Latest
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AI Trends and Fun Demos: 2026 February Encyclopedia Edition
Today I had a blast sharing my new and improved slide deck “AI Trends and Fun Demos” with the team at Burris Logistics in Milford, DE. I’ve added tons of graphics and links, and the slides now comprise a full year of artificial intelligence. 262 slides! Burris Logistics has a special place in my heart.…
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2025–2026 Bay Bath 13: 10 minutes, 37.4° water, 35° air, 25 mph wind
Today was a ten-minute unrelenting barrage of salt water hitting my face and huge flakes of snow stinging my eyes. The waves knocked me backwards twenty yards in a matter of seconds. It was hilarious, and an exercise in breathing between gulps of water. Thanks to Chloe for coming as safety observer.
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I’m the proud owner of Ethan Mollick’s sold-out first-edition Volume 1 Parameters 0–1,459,999
Last week, Ethan Mollick from the Wharton School of Business, asked Claude Code to create a printed edition of the full parameters of GPT-1. Claude Code built a set of 80 700-page books containing the 117 million floating point numbers that comprise the weights for GPT-1, along with a guide for how to do inference…
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Local Media Association Podcast: “AI in 2026: How newsrooms can get more value without losing trust”
I had a great time on the Local Media Association’s podcast with Ryan Welton. We covered a lot of ground, including: 1. The “Raw Audio” Dictation Hack (Beyond Speech-to-Text)2. Why I Prefer “Context Dump” vs. “Persona” Prompting3. Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation (“Depthing”)4. Spatial Reasoning & “Emerging Intelligence”5. The Shift from “Creator” to “Processor”6. “Unstructured”…
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2025–2026 Bay Bath 10: 10 minutes, 28.8° water, 23° air temperature, 14 mph wind
Today may have been my favorite bay bath of all time. This also may be the coldest water I’ll experience, and thanks to tracking lots of data over the years, I felt safe and everything went well. The ice was pretty thick on my way into the water. It was high tide, and I had…
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AI News #121: Week Ending January 23, 2026 with 21 Executive Summaries
About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover image is inspired by A$AP Rocky’s “Helicopter” video, which made headlines last week because it used neural radiance fields, or Gaussian splatting, as one of the main technologies behind the video’s signature style. Since Figure Robotics was in the news this week, I swapped A$AP Rocky with a…
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AI News #119: Week Ending January 09, 2026 with 29 Executive Summaries
About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover theme is a nod to Anthropic’s iconic brand symbols. Every time Anthropic releases a product or publishes a blog post, they include a small illustration, abstract and simple, to go with it. The top story this week was the idea of Antropic’s AI models becoming self-improving, and the…
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AI News #118: Week Ending January 02, 2026 with 18 Executive Summaries
About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover image is a continuation of this newsletter’s 2025 New Year’s theme. Last year, I wanted a bittersweet “Auld Lang Syne” feeling, depicting the last generation of pre-AI humanity looking at one final New Year’s Eve through the eyes of an unknowing child. This year, the little boy has…
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AI News #117: Week Ending December 26, 2025 with 34 Executive Summaries
About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover image is a fun remix using a photo of actual wrapping paper from our family Christmas and a photo of my car after I ran into a deer. An eight-point buck jumped out in front of me. It’s a 10-year-old gray Honda Fit. I gave the wrapping paper…
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AI News #116: Week Ending December 19, 2025 with 43 Executive Summaries
About This Week’s Covers This week’s humanities reading is a short quote from a poem by Louise Glück: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” I thought that was pretty spectacular because it lines up with the way large language models are trained all at once and then released. After…
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2025-2026 Bay Bath 1: Ten minutes in 46.8 degree water and 42 degree air
An incredibly special guest helped me kick off the ‘25-26 bay bath season. A solid ten minutes in 46.8 degree water with my buddy!
