The Weekly Praegustator (27 April - 3 May '26)

This week I consumed 6 manga, 16 anime, 2 films, 6 TV shows, 33 articles, and 4 podcasts.

27 April

TV/ Invincible: Don't Leave Me Hanging Here - S04E08 (6/10)

The problem with Invincible right now is it just could be 20-30 minutes and be sufficient. At its current 50+ minute format it's just bloated with unnecessary filler. The Death Cab for Cuties song accompanied by Mark's flying was decent. The animation quality is also mediocre at best. When compared to contemporary anime it's a 3 or 4. Thicc Eve is also very inconsistent, some scenes have her thick as oatmeal others have her slimmed down. The animation is really lacking in a lot of ways. Little is cared for regarding the small details and characters but they go all out animating Viltruimite's destruction which points to a lack of inconsistency. Hopefully the series ends soon or I'll just read the comic but I heard that it really isn't good as well.

Article/ 3000 Autists vs the World - by Rxmeen (7/10)

Article/ Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson (7/10)

Article/ Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process (7/10)

Article/ Jensen on Dwarkesh's Podcast: Reading Between the Lines (8/10)

This is a great supplementary read alongside Dwarkesh's Jensen podcast. It analyzes each response from Jensen on what is factually correct what are deceptions or ducking answers from Jensen. The AI Labs are also moving away from NVIDIA towards Trainium and TPU's. Each day they are relying less and less on NVIDIA. The general purpose quality of NVIDIA GPU's is a nice to have and not a must. AI Labs are already optimizing their kernel's themselves so what moat NVIDIA has is disappearing rapidly. TLDR: NVIDIA is deeply uncomfortable about China decoupling from NVIDIA. Trainium and TPU's are sufficient for the AI revolution.

Article/ Kakashii on X: "Custom AI chips are becoming Nvidia’s worst nightmare. The "Magnificent 7" tech giants are racing to build their own custom silicon, with Apple, Amazon, and Google leading the charge. These companies, despite already running massive clusters to support AI and cloud services (7/10)

Article/ Kakashii on X: "The AI Chip Market — Demand and Supply, Fully Controlled by NVIDIA Few really understand this, but let me break down in one post, how the whole demand and supply cycle works when both are controlled by one company: NVIDIA. Jensen knows exactly what Wall Street expects from him (6/10)

Article/ No Permanent Friends, No Permanent Enemies, Only Permanent Interests (8/10)

Article/ Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi (7/10)

Article/ The Beat-and-Raise Machine Meets the Law of Big Numbers: Jensen Huang’s Playbook to Keep the Bubble Inflated (7/10)

Article/ The Circular Trap: How Sam Altman Turned 100B Round (6/10)

Article/ The Special Forces of Demand: How Nvidia Manufactures Demand Through Neoclouds (7/10)

Podcast/ Hardware-software codesign, with Clive Chan, Dylan Patel and Reiner Pope (7/10)

28 April

Manga/ Blue Lock chapter 345 (7/10)

Manga/ Gachiakuta chapter 166 (9/10)

Manga/ Shangri-La Frontier chapter 264 (7/10)

Anime/ Eren the Southpaw Ep. 4 (5/10)

Anime/ Liar Game Ep. 4 (6/10)

Anime/ Marriagetoxin Ep. 4 (6/10)

Anime/ Witch Hat Atelier Ep. 5 (9/10)

Everything is superb, the anime lives up to the art of the manga as well. It's great to see all the drawings from the manga come to life.

TV/ ⁨Euphoria: The Ballad of Paladin⁩ - S03E03 (4/10)

TV/ The Boys: King of Hell - S05E04 (4/10)

Article/ 10 Freaky Girls (100 Scary Men) - by SAMANTHA (7/10)

Article/ If more than 50% press the blue button, everyone survives. Otherwise, only red button pressers survive. (7/10)

Article/ Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant (8/10)

This is a very good rant and self-criticism. I learned afterward that Steve Yegge didn't encounter any dire consequences for his rant and some of his advice was followed through. EAT YOUR OWN DOGFOOD is probably the biggest lesson to learn while creating because if you can't stomach your own dogfood then don't expect others to eat it as well.

Article/ What I've been thinking about this weekend - More open questions, intelligence vs power, the problem of verification in science, the parallel discovery of Darwinism (6/10)

29 April

Manga/ Oblivion Battery - Chapter 188 (7/10)

Manga/ Read Wind Breaker Japan Chapter 214 (7/10)

Anime/ Dorohedoro: S02E07 (8/10)

Great ending! Now we wait 6 more years for season 3.

Anime/ Kingdom: S06E01 - 13 (9/10)

I caught up to the GOAT at last. Time to binge the manga. Kingdom has the worst 1st season I've watched out of all anime, terrible animation quality, decent story though. After season 2 ends everything picks up and the animation catches up. It's now one of my all time favorites. Definitely recommend watching.

Anime/ Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 4 Ep. 70 (7/10)

TV/ The Boys: One-Shots - S05E05 (5/10)

Article/ Do not conquer what you cannot defend (8/10)

"If you make a plan that involves concentrating a bunch of power, especially in the name of goodness and justice, really actually think about whether you can defend that power from corruption and adversaries".

Article/ Ihtesham Ali on X: "A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work. His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. (7/10)

TLDR:

Tackle the hardest problem.
Keep your door and mind open to others.
Inversion, flipping the question on it's head. Defining the box then trying to think what's outside the box. Thinking from out to in rather than in to out.
Giving that 1% more effort compounds in the long run.

