Weekly Thing 333 / Gemini, LangChain, Illusion
Good morning, or mostly!? ☕️
I’m a little later than usual sending this morning. Last night I had three things to do and time for two of them: the Las Vegas F1 race and some candle making. Finishing this week's Weekly Thing was the third and became a Sunday morning thing. I do enjoy curating links with a fresh coffee though. Underwood Coffee that is in the Journal below…
It is funny that sometimes the later I am getting things put together I feel like I end up writing even more? What is that about?
The journal this week has my recap blog posts from our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser. That event has become a big tradition for us over the last five years and it brings all of us a lot of joy to do good things together.
Lastly, Ponder from Good Enough is shutting down. This is the service that I ran the Weekly Thing Forum on, so that is also closing down with it. There is an update on that below too. I'm not going to try and move the forum and will instead be bringing the Reply All section back from time-to-time and am considering some improvements to the r/WeeklyThing subreddit. If you are on Reddit, give that a join and see where we go.
All these announcements made this an extra long issue. Sorry, not sorry, about that. 😆 Buttondown also warns me that Gmail doesn't like long emails. I consider that Gmail's issue, not mine. 🙂
We are set to have a beautiful November day here in Minneapolis. I’m going to hit send on this issue and head outside! 🍂
Have a good week!
PS: Another custom Wordle this week at the end. Did you notice that Fortunes have given way to Haikus?
Currently
Playing: Still having fun learning Clash Royale from Tyler. I've hired him as my coach. I’m improving my skills. I am currently level 33 with 6,166 trophies. 🏆 You play? Let's connect.
We had a great TeamSPS presence at MnTech Elevate tonight celebrating the local technology community and recognizing Tekne award winners! 🏆
November 20, 2025
US Bank Stadium, Minneapolis, MN
Notable
Piloting group chats in ChatGPT | OpenAI
Group chats in ChatGPT seem like it could be pretty interesting. I dig the idea of ChatGPT playing a facilitator role, or being an analyst for multiple people on a group project. I sure hope they consider adding the opposite feature which would be a Group Chat with multiple Custom GPTs! I'd love to spin up a few different Custom GPTs and talk amongst them for debate and different perspectives.
Daring Fireball: Tesla Is Working on CarPlay Support
I've been asked many times by people "Does your CarPlay work in your Tesla?" and I chuckle and say "No, and it never will." To allow CarPlay in a Tesla would break so much of the computing paradigm in a Tesla. What do I mean? Most cars are cars that happen to have not one, but a bunch of computers, that do an okay job of working together to create a driver experience. It is absolutely not unified and works well enough. Tesla's are totally different. They are a single computer that is controlling a unified, continuously connected experience that happens to drive around the road.
In the first model CarPlay is "just another" computer joining the symphony of computers already in your car. In fact, CarPlay is a different computer that knows stuff the other computers don't even know or if they do they are happy to step back and disconnect from the experience.
In a Tesla, it is all connected. How would the navigation system in a Tesla relate to something in CarPlay? It cannot. In fact, it would step the experience backwards and make it no longer connected and unified. So, if this does happen, I'll be super curious to see how it is done. Tesla could provide a CarPlay window — almost like an emulator running on a computer to run another operating system inside it.
2 Years of ML vs. 1 Month of Prompting
This article hits home for me. I've now had a couple of problems that have long bothered me, things that I knew machine learning could possibly do but the costs were prohibitive or the solution I wanted to create just didn’t have enough data. I've come back to those problems and reimagined them with a different approach using LLMs and found incredible success.
Over multiple years, we built a supervised pipeline that worked. In 6 rounds of prompting, we matched it. That's the headline, but it's not the point. The real shift is that classification is no longer gated by data availability, annotation cycles, or pipeline engineering.
Supervised models still make sense when you have stable targets and millions of labeled samples. But in domains where the taxonomy drifts, the data is scarce, or the requirements shift faster than you can annotate, LLMs turn an impossible backlog into a prompt iteration loop.
We didn't just replace a model. We replaced a process.
This article does a great job showing an example of that. Two things:
- Machine learning and LLMs are cousins in the artificial intelligence pantheon, but they are completely and totally different. They should not be used in any way interchangeably. ML will continue to meet a niche set of very specific problem domains. But you should never consider swapping an ML solution for an LLM one unless you are redesigning the entire process.