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AI News #102: Week Ending September 12, 2025 with 29 Executive Summaries, Top 8 Links, and 1 Lonely Visual
About This Week’s Covers This week’s main cover is a collage of photos from my time outside recently. When I dropped my daughter off at college, I decided to take two months off of my newsletter in order to be present and reset. It’s currently the end of November 2025, even though I’m going back…
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Vail YOLO Adventure Part II: Reuniting with the Gore Range and Sending Off My Daughter 30 Years Later
In January 1994, my sophomore college roommate, Caleb, and I bought one way tickets to Vail Colorado, on a mission to be ski bums. We each had a suitcase, skis, and $300 in cash. No cell phones. No internet. No job. No house. No plan. You can read the first part here: My YOLO Vail…
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My YOLO Vail Story – 19 Years Old With a One Way Ticket and No Plan
In January 1994, my sophomore college roommate, Caleb, and I bought one way tickets to Vail Colorado, on a mission to be ski bums. We each had a suitcase, skis, and $300 in cash. No cell phones. No internet. No job. No house. No plan. There wasn’t much to research in advance, since there was…
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My friend Mike’s gift of love
When my dad died, I had to decide how I felt about death. To have my friend Mike call me the next day, and ask me to walk with him for the next three years as he approached death was a big challenge, because I was at a very dark point. Mike didn’t want me…
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Eulogy for Michael Bernstein, my buddy
Eulogy for Michael Bernstein, my buddy Wednesday July 2, 2025Central SynagogueNew York, NY GREETINGS Daph, Allie, Theo, Jana, Seth, Marsha..… Family and friends. Mike asked me to share a bit about who he was when he was younger. I met Mike our first semester in college. It was 1992. We were 18 years old. FRESHMAN…
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AI News #89: Week Ending June 13, 2025 with 33 Executive Summaries, Top 45 Links, and 7 Helpful Visuals
About This Week’s Covers This week’s newsletter category covers honor the passing of musical great Brian Wilson. Beyond music, Brian had an exceptionally tough life and I admire him as an incredibly gentle soul. Since Brian was such a big part of The Beach Boys, I asked GPT-o3 to create a rubric I could use…
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AI News #86: Week Ending May 23, 2025 with 18 Executive Summaries, Top 93 Links, and 12 Helpful Visuals
About This Week’s Covers This week’s covers celebrate my great friend Mike Bernstein, who introduced me to the Beastie Boys’ album “Paul’s Boutique” many years ago. I asked GPT-o3 to create a rubric I could use for batch producing derivative newsletter covers in the spirit of the Paul’s Boutique album cover. The main cover is…
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AI News #85: Week Ending May 16, 2025 with 25 Executive Summaries, Top 56 Links, and 10 Helpful Visuals
About This Week’s Covers This week’s covers are in honor of my great friend John Bayalis, who is an incredible painter, photographer, and New Order fanatic. A few years ago, John decided to paint all 64 official Joy Division and New Order releases on 3×3 inch canvases. I’m thankful to be the caretaker of more…
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Delaware Technical and Community College – Artificial Intelligence Keynote – Ethan Holland – April 2025
Here is the full slide deck from the keynote presentation, below. Let’s connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanholland/ Scroll down to view all 136 slides along with all videos and hyperlinks embedded in between slides as needed. Alternatively, here are two downloadable versions of the presentation:DelTech Keynote Ethan Holland April 17 2025.key (106.9 MB Apple Keynote)DelTech Keynote…
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AI News #82: Week Ending April 25, 2025 with 35 Executive Summaries, Top 67 Links, and 2 Helpful Visuals
About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover is a tribute to the 35th anniversary of Public Enemy’s classic album, “Fear of a Black Planet.” To make it relevant to artificial intelligence, I changed the theme to fear of the paper clip maximizer. The paper clip maximizer is a popular ethical warning where an innocent request…
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Always be kind. To everyone.
A reminder that you never know who you’re meeting. Fourteen years ago today, I presented at a conference with Sam Altman and John Battelle. Of everyone there, Sam was the nicest to me. He genuinely asked me questions and was kind. Everyone else was too cool for school. As the saying goes, ‘People only remember…
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Billie Eilish – Bag Guy
It’s the weekend. Normalize sharing fun things with your professional network. When I was at American Eagle Outfitters, I took a Strengths-Based Leadership test. I got the highest score in the company in creativity. In this case, creativity implies free association, not artistry or talent. Sounds cool, but this trait has been a colossal pain…
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Handmade memes had a posse
Back in the 90s, I used to make and trade stickers with Shepard Fairey before he founded OBEY Clothing. This is an old one my friend Tom found last week. I made it in honor of Swarthmore College president Al Bloom. These stickers ended up all over the world. Before people shared memes on the…
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Apple is pulling a Braveheart and can change the way we use phones whenever they choose
Update: Dec 15, 2024Making onscreen content available to Siri and Apple Intelligence | Apple Developer Documentationhttps://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/making-onscreen-content-available-to-siri-and-apple-intelligence I believe Apple is purposefully slowing their AI releases because the impacts would be too disruptive. Apple is sitting on a Large Action Model that could “use your phone for you”. It could use apps, navigate interfaces, and take…
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The AI Future: Exploring the Adjacent Possible with Emerging AI Solutions
I’m excited to have written an article in the latest issue of Delaware Lawyer magazine. It addition to forcing me to put ideas to paper, it was a fun opportunity to shout out Jeremiah Owyang, Alan D. Thompson, and Ethan Mollick in print. I wrote the piece in November with a Thanksgiving deadline. The issue came…
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2025–2026 Bay Bath 14: 11 minutes, 46.6° water, 39° air, 9 mph wind.
Today was likely the last sub-50° water of the year, and an almost-full moon was there to celebrate. Next week, I’ll go out one last time to say goodbye to my third winter of embracing the water outside with nature at sunset. In November, I’ll be scared of it again. And in March, I’ll be…
