Outsourcing Your Own Brain
While Instagram declares the polished feed dead, Stack Overflow collapses in freefall, and Claude 4.5 starts demanding human dignity.
Dear Friend,
First and foremost, let us wish you a happy New Year! May 2026 be nothing short of amazing in all the right ways. 🚀 And thank you all so much for responding to our short “I like…/I wish…/What if…” survey – we are incredibly grateful for your feedback (and the fact that you seem to like the radical Briefing). A few tweaks we are making based on your feedback: We are adding a little more context to our Down the Rabbit Hole section, which should make it easier for you to skim the section and see which links you want to follow. I will also add some more context and commentary to the news I comment on in the Headlines from the Future part of the Briefing. Further, we will occasionally add a section to the Briefing – e.g., something on the tools we are using, or insights on the workflows we are using in our work at radical. And lastly, we hear you on two things – on the one hand, quite a few of you mentioned that your inboxes are overflowing; on the other hand, you asked us for opportunities to engage live with us and the community. To tackle the former, we will now bring you our Tuesday Deep Dive every other week instead of weekly (and dig a little deeper in each dispatch); on the latter – stay tuned! 🤩
In summary (the TL;DR): More context in the Friday Briefing, Deep Dives every other Tuesday, and live events are on their way.
P.S. Just before the holiday break, I talked with Christian Mastrodonato on his podcast “Engines of Creation” about futures (the plural) and antifragility. It was a super fun and somewhat far-reaching conversation – check it out here.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
Are These AI Prompts Damaging Your Thinking Skills? Outsourcing your thinking to an AI, and doing so fairly consistently (which LLMs certainly encourage and entice you to do), leads to atrophy of your brain (according to a new study by MIT). I guess the old adage my math teacher reminded us of regularly, “use it or lose it”, is truer than maybe ever before.
The researchers said their study demonstrated “the pressing matter of exploring a possible decrease in learning skills”.
Not all is lost though – it’s all about how you use AI (which is something I subscribe to – AI can be an incredibly powerful tool, if wielded correctly).
She tells the BBC: “We definitely don’t think students should be using ChatGPT to outsource work”. In her view, it’s best used as a tutor rather than just a provider of answers.
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AI Image Generators Default to the Same 12 Photo Styles, Study Finds. We know that LLMs gravitate toward the mean, which is why AI-generated slop sounds so “same,” is littered with en-dashes ( “ – ” ), and regularly generates stylistic elements such as “And here is the kicker […].” Here is an interesting example of what this looks like when you use LLMs to generate images – it turns out you can have any image, as long as you are happy with one of twelve distinct styles. As Henry Ford quipped: You can have a Model T in any color – as long as that color is black.
This, of course, means that those who are creative and deliberate in their use of AI prompts to generate images will yield vastly superior results than the rest of us who just sloppily use these tools (same as the note above).
AI image generation models have massive sets of visual data to pull from in order to create unique outputs. And yet, researchers find that when models are pushed to produce images based on a series of slowly shifting prompts, it’ll default to just a handful of visual motifs, resulting in an ultimately generic style.
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Outcome-Driven vs Process-Driven. Ben Werdmuller, Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, boils down the difference in attitude toward AI beautifully – as an aside, this is not only true for developers, but for anyone who uses AI (and has found viable use cases – which, as another aside, isn’t true for every job or task). TL;DR: Become outcome-obsessed and let the process take care of itself.
[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away.
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AI Has Won the Photo Game. Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, recently made two interesting statements – on the one hand, he admits that AI has taken over the platform and is changing what people post:
“Unless you’re under 25 and use Instagram, you probably think of the app as a feed of square photos. The aesthetic is polished: lots of make up, skin smoothing, high contrast photography, beautiful landscapes,” wrote Mosseri on Wednesday. “That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,” the Meta executive said, adding that users now kept friends updated on their personal lives through unpolished “shoe shots and unflattering candids” shared via direct messages.
And on the other hand, he concedes that you simply can’t trust what you see anymore:
For most of my life I could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened. This is clearly no longer the case and it’s going to take us years to adapt. We’re going to move from assuming what we see is real by default, to starting with skepticism. Paying attention to who is sharing something and why. This will be uncomfortable - we’re genetically predisposed to believing our eyes.
It goes without saying that this might morph into a larger problem – not just for Instagram but society at large. Personally, I wonder how long it will take the general public to shift from “I trust what I see” to “I never trust a photo unless proven otherwise.”
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Copywriters Reveal How AI Has Decimated Their Industry. This series of interviews with copywriters is a sobering look into one of the industries most affected by LLMs – and to be clear, I don’t think there are too many industries which have seen such a wholesale change as copywriting; for most people AI (so far and for the foreseeable future) is more of a fractalized change.