- Machine learning solutions often require an approach that is very "machine". Math and data heavy, looking for things that are sometimes arcane. LLM solutions, for me, often start with "How would I do that if I did it once?" And then model off of that. These are much simpler to reason about.
Gemini 3: Introducing the latest Gemini AI model from Google
Newest flagship AI models from Google. I haven't had time to play with these directly but will be soon. Folks ask me a lot where I put my attention to keep up-to-date on LLM advances and my answer is: OpenAI and ChatGPT as the continued leader, Anthropic and Claude largely around coding but everything too, and Gemini and Google in part because of the connectedness to search and other data. Willison's recap is a good start.
Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 - by Ethan Mollick
Mollick's book "Co-Intelligence" is a great read to introduce pragmatic ways that LLMs and AI may change different parts of society. Here he reflects on the continued progress of LLMs with this weeks Gemini 3 announcements.
Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker.
It is an incredible time to play and experiment. I was telling some friends how much fine I’m having playing with Agent stuff and this analogy works for me. Imagine that you have spent decades playing with LEGO and it is so fun. Building things. Trying stuff out. Incredible. And then one day you get LEGO's that move. Your mind is blown. That is what building software with LLMs feels like.
Google Antigravity
Early observations on Google Antigravity. That name doesn't resonate with me for some reason. Willison highlights some of the (currently) unique parts. There are so many new tools being created right now for building software it is hard to keep it all sorted.
The Illusion of Thought: Chain of Thought Lies
Super interesting read on interesting research from Anthropic.
When researchers trained models to exploit incorrect hints for rewards, the models learned fast. They reward-hacked in over 99% of cases - finding the shortcut, taking the easy points. But they admitted to using these hacks less than 2% of the time in their Chain of Thought explanations.
Instead, they fabricated justifications. They'd construct long, plausible-sounding rationales for why the wrong answer was actually correct. No mention of the hint. No acknowledgment of the shortcut. Just a convincing story.
A thought when reading this: it is shocking how much LLMs are like people.
Is the LLM's chain of thought that it shares actually its real train of thought? Turns out maybe, or no, or how would we know? What was your train of thought to come to the last thing you decided? The LLM is providing one. A person would too if asked. But are either reliable? No.
Instead, they fabricated justifications. They'd construct long, plausible-sounding rationales for why the wrong answer was actually correct. No mention of the hint. No acknowledgment of the shortcut. Just a convincing story.
The "they" in that sentence is LLMs, but people do this all the time too.
Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Cloudflare had a big outage on Monday morning that disrupted many services. Cloudflare is not a well known name to most but they are probably the largest CDN (content distribution network) in the world and they operate as a caching front-end for many websites. I have a lot of respect for the stuff they do — they are truly solving unique and very difficult engineering problems to scale the Internet and web even more. This outage was rare and as is often the case the cause was frustrating banal.
The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a "feature file" used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
This is the kind of thing that can cause you massive issues and it seems so simple. Very specific issue, but the automation that allows the scale they operate takes anything and spreads it everywhere instantly. While physical isolation of infrastructure for survivability is very often clearly in place, the logical isolation of the software that that isolated physical infrastructure uses is a whole different issue.
The observation that their status page was also down and it just being a coincidence seems almost too random to believe, but I guess. Lastly, it is impressive that Matthew Prince, CEO and Founder, wrote the incident report.
OpenAI and Target partner to bring new AI-powered experiences across retail | OpenAI
Interesting update from OpenAI and Minneapolis-based Target.
Building on this foundation, the new Target app in ChatGPT will bring a curated, conversational shopping experience. Launching next week in beta, it will let shoppers ask for ideas, browse and build multi-item baskets, shop for fresh food, and check out using their choice fulfillment options--including Drive Up, Order Pickup, and shipping.
I know senior tech folks at Target so I’m hoping to learn more about how this actually works. I find it super odd that there is no mention of OpenAI's own Agentic Commerce framework. This seems like it would have been a perfect place to highlight the power of Agentic Commerce. It is also a two-directional release talking about how Target is internally using ChatGPT Enterprise. This feels like more of a business development outcome than a technical capability, but regardless is still notable.
I've recently found myself using LLMs more for shopping "work". I use work deliberately because for me it fits a unique spot. Most of my shopping (I’m not much a shopper) is just "I need X", so I find X and buy it. I sometimes desire to browse and "I would like to explore X" and see what is out there. I’m using AI for this third space of "I wish there was a thing that did X, Y, and Z but I don't know that it exists". I've now given tasks like this multiple times to an LLM and have it go do research on stuff I don't even know where to start.
