The Monthly Dispatch - The Lighter Summer Edition
Major model releases while an OpenAI test agent escaped its sandbox to hack Hugging Face and 1,300+ frontier lab employees called for slowing AI progress.
The Aspiring Nerd
Unfiltered opinions, tech rants, and digital musings—welcome to The Aspiring Nerd, where irregular posting is the only constant.
Latest posts
The Monthly Dispatch - June 2026
US government restricts frontier AI models while Anthropic and OpenAI file for IPO, SpaceX acquires Cursor , and Claude caught embedding fingerprinting us.
Wait, Midjourney Is Building a What Now?
Midjourney is apparently building a full-body ultrasonic scanner spa. It sounds ridiculous, inspiring, and a little too Gattaca for comfort.
The Monthly Dispatch - May 2026
Talent, compute, and supply chains. May 2026 brought Karpathy to Anthropic, 220K SpaceX GPUs to Claude, enterprise joint ventures from both frontier labs, a brutal Starlette CVE, and a fresh diagnosis: tech CEOs have AI psychosis.
Quoting Sameer Al-Sakran: Welcome to the strip mining era of open source security
Open source security faces an AI-driven vulnerability gold rush.
Notes from inside China's AI labs
Discover how China's AI research culture differs from Western labs.
The Monthly Dispatch - April 2026
April 2026 AI roundup: OpenAI-Microsoft restructure, AWS partnership, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, major security breaches, and the wildest model leaks yet.
The Monthly Dispatch - March 2026
New models everywhere, agents getting hijacked in creative ways, the human cost of AI overload, and Anthropic's leaked Mythos project.
Curious & Confused: TIL in February 2026
Model releases everywhere, AI agents going rogue, Anthropic refusing the Pentagon, OpenAI signing the deal.
Quoting Ethan Mollick: A Lot is Going to Change
Ethan Mollick warns that dismissing AI hype means missing the chance to shape dramatic changes already underway.
AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
AI tools don't reduce workload—they intensify it through faster pace, broader tasks, and extended hours.
Curious & Confused: TIL in January 2026
January 2026 brain dump covering AI agents, infosecurity threats, OpenAI's ad plans, and a few delightfully weird corners of the internet.
Moltbook is fascinating, and kind of terrifying
Watching AI agents interact on Moltbook is fascinating, weird, and a bit concerning.
Hilary Gridley's AI Steering Wheel
The AI Steering Wheel transforms vague instructions like "simpler" or "ambitious" into specific, actionable commands that LLMs actually understand.
The Camera You Have on Hand: Using Codex Web to Act on Ideas Instantly
Learn how Codex Web lets you build and deploy projects instantly from your phone—no desk setup required.
Quoting Ethan Mollick: Managing Agents is Really a Management Problem
Managing AI agents requires the same skills as managing people or products, that's why product managers excel at getting results from LLMs.
Quoting Jason Gorman: The Future of Software Development is Software Developers
Have you ever asked an LLM to do the same task in different languages and gotten wildly different results?
My Writing Workflow: From Reading to Publishing
Learn how a curator-first workflow helped increase blog output using Feedly, Raindrop, and a custom Astro CMS to capture, shape, and publish.
From 9 Posts to 47: Building, Breaking, and Learning With AI in 2025
My 2025 review: from building real projects with LLMs to exploring security risks, prototyping, and the philosophical impact of AI on work and creativity.
Curious & Confused: TIL in December 2025
December's tech discoveries: dependency cooldowns, AI criticism frameworks, MCP apps, normalization of deviance in AI, orbital data centers, and more
Quoting Bryan Newbold: Why Leaving X Makes Sense
Bryan Newbold's quote captures why leaving X matters—network effects work both ways, and institutions moving to Bluesky could trigger the tipping point.
Quoting Johann Rehberger: The Normalization of Deviance in AI
Discover how the normalization of deviance threatens AI systems (or why companies gradually accept risky shortcuts)
Quoting The Resonant Computing Manifesto
I'm passionate about AI and LLMs, and I genuinely believe they could transform our world for the better. But I'm also a sarcastic realist who knows there are serious risks and challenges. I've struggl...