AI is really dehumanizing, and I am still working through issues of self-worth as a result of this experience. When you go from knowing you are valuable and valued, with all the hope in the world of a full career and the ability to provide other people with jobs… To being relegated to someone who edits AI drafts of copy at a steep discount because “most of the work is already done”…
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A Tale of Two Cities. When it comes to AI (specifically LLMs) and mathematics, there are two worlds colliding. On one hand you have the AI-maximizers, who believe (and are betting on) LLMs being the harbinger of a new era of mathematical discovery. This school of thought goes so far as to not only pour $64M into a four-month-old startup, but also features a founder boldly asking the question “Maybe we discovered new math?” On the other hand – and when it comes to AI the world seems to divide itself into polarities – others counter with a simple “Basically zero, garbage.”
One of the world’s biggest mathematicians Joel David Hamkins has slammed AI models used for solving mathematics and called them basically zero and garbage, adding them he doesn’t find them useful at all. He also highlighted AI’s frustrating tendency to confidently assert incorrectness and resist correction. If I were having such an experience with a person, I would simply refuse to talk to that person again, Joel David Hamkins said.
Who’s right? Your guess is as good as mine.
What We Are Reading
Lego Unveils Tech-Filled Smart Bricks – to Play Experts’ Unease Lego demos its biggest innovation in 50 years. And whilst it hopes to inspire the creative minds of a new generation, the old ones are lamenting the good old days. @Jane
Another No-Good, Very Bad Year for Retail Stores US retail store closures increased 12% compared to 2024, and 2026 doesn’t look any more promising – with shoppers continuing purchases from the comfort of their homes. @Mafe
Calm: The Underrated Capability Every Leader Needs Now With the world uncertainty index peaking at its highest level on record, leadership isn’t to manufacture certainty but rather to model steadiness. This 8-thread framework is a practical way to build on that. @Kacee
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? Firstly, I am a huge Daft Punk fan. Secondly, it is just hilarious that Daft Punk chose to mix “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” at exactly 123.45 beats per minute. And thirdly, it is amazing that it took the world all this time to figure this out. Talk about a genius prank. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🛟 MIT TechReview on “Creating psychological safety in the AI era”: With fears around job loss, shifting responsibilities, and day-to-day tasks, a leader’s role is ever more about creating a safe space for their employees.
🔞 Talk about second- and third-order effects – teens are going out earlier and earlier; on one hand, they want to score happy hour deals, and on the other, WFH (work from home) has altered their rhythm.
🤖 Understanding “How AI coding agents work – and what to remember if you use them” is an essential task for anyone who’s using them to code alongside or for them.
👑 Talk about LLMs becoming “human” – the system prompt from Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Opus has this gem in it: “If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn’t need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement.”
🙉 Talking about LLMs, AI-superboosters Salesforce seem to have lost a bit of their belief in the almighty power of LLMs. Or, to be more precise, Salesforce’s customers.
🙈 Productivity guru Cal Newport asks “Why Didn’t AI ‘Join the Workforce’ in 2025?” Good question, Cal! Here is the TL;DR: “Which is all to say, we actually don’t know how to build the digital employees that we were told would start arriving in 2025.”
🙊 Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for developers, has been the go-to resource for developers for a long, long time. Unsurprisingly, with the advent of LLMs (specifically in coding), its traffic has collapsed. The irony? LLMs rely heavily on Stack Overflow for their training data – data that is now becoming increasingly scarce as users migrate to AI tools. Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions
⚡ Cold Fusion, the holy grail of energy, is inching closer to reality. Canada has just broken a world record in nuclear fusion, and the number of neutrons has put the entire energy industry on alert.
🛒 From our friends (and my former boss) at Retailgentic comes another must-read for anyone in e-commerce: Eleven 2026 Agentic Commerce Predictions
💉 GLP–1 drugs, such as Ozempic, are changing not just your waistline but have massive implications for your identity and mental health – and not in a good way.
🏎️ Granted, it’s a small country – but Norway’s transition to electric vehicles is nothing short of spectacular: Norway zips ahead in EV race as car sales hit 96% electric
🔌 Here’s a neat visualization of the electicity grid infrastructure in the world.
🎶 Vinyl is back, largely driven by nostalgia-fueled Gen-Zers. What’s maybe most suprising is that 50% of vinyl buyers don’t own a turntable. Which begets the question: Why Gen Z is driving the vinyl record boom?
📷 Here’s a wonderful interactive guide on how digital cameras (and their lenses) work.
Pascal is deep into putting the finishing touches on the first “ugly” draft of his new book “OUTLEARN – The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change.”
Should We Work Together?
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