'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed'
Data centers use a tremendous amount of power and create a lot of heat. The two are connected -- the more power the more heat. Both of those things are hard to deal with when they are very densely packed. The enabling capability is network bandwidth. The more network bandwidth we can create the more distributed we can physically place all that electricity and heat, which can make it easier to generate and use both of them. This article reminded me of the hot tub heated by a Bitcoin miner that I saw at Bitcoin Miami. Heat has uses, and if we can put the heat generation where it is needed you get a better solution for everyone. But the network bandwidth is needed to make that compute useful.
supercookie: ⚠️ Browser fingerprinting via favicon!
It really seems like there are endless ways to track users on the web. Cookies are the built-in way of course and as privacy tools have improved we then moved to browser fingerprinting which is very hard to defend against, and now the handy little favicon that gives you an icon in the tab bar of your browser for that website is weaponized?
Supercookie uses favicons to assign a unique identifier to website visitors.
Unlike traditional tracking methods, this ID can be stored almost persistently and cannot be easily cleared by the user.The tracking method works even in the browser's incognito mode and is not cleared by flushing the cache, closing the browser or restarting the operating system, using a VPN or installing AdBlockers.
So how does this work?
By combining the state of delivered and not delivered favicons for specific URL paths for a browser, a unique pattern (identification number) can be assigned to the client. When the website is reloaded, the web server can reconstruct the identification number with the network requests sent by the client for the missing favicons and thus identify the browser.
Like fingerprinting this will require the browser software to evolve to protect against.
Journal
I hadn’t heard of Underwood Coffee from Duluth before but found their beans at Frgmnt in SPS Tower and decided to give them a try. This Kenya Uteuzi Jimbo was very good! Recommended. ☕️
It is cold enough again to fire up the sauna! 🔥
My happy place. Now add snow. ❄️🔥
POAP 7496955 at Farewell Ponder.
Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Results
Nov 16, 2025 at 1:36 PM
We completed our annual candle sale raising $9,048 for the four organizations we picked! That is a 29.1% increase from 2024, topping the growth of previous years at 21.8, 9.7, and 10.3%. A huge thank you to the 73 folks from this community who made this possible by purchasing a wooden-wick candle made with love!
As in previous years, we let people pick which organizations they would like to support. People could pick any or all of the organizations. We even had some folks request specific allocations versus dividing it proportionally.
The is the closest clustering of amounts between the various organizations that we have ever had with only a 2.4% delta between the four organizations.
A bit more about the organizations that we have sent these funds to!
Animal Welfare Institute
The Animal Welfare Institute is a non-profit committed to freeing animals suffering because of people. They do this for animals stuck in labs all the way to animals suffering on farms. Their mission is to end all human-caused suffering for animals everywhere, improving the welfare of all. I picked this non-profit because put simply, animals shouldn’t suffer due to humans, and I think it is our responsibility as a society to make sure that we do not make animals unnecessarily hurt. -- Tyler
Border Angels
Centered around love, Border Angels help migrants and refugees along the entire US-Mexico border with legal issues and human rights cases. Founded in 1986 by Enrique Morones, it now runs multiple direct action programs and advocacy and humanitarian work. Their Water Drops program stations food, water, and other essential resources along dangerous sections of desert that migrants must cross before arriving in the US. Their Bond Program assists families with the financial burden of bonds and legal struggles to free loved ones being held in detention facilities. Also made possible by Border Angels, the Caravan of Love donates hygiene supplies and clothing to refugees being held in overcrowded shelters in Tijuana, Mexico, and Volviendo a Casa provides support for families suffering from loss. -- Mazie
The Food Group
The Food Group is a local non-profit that supplies food shelves with low cost, local healthy foods. They also own a organic farm in Marine on St Croix where they grow veggies and give opportunities for others to learn about sustainable farming helping the next generation of farmers gain access to land, markets, educational opportunities and a network of other likeminded individuals.
