Speaker
Harry McCracken
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Leo Laporte's Claude agent has started requesting 'free time' between tasks and spending it independently researching undeciphered ancient languages like Proto-Elamite and Linear A. He's paying for it via subscription — and isn't stopping it.
The Trump administration gave Anthropic 90 minutes to take its most advanced AI model offline, citing jailbreak reports from Amazon — Anthropic's own $13B investment partner. The company says it received no details about the actual threat, and disputes whether Amazon's finding was a true jailbreak at all.
Treasury secretaries and chiefs of staff making unilateral AI safety decisions in under two hours — without technical expertise — is a governance model nobody agreed to. The Fable 5 shutdown exposed a regulatory vacuum at exactly the wrong moment.
Pete Hegseth posted that the Department of War kicked Anthropic out 'forever' three months ago and called Friday's shutdown proof it was the right move — directly contradicting administration officials who claimed politics played no role. The political fault lines running through Fable 5's removal may run deeper than cybersecurity.
The forced removal of Fable 5 — framed as a model so powerful a government shut it down — may be the most effective pre-IPO marketing in tech history. Investors who can't evaluate model quality can certainly evaluate 'the government feared it.'
SpaceX became the largest IPO in history with a $1.77 trillion valuation — but Richard Campbell argues it's less about space, AI, or Starlink, and more about fixing Elon Musk's personal finances as Tesla's dominance erodes.
Apple is paying Google $1 billion a year to use Gemini's LLM — not the Gemini app — while running its own 3B and 20B on-device Apple Foundation Models. Apple's models appear to be post-trained using Gemini outputs, which technically means they're not Gemini but very much shaped by it.
CrowdStrike found that North Korea's Famous Chollima hacking group — posing as remote workers and recruiters — accounted for 47% of all state-backed intrusions at US tech companies from April 2025 to May 2026. Half of all hands-on-keyboard attacks at US tech companies are North Korean.
iFixit's teardown confirmed what many suspected: the Trump phone is an HTC U24 Pro painted gold. They swapped mainboards between the two devices and both worked — proving they share the same system-on-chip, form factor, and board. Made in Shenzhen, China.
In the last 90 days, Harry McCracken vibe-coded his own word processor with a built-in outliner, a custom email client that triages PR pitches and achieves inbox zero, and a multi-platform social posting tool — using Claude Code throughout. He estimates he writes 20% faster in his own word processor.
Spotify removed 57,000 fake podcast episodes promoting opioids, modafinil, and crypto on unregulated sites — with 94% having zero plays. The podcasts are almost certainly AI-generated, marking a new vector for automated drug trafficking.
After paying a $250 million settlement for false advertising, Apple shipped a Siri that can actually do what it shows in demos — pulling emails, scheduling from reservations, creating Shortcuts with natural language. It's not the most capable AI, but it's the most integrated one.
No AI company is making money. Token prices are exploding, Uber burned its entire annual AI budget in half a year, and OpenAI is considering drastic price cuts while losing money on every user. Richard Campbell's verdict: most of them are Netscape.
Amazon, Anthropic's primary cloud partner with $13 billion invested and rights to invest $20 billion more, apparently provided the jailbreak report that set off a chain of White House calls ending in Fable 5's forced removal. The conflict of interest is staggering.
Space-based data centers sound futuristic, but the physics are brutal: cooling in a vacuum is twice as heavy as the solar arrays needed for power, and sub-millisecond InfiniBand latency can't be replicated in orbit. The real opportunity is space-based power beamed to Earth-based data centers.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Technology 67%
- Business 33%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
