What I'm Reading: April

Tech

• Candidates are using hidden AI tools to pass interviews

  • Discussion on Hacker News... tl;dr - in-person interviews are the only reliable way to avoid this?

• Founder charged with fraud after AI shopping app actually found to be using humans in the Philippines

• Suffering-oriented programming - start simple with problems that cause you the most annoyance, then build complexity later on

• Warp - an intelligent terminal

• Arc - a browser with a slick AI integration

• Cloudflare fighting AI crawlers with AI by feeding them random garbage

• Chain-of-thought prompting elicits reasoning in LLMs

  • Although I tried this on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4o, and both did this by default, without the need for this sort of prompting (as both those models are reasoning models)

• Cline memory bank for storing LLM context across tasks

• I vibe-coded Opera support for a popular browser extension

Career

• The guide to equity compensation

• On proactive employees

• Moving forward by questioning assumptions and pivoting

• Comfort is costing you

• A UK housing planning permission startup's postmortem

• AI doesn't seem to have wage or labor impact so far

Etc

• Capital Trades - a website that tracks politicians' stock trading activity

  • And the Unusual Whales trading report, where the weighted portfolios of both Democrats and Republicans beat the S&P 500 in 2024

  • And in other suspicious trading news: someone bought a $2.5m zero-day option 29 minutes before Donald Trump posted that he was pausing most tariffs. The trader walked away with $70m.

• How to recognize woodpeckers by their sounds

• Tips for reducing screen time

• Bad systems, not bad workers, are to blame for declining service and job performance

  • Like UPS having better pay than FedEx leading to better delivery quality

• Looks like grad school applications will be up this year with young people fearing recession and a bad job market

• People who deactivated Facebook and Instagram reported slight improvements in happiness, depression, and anxiety metrics

• Don't let your lawyers use ChatGPT to write their briefs like Mike Lindell did... a judge found nearly 30 defective citations

• Heart disease deaths linked to chemicals in plastics