Things I Learned - 08 Nov 2026
This week, I learned: Facemorph.me implements face morphing via StyleGAN2 (among the best face morphing implementations I’ve seen) and exposes it via a free public site #ForNow. My reading from The Sequoia of Tomorrow: Money’s in the Bay Area. People, move there. Money’s in a few big winners. Maybe they can find them easy and don’t need to scout? Money’s in speed and fewer deciders. Partners don’t need to wait for and convince each other every Monday. Risky, but faster. Looks like you can use Codex via an API, since the OpenAI Agents 0.22.0-alpha.1 release is available. “This alpha introduces the embedded Codex harness in the OpenAI Agents SDK for JavaScript and TypeScript.” Via Daniel The amount I’m delegating to agents is small but growing. In Aug-Sep, a median session took Codex 3.3 minutes and only 4% of my prompts took 20+ minutes. In October, the median session took 7.5 minutes and 13% of my prompts ran 20+ minutes. ChatGPT image generation will be a separate quota from Codex #ForNow. Armin used Qwen3-TTS to detect voices. I ran a quick benchmark to see how well it did on my transcripts. Answer: Not very good. 32% precision, 84% recall. “Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side.” Also, “Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages.” Paul Graham Looks like we’ve learnt how to get a neuron to fire by shining a light on it. It’s called Optogenetics. Voice remixing is now available in Gemini 3.8 Flash and it did a pretty good job of replicating my voice as well as creating new voices based on a prompt. via X. Qwen3-TTS supports custom voices too and can run on your laptop with just 1.7B parameters. This (interestingly summarized) Machines of Loving Grace suggests factors that bottleneck intelligence (like in clinical trials, ) - and hence become the focus: People move slowly or impose constraints. Data isn’t available. Nature (biology, chemistry, engineering) works only so far. Nathan Baschez sees agents factories as the next step beyond “All employees use agents”. These are shared workflows maintained centrally that the organization can get work done with. That packages context (skills, prompts, docs, data) along with environment (tools, permissions). The main advantages are centralization (few experts/owners enable everyone) and execution (acting in the real world). WACZ seems to be the modern way to archive websites. Unlike MHTML, it can handle multiple pages. In the last 10 months (Jan-Oct 2026), I prompted Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Codex about 12,000 times. On average, I talk to AI ~40 times a day. That’s 80% of my “Talk to AI 50 times a day” recommendation. I still have some way to go. Phone spam marketing has reached an elevated level of obnoxiousness. I get calls from automated recordings often. But today, Airtel Black call me and put me on hold for two minutes. Wow! Then the music stopped and the line just hung. So, they put me on hold and ghosted me. And the reason I picked up the call was because their Internet was down - so a triple whammy! Not only have I started enjoying tea a lot, I quite look forward to it. Even to the point where a high point of my day is when someone serves me tea, unasked. As my daughter commented, I’m getting old. wacli is a CLI interface for WhatsApp. Unofficial, and works well #ForNow. There’s no clear, good, ChatGPT search / export CLI that I am comfortable with #ForNow. ChatGPT Mistakes I made Week ending 08 Nov 2026 ...