories of dancing to Rage Against the Machine, the soft embraces of the people I met, the bittersweet goodbyes, and the warmth still lingering in my chest. Sardinia was a wild mix.
I paid 200€ for Claude Code, and in one week, I built something that should have taken me two years. The result is playtiao. com: a digital two-player board game, with matchmaking, AI opponents, rankings, tournaments, tutorials. Tested. Documented. Production-ready. ~192.
In this postcard: Lunar New Year in Hanoi, hitchhiking to Cat Ba Island, rusty towers in Bac Son valley, the Ban Gioc waterfalls, and a small reflection on kindness and reciprocity. I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn. At some point during the Tet dinner.
Hey there my dear friends, it is really hard to write these newsletters regularly. I want to write about things that pass through my mind, like the stream of consciousness that is always there, producing interesting and often novel thoughts and ideas, connecting knowledge.
Turn Your Life into Art - Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground is a beautiful book about how to design powerful experiences that are capable to change the life trajectories of other people by engaging parts of their subconscious.
Hey there my dear friends, I am still gathering material for my Collection of Beauty, and it is growing rapidly. . . maybe a bit too rapidly. Every other day, I hunt for beautiful art, finding things from Wikimedia Commons, learning about artists I had never known before.
Hey there my dear friends, many of you wrote me warm words after getting the last edition of this Newsletter, and I am happy to receive every single one of them. It makes me fill up with a warm and fuzzy feeling of gratitude, friendship, and connectedness.
Hey there my dear friends, it's been a long time since the last Edition of this newsletter came out. And I feel sad about this, I really do. The truth is, I got annoyed by the current hype cycle of AI.
This book was a bit of a disappointment. Having heard so much about it, and read about it before it seemed like a book full of wisdom of how to run a company.
This book is an interesting dive into what the word love means and how it has mostly lost all meaning because people use the word love for all kinds of things. And in doing so they abuse the word quite a lot to mask things that are not loving at all.
The War of Art is a book about fighting the enemy within, the Resistance, born out of fear (of success, failure, rejection, being wrong etc). This Resistance tries to keep us from creating art, with all kinds of self destructive tricks. We engage it in battle, every day, again.
Anything You Want is a book about how business can (and maybe should? ) be conducted. Focusing on what is fun and meaningful, rather than in what is most effective or "the right way" or "industry standard".
Your Music and People by Derek Sivers is a guide to how to become successful in the music industry. It's about being professional, yet different and human and not losing the goal of what you want. As such, it has a lot of wisdom to offer.
Hell Yeah or No is a book about small ideas that have a profound impact on day to day live. It is showing different ways of clarifying "what you actually want" and inspecting why you want those things in order to live a beautiful and psychologically rich life.
Truth means objective truth. True for everybody, everywhere, forever. There are not many things that fit this category. Instead we should focus on what is useful to us. And judge ideas based on their merit, not their "truth".
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time, OpenAI unveiled their newest and most powerful model yet, while Google has released the successor to their Genie models, and Meta gave a peek into their ambitions for the age of superintelligence. As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with an AI running a small store business at Anthropic, an update to what Neuralink is up to, and a smartphone-optimized LLM of the Gemma family by Google. As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a novel model by Google Deepmind that understands how single-nucleotide alterations affect genomes, an improved voice generation model by Elevenlabs, and alarming findings on agentic misalignment by Anthropic. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a novel design for self-improving AI coding agents, an essay by Sam Altman about how AGI is already here, and a novel interactive world generation model by Odyssey. As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. The last two weeks have been crazy with announcements from different companies. Google IO happened, Anthropic released Claude 4.0, and OpenAI acquired a company for 6.5 billion to create AI consumer products... As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a new generalist robot action model by Physical Intelligence, an introduction to Vibe Marketing by Greg Isenberg, and an essay on the idea of cellular alchemy and how we are beginning to unravel how different cell types transform into one another. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a video essay on things AI will never understand, OpenAI announcing o4-mini, and a paper on increasing temporal consistency for AI video generation. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn!
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with Google's new Alpha Evolve system, showing that AI can solve hard novel problems, Continuous Thought Machine, a new brain-inspired approach for reasoning AI from Sakana, and some interviews from Sequoia's AI Ascent event. As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with the latest iteration of Google's Gemini Model, a detailed forecast scenario for where AI (and the world) is heading, and how AI crawlers are DDOS attacking public infrastructure. As always I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn!
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with Google advancing the state of art for robotics with Gemini, Manus—a new and powerful Chinese autonomous AI agent, and the Nvidia GTC keynote. As always I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a computer made out of living neurons by Cortical Labs, the release of Claude 3.7 and the impressive Claude Code by Anthropic, and the arrival of Open AI's GPT 4.5 codenamed Orion. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn!