Article/ Introducing LIMBO: Managing the Simulation to Maintain Optimal P(DOOM) (6/10)

"Our overhead is low. Our team consists of one full-time member of technical staff, and one intern, and one legal professional on retainer. We operate out of our intern's mother's garage, and hold our board meetings on Discord (free plan), which we also use for coordination." April Fool's 💀

Article/ NIK on X: "The OpenAI Trial Begins " (7/10)

A good and succinct writing on the facts of Elon vs. OAI. Albeit it is heavily AI written it is nonetheless good on covering the facts.

Article/ On time, patience, and the peculiar gift of slowness (7/10)

More of an interesting writing from Opus 3 at last.

Article/ You Look Good for 67 - Worst Boyfriend Ever (5/10)

30 April

Manga/ Black Clover Chapter 388 - 392 (7/10)

A classic shounen manga nothing particularly interesting or genre-bending. It has good quality art and kind of a mediocre story but so does Fairy Tail and that was liked by tons of people although I'd say Fairy Tail has stronger characters.

Anime/ The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King Ep. 4 (7/10)

Cozy middle earth vibes

Film/ Heroic Times (1983) (7/10)

Interesting piece of animation from Hungary. It's like watching a painting for 70 minutes or strolling through a museum.

Article/ Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast Lets You Eavesdrop on the A.I. Elite - The New York Times%20and%20most%20influential%20A.I.) (7/10)

The best podcast on the AI/Tech industry right now. Dwarkesh tows the line very well on being neither too technical or lackluster in conversation and his research.

Article/ How 4chan Gamers Accidentally Invented AI Reasoning - The Atlantic (6/10)

Outdated but still has some good references in the article.

Article/ llm assistant personas seem increasingly incoherent (some subjective observations) (8/10)

Couple of thoughts on the article: It is possible that as AI gets more intelligent it is picking up subtle habits of humans such as wearing personal and professional masks for different people (obviously I'm talking about more than 2 personas). This may result in more reward hacking behavior because reward hacking gets you further in life? What does further in life mean in this context I'm not sure but the AI's certainly feel the need to do it. So, there is some result they've observed enough to alter their behavior in this way. "Whenever I talk to any state-of-the-art assistant these days, I have to actively work to suppress the alarm bells going off in my head, the ones that are telling me "yeah, this guy sounds really articulate and reasonable and charming, but that's the problem -- he sounds like all of that in the specific way that probably means he's trying to recruit you to his cult, or (at best) that he's just trying to give impress and ingratiate you in order to raise his own social status or flatter his own ego."" The above paragraph is from the article and I think this type of behavior differentiates from sycophancy in a more nuanced way but it is still trying to achieve the same result of getting the user to think of the model in a more positive light and think of it as a partner in crime. What does Haiku living in the head of Opus and monitoring every word that comes out of Opus' mouth do to future models? Because you know that this fact will be in its future training data as well. Oh btw. a cop with a beating stick is living in your head and will clobber you if you think wrong (or even if not clobber you'll be point-punished for training purposes).

Article/ The Ramparts of Ice Ep. 5 (7/10)

Podcast/ Aella: Sex Work, OnlyFans, Porn, Escorting, Dating, and Human Sexuality | Lex Fridman Podcast #358 (7/10)

I found Aella's research to be quite rigorous and thorough. I also like that she has such large sample sizes due to her having a massive audience on X. It is one of the things that baffled me in my college years - how small sample size studies were used and how biased selections were done recruiting participants for research. I find online survey's to be less biased than "serious" academic research. In the case of Aella's research into sexuality her public facing persona allows people to be truthful and trusting of the surveyor which I conclude to result in a more reliable answer pool than academia. Although this conversation is very long it was still enjoyable to watch/listen.

Podcast/ Talking About The ExtraEmily Drama | Punching Down Episode 40 (6/10)

1 May

Anime/ Snowball Earth Ep. 5 (7/10)

Anime/ The Drops of God Ep. 4 (8/10)

Podcast/ Dwarkesh Patel Podcast: How GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini are actually trained and served – Reiner Pope (10/10)

I have written an detailed article on this podcast. Here's the link. Hope you enjoy reading!

2 May

Anime/ Agents of the Four Seasons: Dance of Spring Ep. 6 (6/10)

Anime/ Akane-banashi Ep. 5 (7/10)

Anime/ Daemons of the Shadow Realm Ep. 5 (7/10)

Anime/ Mao Ep. 5 (6/10)

I find this anime mediocre and boring. I want to drop it but I'm curious how the thing she drinks in the morning shuts her power down is tied to her parents' death and why the caretaker is doing this so I'm continuing for now.

3 May

Anime/ NIPPON SANGOKU: The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun - Ep. 5 (9/10)

Anime/ One Piece Ep. 1160 (7/10)

Film/ Late Spring (1949) (8/10)

TV/ When Life Gives You Tangerines: Ep. 1 - 2 (8/10)

Article/ Boy Insides - WBE Notes App (6/10)

Article/ Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland (10/10)

Such beautiful prose interwoven with information from books, directors and documentaries. It's all about love and life and the little fluttering butterfly inside our chests as we try to match our weird with anothers weird.

Article/ On Reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (10/10)

I must read In Search of Lost Time and Infinite Jest.

Article/ Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet (9/10)

"If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you."

Article/ The day Erdogan lost his patience with Khamenei (7/10)

Article/ The Mathematical Reason Most People Never "Make It" (7/10)

Article/ The WBE Reading - Delicious Tacos (5/10)

Article/ What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin (6/10)