Cal Newport
FollowEverything Cal personally uses, recommends, or has created — plus things they don't recommend — sourced from their own show and appearances on other podcasts.
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"I'm not right now. There are certain things I do where Trello is the right tool. In particular, if it's a complicated project with multiple people involved, Trello is the right tool."
"Earlier this year, I switched to a new task management app. It's called Things 3. I spent $10 to buy a copy for my phone and then I spent $50 to buy a copy for my Mac."
"So I bought a Raspberry Pi. This then hooks into an Ethernet network switch."
"iPhone, Apple Music right there, constantly playing the songs. Like you get to a chapter like, 'Oh, I got to hear the song first.'"
"I bought a Hobonichi notebook. Not a Hobonichi Cousin, which is the planner she used because obviously I'm a big fan of my time block planner."
"Right now, I use Field Notes primarily, but I'm giving this Hobonichi a try."
"I am now moving over to running the open-source FPP Falcon controller software on a Raspberry Pi as my main controller."
"I got the vintage video game maintenance manual from 1980 for the Galaxian arcade cabinet because I'm taking out some of the circuit diagrams to frame."
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"The average worker receives 153 Teams messages. That's like Slack, Instant Messenger, per weekday. That adds up to 270 interruptions a day when you only have about 480 total minutes to work with."
"OpenClaw is an open-source framework that makes it easy for average people to write their own DIY AI agents without the careful safeguards and guard rails that commercial companies put into their products."
"Distraction in the workplace is driven by workplace communication tools like email and Slack."
"We still hear these arguments today, that if we don't let 12-year-olds in Australia be on TikTok, they won't be able to know about world events."
"I had read a snarky profile in Wired. There's this like famous mean profile of Brandon Sanderson from Wired magazine."
"it is written in the style of World War Z... I read World War Z. I really didn't like it. I don't like watching zombie movies"
"I have to go into this cold plunge to stimulate exactly this type of response or whatever it is"
Showing 96 of 234 recommendations
Clear filters"Here's what Thomas Friedman said in his widely read New York Times column."
"this was from last week I think in the New York Times. It was an op-ed that had a happy feel-good title. Mass hysteria, thousands of jobs lost. Just how bad is it going to get?"
"This one was brought to my attention by Gary Marcus. It's from the CEO of the AI company HuggingFace."
"If you go back and look at the release notes for Anthropic's earlier, less powerful Opus 4.6 LLM, they say their researchers used Opus to find over 500 exploitable zero-day vulnerabilities."
"Basically, the mood of much of the internet right now about Claude Mythos is that Anthropic just invented the Whopper supercomputer from the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie War Games."
"If we look at the technical non-expert line, we see that the performance of Mythos is near the top. It's actually not the best performance. GPT-5 does better than it."
"Anthropic recently announced a new LLM named Claude Mythos. They claimed it was so good at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in source code that they couldn't release it to the general public."
"A 5.1 billion active open model recovered the core chain of the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug."
"The researchers from IBM found that GPT-4 successfully exploited 87% of the vulnerabilities that it was presented."
"After about GPT-4, OpenAI had evidence that when they continued to make their models bigger, they stopped getting those big performance jumps."
"The jump from two to three and three to four were these impressive leaps"
"Eight out of eight models detected Mythos flagship FreeBSD exploit, including one with only 3.6 billion active parameters."
"I found a first edition, first printing of Jurassic Park. Was $2,000. That was a bridge too far."
"I found a second edition Andromeda Strain from 1970 that's signed by Crichton. 500 shekels."
"the kind of digital equivalent is a tool like the AlphaWrite... it's basically just like a keyboard and a small screen and all you do is just type a draft"
"Just last week, Axios wrote an article that was titled, 'AI is making college students change majors.'"
"This is a good article because Roger talks to an economist named Nathan Goldschlag."
"the first article was published online in February and it's part of the March print issue of the Atlantic and it was titled America isn't ready for what AI will do for jobs"
"Both of them drawing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
"Torsten Slok who is the chief economist at Apollo Global Management."
"Now, ChatGPT and other bots can do many of these chores."
"It'll send a prompt to the LLM saying here's the situation, just like you would do with ChatGPT"
"After all of the hype and stress and handwringing around LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and Claude."
"it's unclear how they're going to do this beyond putting ads on ChatGPT and Claude code subscriptions which they're currently losing money on"
"The one way I'll use ChatGPT is just sometimes instead of Google, right? Especially if I want like instructions for how to whatever change settings on something."
"I ran every single assignment through the three best models I could get my hands on from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini"
"These sort of AI tools for programming have been big since before ChatGPT came out."
"Chat GPT was made on from the very beginning the last half decade"
"Last summer, the Wall Street Journal published an article with an alarming headline."
"Here's a summary of their results from a Wall Street Journal article that came out last week."
"Examples of covert pursuit of misaligned goals flagged by human users on X.com"
"We saw this already with the OpenClaw framework, which allowed people to build their own custom applications that use LLMs to do personal assistant type roles."
"OpenClaw is a programming framework, basically like a collection of libraries you can use if you're writing a computer program that makes it easy for someone to write one of these agent programs."
"OpenClaw is an open-source framework that makes it easy for average people to write their own DIY AI agents without the careful safeguards and guard rails that commercial companies put into their products."