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with an announcement of the new Helix AI powering Figures robots, Microsoft's Majorana—a novel quantum computing architecture, the announcement of Grok3 by xAI, and much more. As always I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn.
In this tutorial, we will create a fragment shader editor, similar to ShaderToy with React Three Fiber. We will use the awesome codemirror package and a few other neat tools to help make our lives easier. Along the way.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time, with a documentary on the privatization of space exploration, a Lex Fridman interview with Semianalysis, a much faster 3D from image generation model, and OpenAI's announcement of Deep Research. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with a fair bit of politics around AI, a system by Microsoft that can create novel materials with specific properties and constraints, and Deepseek's R1–an open-source LLM from China that rivals OpenAIs o1. As always I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with an article by Sam Altman reflecting on where OpenAI is heading, the Nvidia CES Keynote by Jensen Huang, and things we (or Simon Willison in particular) have learned about LLMs in 2024. As always I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time, with the announcement of o3 by OpenAI, new video and image generation model releases from Google, and research by Anthropic showing that today's AI will fake alignment even if not explicitly told to do so.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. These last two weeks have been super packed with announcements. Google has released an insane amount of new things, while OpenAI is doing 12 consecutive days of demos, and the New York Times had its Deal Book Summit. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn!
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with booknotes for the book Innate, better AI image editing tools by Black Forest Labs, and an insanely good AI 3D generation model by Nvidia, as well as an article on the limitations of reasoning models like o1. As always I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with booknotes on the Web of Meaning, a new agentic framework published by Microsoft, and Robots that can sense touch more similar to what humans can do. As always I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
This book details how our personalities and behavioral traits such as intelligence are influenced by our genes. Mitchell argues that we have traits that are to a certain degree innate and dives deep into the scientific literature explaining how we know that this is true. Yet.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. The last few weeks have been absolutely bonkers again regarding things that have happened in the AI world. New tools for music creation, AIs using computers, GitHub Copilot improvements, and more. As always I hope you enjoy this edition of Live and Learn.
People often ask me how I can do so many different things, and be so productive. . . some even tell me that I am very disciplined. But yet, when I think about myself I don't consider myself to be very disciplined at all. My willpower to resist things is often zero.
The talks about AI have intensified greatly in the last few years since ChatGPT was first launched and since then generative AI tools like Midjourney, Udio, and Runway have taken the world by storm.
The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent is trying to give people a new worldview focusing on harmony, interconnection and cooperation, instead of competetion and exploitation.
When I think about influential internet people in my life, I can assemble a list: a sort of "guide" through the internet, showing the route that I took. A route that links to people who heavily influenced my decision making, my thinking.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with an article by Dario Amodei on the benefits of AI, the fifth Starship flight by SpaceX, and two new video models, one by the University of Tokyo and one by Adobe. As always, I hope you enjoy this Edition of Live and Learn!
In this book Kevin Mitchell explains how evolution produced living things that can make choices for their own reasons and why this means that we have free will, even if our cognitive machinery is entirely based on the physical instantiation of our brains.
I want to get back into painting but the one thing that always bothered me with my old acrylic paints is that they never really covered each other well. So I set out to test which is the best yellow I can find on Amazon.
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This one is absolutely packed with exciting news and announcements from Meta, Google, and OpenAI. We have crazy AR glasses, AIs designing chips, creating videos and podcasts, and a lot more. The last 2 weeks have been crazy, so let's dive in!
Waking up in the sand dunes in the early morning, I am freezing. It's gotten cold overnight, and condensation water is dripping from the walls of my tent, wind tearing at the fabric. But it's time to head out and leave. I love how easy it is to pack up the simple Decathlon tent.
Walking in the morning after the last two days were spent recovering in bed from the stomach flu I had caught felt wonderful. I woke up early because I knew that I wanted to walk a long way today.
Today was a very slow day. Sick and tired, still having stomach cramps, I lay in bed for most of the day in my small hostel room. But during the middle of the day, I started to feel a bit better, so I went outside to see the beautiful coastline of Porto Covo.
Leaving the small hostel in the early morning hours with a new friend was exciting. We knew where we wanted to go and that it was far, but we were also excited for a day full of beautiful conversations, hiking, and stunning landscapes, so with our backpacks squarely on our backs.
Yesterday I arrived in Sines. It's a beautiful little Portuguese city near the ocean, and I slept in a wonderful little but expensive (35€ per night for one person) hostel named Origens Hostel. The view from the rooftop terrace had a funny geometry.