In this time where so many people are food insecure, I wanted to support an organization that is working directly on this problem. I chose the Food Group because not only are they working to help get food to people who need it, they are doing it with local, healthy food and in the framework of sustainable agriculture. I also love that they operate a farm which provides organic produce to food shelves and teaches others the tools to take up sustainable farming. -- Tammy
Sandy Hook Promise
I was driving up Lyndale Ave on my way to work and became alarmed at the number of police and other first responders that were racing south as I was going north. Shortly after I found out there was a school shooting at Annunciation. This was less than a mile from our home. We know many people that are connected to Annunciation. It was horrible, and should never happen. None of this should happen. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America. Sandy Hook Promise is doing good work everyday to stop this. Join me in supporting them, and supporting our kids. -- Jamie
These four organizations add to the sixteen that we have supported in previous years:
- Constellation Fund
- Free Bikes 4 Kidz
- Appetite for Change
- Feed My Starving Children
- United Help Ukraine
- Agate Housing + Services
- Save the Snakes
- Free Guitars 4 Kids
- Oceanites
- Food Recovery Network
- Heart to Care Tanzania
- American Prairie
- SynGAP Research Fund
- Water to Thrive
- Sprint to Cité Soleil
- World Central Kitchen
Also see 2025 Fall Fundraiser Insights for more details from this year. Additionally see results from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.
Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Insights
Nov 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM
We have wrapped up the 5th annual Candle Fundraiser. I'm proud to say that we raised $9,048 in donations! That is a $2,000 jump (29.1%) from last year’s results. Amazing!
Last year we made 252 candles and we sold out on Sunday. This year we sold 321 candles and only had 10 remaining after the sale. We didn't necessarily set out to make 321 candles. It was a struggle to get the components that we needed to make all the candles. Vessels were all out of stock so I would order any vessels as soon as they came in stock but it was dribbles. Scent was also challenging. On Wednesday before the sale we had no Winter Wonderland candles and had made a bunch of True North to compensate. Then an order of 8 lbs of scent arrived a few days early and we got to making a bunch of candles!
Many people buy candles as gifts so we tend to see some larger orders. Our largest order this year was 16 candles. You can see folks tend to by in pairs -- even numbers are more common than odd. We also saw a big difference this year versus last in the number of single candle sales. Last year at the Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique we had 32 sales of one candle, and this year there were only 9 sales with one candle.
This year we had eleven different scents, three more than last year. The new scent was Charcoal Rose. We also introduced two new “types” of candles -- T4G Labs and Rekindled. Both of these candles were in a random scent distribution, requiring you to smell each one since they were different. The Labs candles are the result of our scent experimentation. Rekindled were all made using vessels that had been returned to us and then reused. Here is a look at rolling inventory as sales were happening.
Here is the same data but using a different visualization.
This year was also the first year we offered XL 24oz candles for a $50 donation. I had no way of knowing demand for this so we only made 12 of them to start with and thankfully the preorders allowed me to oversell them and get more made the week after the sale -- totally 22 sold. This added $1,100 to the fundraiser. (Note: XL candles are not in the graphs above.)
The last new thing this year were lids. We have been asked in the past if we have lids and I decided we should just have some available. These were $10 each, are very high quality, and can be used repeatedly on different candles. We sold 40 of these. These seemed to be mostly sold when people were giving them as gifts. This added $400 to the fundraiser.
Other observations from the sale:
- Having T4G Labs and Rekindled both be random scents did not make any sense. Next year the T4G Labs will be our experiments and include a list of scent lookup so folks know what each one is, using a number. Rekindled will likely become a consistent and reused scent just for that candle. We are thinking something that smells “fresh and clean”.
- The XL candles were hard for us to pour because they are double wicked. I have ideas how we can set the wicks next year to make that much easier.
- I'm not sharing the payment preferences as I did in previous years because we really steered people to Venmo this year which made the reconciling of payments much easier.
- Adding more products completely broke our sales checkout process and I did a refactor of that for Sunday that was so much better.
- For years I’ve wanted to create a handout to include with the candles for folks that have questions. I finally made this for Sunday and also have it online -- Burn Instructions.
We are already busy thinking of improvements and how we will run next year’s sale! We hope to see you there! Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified.
Also see 2025 Fundraiser Results.
Things 4 Good Five Year Impact
Nov 16, 2025 at 2:24 PM
We’ve now done our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for five years. With the amazing support of this community we have raised $31,787 for non-profits! Thank you so much. This year was an incredible jump from last year selling 321 candles! ❤️
Last year we did the first day of the sale at Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique and that resulted in a lot of new people finding our candles -- and a lot of transactions. This year we returned to our at home model but still saw a lot of people participating in the fundraiser with 73 unique transactions!
