Wisereads Vol. 126 — Jacob Rintamaki on the future of robotics, Dan Koe's guide to resolutions, and more

Last week, we shared William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a recent addition to Standard Ebooks' catalog. This week, we’re sharing another new addition released into the U.S.'s public domain this year: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

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Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, known online as antirez, cautions AI skeptics against missing the wave that's carrying programming into a new era. "LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. The same thing open source software did in the 90s."

Anthropic engineers Mikaela Grace, Jeremy Hadfield, Rodrigo Olivares, and Jiri De Jonghe share field-tested guidance on evaluating AI agents. "Like the Swiss Cheese Model from safety engineering, no single evaluation layer catches every issue. With multiple methods combined, failures that slip through one layer are caught by another."

New York Times Well reporter Amanda Schupak curates 35 research-backed, doable habits from leading health experts that address mental health, physical health, and beyond, with tips like: "If something feels too hard to do, it just means that the first step isn’t small enough," and "Dark-chocolate-covered nuts (at least 70 percent cocoa) are almost a perfect food."

In an AI Engineer session, McKinsey SoftwareX leaders Martin Harrysson and Natasha Maniar discuss taking your team beyond agile frameworks to become more AI-native. "Engineers are moving away from execution and simply writing code to being more of orchestrators, thinking about how to divide up work to agents. And yet about 70% of the companies we survey have not changed their roles at all."

Dan Koe, an entrepeneur and writer on identity and behavior change, lays out a one-day reset to help you finally conquer the high failure rate of yearly resolutions. "If you want a specific outcome in life, you must have the lifestyle that creates that outcome long before you reach it."

Stanford-trained technologist Jacob Rintamaki distills how robots and AI can compound each other's progress, and speculates on how together they might shape humanity's future. "The flywheel is elegant: Robots will build AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure will train better models. Better models will make robots smarter. Smarter robots will then build more AI infrastructure, as each turn of the wheel accelerates the next, faster and faster."

To celebrate its release into the U.S. public domain, we're sharing American writer Dashiell Hammett's masterpiece detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, a foundational work of the hardboiled genre that inspired multiple film adaptations. The novel follows private detective Sam Spade as he navigates a treacherous world of criminals and deceit, searching for a legendary black statuette while entangled with the mysterious Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a woman whose loyalties remain as elusive as the artifact she seeks.

"I’m sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn’t be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but—well, by Gad!—if you lose a son it’s possible to get another—and there’s only one Maltese falcon."

This edition of The Maltese Falcon is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Artist, filmmaker, and Sequoia Design Partner James Buckhouse chases his curiosity in Outsider Insight, exploring creativity and human ingenuity through a blog that's part adventure story, part meditative philosophy, and part tech exploration. From Inspiration in the Valley of Dreams: "Spend any amount of time with me and I’ll find a way to talk about story, art, and design. And how together they can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, if you get it just right and do it with all your heart."