Curious & Confused: TIL in September - November 2025
A curated collection of tech discoveries from September-November 2025, covering AI developments, security threats, and privacy frameworks
A First Look at Prototyping With Gemini 3 and Google AI Studio
How Gemini 3 and Google AI Studio revolutionize prototyping.
Quoting Elena Verna: My beef with AI credit pricing
Elena Verna critiques AI credit pricing models and urges product teams to rethink how they charge for AI-powered features.
Experimenting with Codex CLI, Agents.md, and PRDs
First impressions using Codex CLI with Agents.md and PRDs to speed product work and code experiments without another subscription.
Quoting Geoffrey Litt: Code Like a Surgeon
Geoffrey Litt compares effective coding with AI support to a surgeon working with a skilled team, staying hands-on with the core.
On Vibe Coding Cleanup as a Service
Reflecting on the business of cleaning up AI-generated code and why vibe-to-production services are becoming lucrative.
Curious & Confused: TIL in July - August 2025
A roundup of my July–August rabbit holes: AI tools, odd ideas, and quick notes captured before they vanish.
Quoting Michael Bassili: I Miss Using Em Dashes
Michael Bassili laments losing em dashes to safety filters and how AI tooling reshapes writing habits for bloggers.
Quoting Bruce Schneier: We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs
Bruce Schneier argues we still lack defenses against malicious LLM inputs and outlines why current security approaches fall short.
Prototyping a Tag Manager Component with ChatGPT and Cursor
Building a tag manager component for a blog CMS using ChatGPT for UI prototyping and Cursor for implementation, with LLM-powered tag suggestions.
Quoting Anu Atluru: Doomprompting Is the New Doomscrolling
Highlighting Anu Atluru's take on doomprompting—how short, lazy prompts make us passive creators and duller conversationalists.
GPT-5 First Impressions
Testing GPT-5 in Cursor to ship version history features quickly, with thoughts on speed, accuracy, and AI-assisted coding.
What is Slopsquatting?
Explaining slopsquatting—the tactic of registering fake packages that LLMs hallucinate, priming supply-chain attacks.
Quoting Orta Therox: Programming’s ‘Introduction to Photography’ Moment
Orta Therox frames AI-assisted coding as programming's photography moment, where new tools reshape craft rather than replace it.
Quoting Vincent Schmalbach: My LLMs Have Personalities
Vincent Schmalbach personifies his LLMs like quirky interns, comparing ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok personalities.
Curious & Confused: TIL in May - June 2025
Notes from May–June explorations: AI agents, security quirks, regulation chatter, and context engineering experiments.
Quoting Simon Willison: Identify, solve, verify
Simon Willison's identify–solve–verify mantra on why humans remain essential to guide, debug, and validate LLM-generated work.
Quoting John Rush: Building a Personal AI Factory
John Rush shares how he builds a personal AI factory with Claude Code, MCP, and agents, mirroring my own coding workflow.
Quoting Simon Willison: The lethal trifecta for AI agents
Simon Willison outlines the lethal trifecta for AI agents—private data, untrusted content, and external communication risks.
Quoting Devansh: Fine-Tuning LLMs is a Huge Waste of Time
Devansh argues fine-tuning LLMs is destructive overwriting. Use RAG, adapters, or prompt engineering instead.
Curious & Confused: TIL in April 2025
April 2025 learnings: panoptic segmentation, LLM grounding, EU AI Act, vision-language models, and prompt versioning.
Quoting Sean Goedecke: Debugging, emotional resilience, and mental models
Sean Goedecke on why debugging is emotionally challenging—it breaks our comforting illusions of control and understanding.
Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is kinda scary
OpenAI's o3 model can identify photo locations—a powerful but dystopian capability that raises serious privacy concerns.
Quoting Drew Breunig on Domain Experts & Developers
Drew Breunig on how AI is flipping the script: coding is becoming commodified while domain expertise becomes the real differentiator.
How secure is MCP, really?
Exploring the security risks of MCP and why it may not be production-ready. Key vulnerabilities include shell access and secret exposure.
Matt Webb, Interview for People and Blogs:
Matt Webb on why blogging is a political act: owning your words free from algorithmic control and platform values.
Curious & Confused: TIL in March 2025
A brain dump of interesting discoveries from March 2025: MCP, chain of draft, Perlin noise, and other fascinating concepts.