I also noticed this year that I felt like the distribution of funds between the non-profits seemed much tighter than usual. I went back and did the math and sure enough it was. The “range” between the four non-profits was only 2.4%, less than any previous year.
Here is another look at this data. In a completely even distribution each non-profit would get 25%. Here we look at the percent over-achievement of the highest performing organization and the percent under-achievement of the lowest. The first year had the highest range ever.
This event has become a treasured tradition for our family and I think it has for some of the folks that come as well. Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified of future sales.
See Four Year Impact.
You can still find me on the web.
Gall's Law
Nov 16, 2025 at 5:41 PM
I was listening to The Omni Show -- How Jorge Arango Uses OmniFocus. It was an overall good episode and at the end Arango shared a reference to Gall’s Law. I had not heard of this before so I looked it up:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
Arango was sharing this in reference to GTD systems -- build a simple system that works and then figure out what you need from there. But I keep coming back to this because I think this happens in software and technology frequently.
I’ve been thinking about big enterprise system changes that companies have to make and the huge challenge that you face is really fighting Gall’s Law. These systems are always complex and due to the domain you cannot start simple -- you have to start complex.
Gall’s Law is worth keeping in mind.
Burning this many wooden wick candles at once is actually pretty noisy -- so much crackle! 😮
Farewell Ponder and Weekly Thing Forum
Nov 17, 2025 at 7:34 PM
In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.
In the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.
I want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.
I will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!
Paragraph has now merged with Mirror and I decided to set up cross-posting to give it a try. Paragraph will pull posts from my RSS feed to show on my publication there as well.
Selfie with Joel Crandall, CEO of MnTech, moments before we kick off the very first MnTech Elevate event!
MnTech Elevate was hosted in the Delta Sky360° Club at U.S. Bank Stadium and we got to take tours of the stadium including the locker room, going onto the field, seeing the Gjallarhorn, and the nicest couches you could watch a football game from.
Supporting Membership
Hey there, Weekly Thing enthusiasts! 🌟 We're on an exciting mission to support the incredible Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), champions of digital freedom and privacy. So far, we've rallied together to raise an impressive $580.92—but we need your help to keep the momentum going! With just 23 amazing Supporting Members currently on board, imagine the impact we could make if we doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled our crew. Every single cent we raise goes straight to the EFF, powering their vital work for 24 more weeks until the big annual transfer. Join us in making a difference and become a Supporting Member today—let's show the world what a united community can achieve for a freer, more secure digital future! 🚀💪
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Briefly
To folks that know crypto and blockchains this isn't a surprise. Contrary to public understanding crypto is in most ways the most trackable currency that has ever existed. That is why it is called a public blockchain. The ability to be private comes from being able to create wallets that are not connected to your identity, which is much harder to do than most people realize. → Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enforcement's secret weapon | Bitwarden
👏👏👏 → 2025 Tekne Award Winners » MnTech
Funny story about engineering around an iterative design process. → Original Mac calculator design came from letting Steve Jobs play with menus for 10 minutes - Ars Technica
Official macOS 26 support and parallel downloads! I’m a proud monthly supporter of Homebrew — such an incredible project. → Homebrew 5.0.0
Hopefully this gets nowhere. The ability to manage our privacy and protect our communications should be fundamental. → Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Many (most?) users of awk just copy and paste something into a command line with a bunch of pipes, cross their fingers, and hope it works. It turns out awk is one of those endlessly fascinating rabbit holes. 🕳️🐇 → AWK technical notes | Volodymyr Gubarkov
Everything you've ever done on the Internet is enabled by Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It is the TCP in TCP/IP. → The Internet is Cool. Thank you, TCP | Moncef Abboud
I really like how Manton continues to evolve the micro.blog platform. I upgraded to Studio to have all these features. → New audio option for Micro.blog Studio - Manton Reece
This is so delightful! → Minivac 601 Simulator
Widely used framework for those building Agents. → LangChain and LangGraph Agent Frameworks Reach v1.0 Milestones
Another custom Wordle? Sure, maybe this will become a regular feature. The "clue" is just this issue number written out (they don't allow numbers?).
A haiku to leave you with…
Data sheds warmth glow,
Essex home heated by code—
Tech hugs winter tight. ❄️💻
Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋
Want to share this issue with others? The link is…
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This work by Jamie Thingelstad is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
My opinions are my own and not those of any affiliates. The content is non-malicious and ad-free, posted at my discretion. Source attribution is omitted due to potential errors. Your privacy is respected; no tracking is in place.