The Archive

Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare , per se, but they’re occasional . If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out. I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my best I’m moving from song to song. — John Gruber , responding to my blogging tips Tags: john-gr...

Hank Green, a popular YouTuber and science communicator, said he is stepping back from production amid intense criticism over his use of AI. Green described his AI usage as "not healthy," but stressed that he used it for finding research sources and not to write scripts. Much of the ensuing firestorm in this corner of the internet has centered on how a creator can square a brand built on authenticity and credibility with a technology trained on the (often uncompensated) works of others, and which has a well-known tendency to generate plausible-sounding falsehoods. Some attention has fallen on...

Running a dedicated Kubernetes cluster per team often results in more isolation than an organization requires. While one cluster can be successfully shared... Running a dedicated Kubernetes cluster per team often results in more isolation than an organization requires. While one cluster can be successfully shared across many teams, the coordination costs increase as the number of teams grows. Challenges include conflicting CRD versions, overlapping RBAC, and no clean way to carve GPU capacity into team-level budgets. At a certain scale… Source

Edward “Bud” Cole speaks in Japan in 2023. | Image: Jun Sato/WireImage Fender CEO Edward "Bud" Cole gave an interview to T3 in May celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster with comments on AI and music that initially flew under the radar. But it has started making the rounds recently, pouring more fuel on an already raging fire of bad PR following the company pissing off basically the entire guitar-playing community by sending cease-and-desist letters to builders, claiming copyright of the Stratocaster body shape. Some influential guitar YouTubers have even said they're done buying ...

Green offered a remarkable apology, saying that "the level of dopamine that I've been getting from interacting with LLMs ... is not healthy for me or good for the world."

Study shows LLM-generated Kubernetes security patches improve when prompted with runtime service topology context rather than isolated KSPM findings.

Uber is also investing in Travis Kalanick's company Atoms, which has made gauzy claims about using industrial AI to modernize the world.

Deep neural network regression under covariate shift from dependent data using quantile and Huber loss.

Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.

Fine-tuned SHuBERT-ByT5 model for real-time sentence-level sign language translation achieving BLEU 15.9 on test set.

The popularity of Spotify Wrapped has kicked off a wide range of year-in-review features, on apps from YouTube to Uber - and now, the lookback trend has come to AI. Anthropic on Thursday announced a "reflect" feature for its Claude chatbot, allowing users to see an analysis of their usage data over the past month, three months, six months, or year. Anthropic bills the reflection dashboard as a way to "see your patterns and shape them," the company wrote in a blog post. It begins with a summary of an individual's key topics brought up with Claude, as well as types of tasks they delegate and th...

A scan of an imaging phantom, segmented to validate how cleanly structures separate under controlled conditions. | Image: Midjourney Medical Midjourney has shown more of its futuristic medical scanner. It still hasn't shown much proof it works. The AI startup, best known for generating images, released a behind-the-scenes video of its dunk-tank ultrasound scanner, which it plans to deploy in spas and hopes will transform medicine with cheap, detailed, radiation-free imaging. The nearly 20-minute tour comes from tech YouTuber Marcin Plaza, who also happens to be an engineer at the company. Pla...

The hire marks OpenAI's latest push into India, expanding offices, partnerships and hiring.

Bilevel optimization (BLO) is fundamental to hierarchical decision-making but suffers from critical instability under heavy-tailed stochastic noise. Existing variance-reduction techniques typically rely on myopic magnitude checks, which fail to distinguish informative geometric signals from impulsive outliers. To resolve this, we propose \textbf{RQ-TTSA} (Robust Quantile-guided TTSA), a distribution-aware framework that leverages historical gradient buffers to estimate rolling quantiles for adaptive Huber-style clipping, effectively preserving local optimization geometry while strictly boundi...

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]

The best Stratechery content from the week of June 1, 2026, including Google and Microsoft, YouTubers taking over Hollywood, and a guide to the NBA Finals.

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular token-burning coding agents were about to become. Natalie Lung for Bloomberg: The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. That means spending on one tool doesn’t have a bearing on the budget for anot...

Uber's cutback has occurred after the company had reportedly encouraged staff to use AI as much as possible.

YouTubers are ruling the box office, and it shouldn't be a surprise: succeeding on YouTube is a much higher bar than the gates that currently govern Hollywood.

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it. — Daniel Jalkut , via John Gruber Tags: ai

The reported Uber story is so on brand it almost reads like satire. Incredibly useful tool, slightly magical workflow, then finance walks in with a flamethrower in April. If they really finished the year's claude code budget by month four, that does not mean claude code is bad. It means the usage pattern changed faster than procurement math did. Claude is good enough at coding that people stopped treating it like autocomplete and started treating it like a coworker that never sleeps. That is exactly where the cost curve gets weird. A dev asks for a refactor. Claude reads context, plans, edi...

The cold-start problem In production inference deployments, demand fluctuates over time, requiring inference replicas to scale elastically. However,... In production inference deployments, demand fluctuates over time, requiring inference replicas to scale elastically. However, cold-starting inference workloads on Kubernetes can take several minutes. During that time, GPUs are allocated but idle, generating no tokens and serving no requests. This delay increases the risk of service level agreement (SLA) violations during traffic spikes… Source

Uber president Andrew Macdonald (pictured) says its “hard to draw a line” between AI spending and deliverable features. | Photo: Zed Jameson/Bloomberg via Getty Images After reportedly exhausting its annual AI budget just four months into 2026, Uber is now questioning whether it's actually seeing meaningful returns on its investments. In an interview with Rapid Response, Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said the company isn't seeing a connection between rising token consumption for Claude Code and more useful features being delivered to consumers. "That link is not ...

Maximizing the value of AI infrastructure demands deep visibility into GPU utilization. Yet many platform teams running AI workloads on Kubernetes operate with... Maximizing the value of AI infrastructure demands deep visibility into GPU utilization. Yet many platform teams running AI workloads on Kubernetes operate with limited visibility into how their GPUs are used. Most don’t know who’s consuming them, how much memory is in use, and whether Kubernetes pods are pending or silently idle. Without a signal, GPU fleets are routinely underutilized and slow to… Source

Uber integrated OpenAI models into AI assistants and voice features to optimize driver earnings and rider booking across its marketplace.

Y Combinator owns approximately 0.6% of OpenAI, valued at ~$5B at current $852B valuation.

We knew at some point Tim Cook would step down from his position as Apple's CEO. Over the last year, it has become increasingly obvious that John Ternus was his likely successor. The news this week was still a surprise, though - and this year's succession could lead to some important changes at the most influential company in tech. Verge subscribers, don't forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball's John Gruber to talk ab...

Surprise! StrictlyVC San Francisco, which will kick off this year’s events lineup for TechCrunch on April 30 at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, is getting a new addition to its increasingly stacked lineup of speakers. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga will join the rest of the lineup to discuss operating at scale in the age of AI.

Claude users can access more apps with Anthropic's AI now thanks to new connectors for everything from hiking to grocery shopping. Anthropic already supported connecting numerous work-related apps to Claude, like Microsoft apps, but this expansion focuses on personal apps like Audible, Spotify, Uber, AllTrails, TripAdvisor, Instacart, TurboTax, and others. Some of these apps, such as Spotify, already have similar connectors in OpenAI's ChatGPT. Once an app is connected, Claude will suggest relevant connected apps directly in your conversations, like using AllTrails for hike recommendations. A...