Vol. I · No. 63SUN, JUN 21, 2026
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The butterfly effect in LLM social simulations. Relevant to how we write CLAUDE.md and system prompts.

Two persona prompts, identical content, same model (gpt-5.2). Only difference is formatting: one prose, one bullet points. In a 10-round Prisoner’s Dilemma the prose version cooperated \~96% of the time, the bullet version \~20%. A 76pp gap, p < 0.001. Same meaning, opposite behavior. Authors call it the butterfly effect in LLM simulations. The part that matters here: CLAUDE.md, system prompts, and memory are mostly declared self-description. If formatting alone moves behavior this much, two people with the same intent get different Claudes based on how they happened to write it up. Any...

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Elon, stop trying to make Grok happen

There is a harsh truth about Elon Musk's "truth-seeking" AI chatbot Grok: It's not very good, and not many people are using it. That's the takeaway of a new Reuters report, which found that Grok barely appears in federal records of how the US government used AI last year. It's not the only sign xAI's signature chatbot is in trouble, even as Musk puts it at the heart of what could be the biggest IPO in history. Reuters reviewed more than 400 examples of government AI use where specific vendors were named. Grok or xAI, it found, appeared in only three - each of those for basic uses like documen...

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2026.21: The Data Center Veto

Stratechery weekly roundup covering data center policy tensions, agent economics models, and tangential topics from May 2026.

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30 stories