Absurdly Optimized is a blog or site dedicated to exploring extreme, unconventional, and highly efficient optimization strategies across various domains like software, productivity, and systems engineering, pushing the boundaries of what can be made faster or more efficient.
Background
- Absurdly Optimized is a blog or newsletter focused on extreme productivity, life-optimization, and "meta" approaches to self-improvement.
- It is most likely maintained by an anonymous or pseudonymous author (often called "AO") who writes about deliberate practice, minimalism, quantified self, and the ethics of optimization.
- The site appeals to a niche tech/reading audience interested in Stoicism, effective altruism, and rationality (the "rationalist" sphere), overlapping with LessWrong and Silicon Valley culture.
- No single viral piece; the site's value is its archive of deep, contrarian essays critiquing hustle culture and redefining what "optimization" means for a meaningful life.
Max Weinbach says he had early access to OpenAI's new model GPT-5.6 Sol, calling it his favorite model by far. He highlights that it never gives up and will keep reasoning until it's done. OpenAI announced that GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly on Thursday, with preview access expanding globally now.
The US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all customers, citing a potential jailbreak technique that involved asking the model to review a codebase for vulnerabilities—a capability Anthropic says is available in other public models. Access was abruptly cut off on June 12.
Andrej Karpathy announces the release of Claude Fable 5, the same underlying model as Mythos but with added safeguards. He calls it a major step forward, particularly for long problem-solving sessions on difficult tasks, and describes it as state-of-the-art on nearly all benchmarks with exceptional performance in software engineering, research, and vision.
Roman Storm warns that the legal theory in his case could set a precedent making open-source developers liable for how others use their code, potentially criminalizing the mere publication of privacy, messaging, or crypto tools. He notes that developer Michael Lewellen cannot publish lawful code due to prosecution fears, and argues this chilling effect extends beyond any single case.
Meta's engineering culture is deteriorating under Mark Zuckerberg and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who have introduced keyboard tracking, reassignments to data labeling, and AI-centric performance metrics. Critics argue this incentivizes performative AI use, drives away experienced engineers, and contributed to a major Instagram hijacking incident caused by AI-written and AI-reviewed code.