May 2026 Links
Everything I read in May 2026, ordered roughly from most to least interesting.
How to Land a Frontier Lab Job: Vlad offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to maximize your chances of getting into one of the main AI labs. Remember, step-by-step doesn’t necessarily mean easy!
Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa: Travel report of two Belgian tourists travel across the DRC and refuse to pay bribes. A few thoughts: I’m shocked they held up against such hostile people in a country where laws aren’t that enforced (in one direction). The amount of I-deserve-money people is sad, but not necessarily surprising (?) in that they will do almost anything to get money because of how poor they are. Thank goodness for my paved roads. DRC has a lot of people.
Please be a giant dick, so we can ban you: I recently had to ban someone from a meetup, and this thought crossed my mind more than once leading up to the incident of the ban.
Where the goblins came from: “a powerful example of how reward signals can shape model behavior in unexpected ways, and how models can learn to generalize rewards in certain situations to unrelated ones.” This reminds me of Golden Gate Claude.
Every minute you aren’t running 69 agents, you are falling behind: There’s definitely some bleakness on my end of feeling like I’m falling behind. I don’t really know how to effectively run Claude Code, my job role isn’t super receptive to agents, etc. Hotz hits the nail on the head with this (although I disagree with some of his AI sentiments):
The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community. Not infinite, not always needs more, just more than you consume. That’s enough, and avoid people or comparison traps that tell you otherwise. The world is not a Red Queen’s race.
LEGO’s 0.002mm Specification and Its Implications for Manufacturing: Details on LEGO’s manufacturing tolerances and processes.
RFC 454545 — Human Em Dash Standard: “This document proposes the Human Em Dash (HED), a Unicode character visually indistinguishable from the traditional em dash (—) but encoded separately for the purpose of indicating probable human authorship. Recent proliferation of automated text generation systems has produced a measurable increase in the frequency and enthusiasm of em dash usage. This trend has created ambiguity for human writers who have historically relied upon the em dash as a stylistic device.”
Kalshi’s Favorite Lie: Kalshi strategically lies to make themselves seem like a “better person” than the typical gambling house, when in fact (well, opinion), they’re not. Kalshi makes a fee off of each trade.
Griffin Pinney: ULCA math PhD student who likes puzzles and is consistently one of the first to solve Jane Street’s monthly puzzles.
The Jevons Paradox and Insatiable Humans: A few (potentially naive and/or uninformed) jumbled thoughts/responses in no particular order:
My rebuttal to the “creates new and innovative jobs” argument is that we still needed human labor for those jobs, whereas now the models are getting close to, if not surpassing, human-level performance, eliminating the need for human labor because, well, AI can just do that too! People seem to miss that productivity tools are not the same as outright labor. Spreadsheets can 4x the accounting profession headcount, but it doesn’t matter if more robots are right there waiting to snatch them up!
I’m curious how the lower intelligence --> more use of it works out. Does this mean companies will just keep employment constant and scale productivity via LLMs? Or reduce employment to keep productivity the same via LLMs? I’d unconfidently predict the latter given there is only so big of a market for them to capture and they’d rather have better margins than risk the diminishing returns of getting more market share. (Again, definitely out of my element here!)
Will going to college become an even stronger status signal than it already is? John Doe going to college and studying X exhibits some pretty strong confidence: “I’m studying CS despite the annihilation of the X profession because I know I’m better than LLMs”. There’s also a revealed preference angle of people saying “go the trades route, it’s better!” and still encouraging their kids to get a four-year degree (I haven’t seen this yet, but would bet it exists).
I appreciate and/or like his examples of where AI will be a boon, what specific fields should prepare for, and him making it clear that we don’t know what will pop up.
Potentially-funny side note: I plugged in the first section of the Jevon’s Paradox paper into Pangram because it sounded a bit fishy, and sure enough, 100% AI generated. The rest of the paper was mixed around 50/50, so maybe he was just doing the first part to make a point. But on second thought, isn’t he almost making the point that his job could be obsoleted..???
A day in the life of a quant researcher at Citadel Securities in Miami: Pretty self-explanatory. Super smart math guy who works a lot and exercises a bit in his free time.
Dating Net Worth: “A calculator that estimates dating market value from age, attractiveness, height, income, and personality — with coefficients informed by published research on dating preferences. Half science, half art. For entertainment.”
The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon: RCT stayed GOATed in the video game community. Incredibly fun, super optimized with no wasted lines of code. I’m curious of SOTA LLMs will be able to match the performance? Maybe that would be a good benchmark.
Map of Shark Attacks in the US: A Des Moines zoo employee was bitten by a shark, hence the random dot in the middle of the midwest.
U.S. vs. Backpage indictment: I’m surprised that Backpage was openly advertising prostitutes in this day and age, but then again, some people have different risk tolerances or intelligence levels than others. I like how specific the details in the indictment are.
Kat Abughazaleh: American journalist, social media influencer, and politician.
A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there right now: I saw a funny tweet that said something like:
Someone once said there’s no such thing as a tall, high-earning incel. I retorted and said of course there is! Being a product manager at Meta is a thing!
A Dot a Day Keeps the Clutter Away: Visually weighting the boxes he uses the most by putting dots on them after he uses them.
Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold: “A US deep-sea treasure hunter who refused to disclose the location of a famed shipwreck’s gold coins has been released from prison after a decade, with 500 coins still unaccounted for.” While scummy, this may actually be the financially-correct thing to do? Assuming 1 oz per coin, that would be >$2MM, which is probably worth sitting in prison for for two years. That said, it’s difficult to put a price on the paranoia he’s likely to feel for the rest of his life!
Chris Donahue (general): Commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa and commander of Allied Land Command since 2024.