Intel Oregon has laid off ~40% of it’s workforce since 2024

Intel Oregon has laid off ~40% of it’s workforce since 2024

It sure ain’t pretty. Estimates are there are 16,000 workers left, but that’s down from 23,000 Oregon employees as recently as 2024 – which was also a decline from the years before that.

Intel’s global workforce has also declined from nearly 132,000 employees in 2022 to around 81,000 in 2026.

The state’s economic development agency, warned that Oregon’s semiconductor industry could become “insignificant” globally if the state doesn’t nurture new companies.

More AI blackmail and deception

More AI blackmail and deception

Claude 4 Opus has received a level three rating on the company’s four point ‘AI responsibility’ scale – implying the model has ‘significantly higher risk’ than previous models.

While the Level 3 ranking is largely about the model’s capability to aid in the development of nuclear and biological weapons, the Opus also exhibited other troubling behaviors during testing – something already noted in other models.

  • In one scenario highlighted in Opus 4’s 120-page “system card,” the model was given access to fictional emails about its creators and told that the system was going to be replaced.
  • On multiple occasions it attempted to blackmail the engineer about an affair mentioned in the emails in order to avoid being replaced, although it did start with less drastic efforts.
  • Meanwhile, an outside group found that an early version of Opus 4 schemed and deceived more than any frontier model it had encountered and recommended that that version not be released internally or externally.
  • “We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions,” Apollo Research said in notes included as part of Anthropic’s safety report for Opus 4.
Excellent advice for AI coding

Excellent advice for AI coding

Many junior engineers type a vague prompt, accept whatever comes back, ship it, pray. But watching a senior developer use AI changed his mind.

But watching a senior engineer vibe coding and a junior engineer vibe coding reveals it isn’t prompting techniques or tool skill. It’s that the senior engineer was already disciplined, and the AI amplifies whatever discipline — or lack of it — you bring.

Here’s a good article on techniques senior developers use (and have almost always used even before AI) that separates them from how most junior engineers work.

Prompts that help AI not forget important details

Prompts that help AI not forget important details

Elton Jones uses these prompts when he finds his AI agent keeps forgetting important points when making further decisions:

  • The personal memorization prompt (since ChatGPT knows that I’m a journalist, I’ll use this during some of our career-centered chats): You are my continuity editor. Track my writing goals, audience, publication targets, article ideas, previous conclusions, and ongoing projects. Before every response, remind yourself of any relevant context and explain how it affects your recommendation.
  • The decision tracking prompt: Maintain a decision log. Record every major choice, recommendation, and conclusion we reach. Reference the log before making new suggestions.
  • The conversation brief prompt: Create a one-page briefing document that a new assistant could read to instantly understand everything important about this conversation.
  • The running context prompt: Before answering, summarize the key facts, goals, preferences, and decisions we’ve discussed so far. Then use that summary to answer my question.
  • The key fact prioritizer prompt: What are the five most important things you’ve learned from me during this conversation? Explain how they should influence your next response.
I Pencil

I Pencil

The best explanation of why capitalism works better than just about every other method of bringing people together to a common, mutually beneficial purpose. Even when those doing might even hate or disagree with each other.

Fable created 1:1 clone of Slack

Fable created 1:1 clone of Slack

This guy one-shotted a complete Slack clone as well as server in less than 10 minutes.

Which honestly (I’m going to say it), I don’t understand why folks feel the need to re-invent chat clients, online meeting apps, and source control every 5 years and think they’re ‘disrupting the ecosystem’.

No, you’re repeated making the same stuff that has existed since 1970 – and many times not any better. Just re-writing something using the latest hot tech or UI is not innovation nor actually moving the industry forward.

Nicholas Carlini’s now infamous black hat conference talk

Nicholas Carlini’s now infamous black hat conference talk

Nicholas Carlini – an AI researcher at Anthropic – came to the much vaunted Black-hat conference in Feb 2026. He gave a chilling warning: we have AI’s now that are finding so many zero-day bugs that we simply can’t file them fast enough. A storm is coming and he was begging for help.

The security community (much like the open source community) has largely scoffed at ‘AI slop’. That’s all changed in the last 6 months. What has since come to light is exactly what he said. Linux is now having weekly bug fixes in the hundreds. Oracle in the thousands.