Rami's Readings #126 - 👋 I’m Speaking at Seattle AI Week
The latest on AI, LLMs, Seattle AI Week, Tiny Recursive Models, Agentic Context Engineering, Taleb on Debt Crisis, Corporate Bond Yields, Organizational Politics, UTF-8, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #126 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering AI, technology, business, culture, fashion, travel, and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers
Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Life in Conversation with Salmi, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.
📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack
🇨🇦🤝🇺🇸 Seattle AI Week
On October 29, I’ll be participating in the “Montréal × Seattle: AI Community Connect” panel, a discussion exploring how two of North America’s most vibrant AI ecosystems can collaborate, build bridges, and accelerate innovation together.
It’s a topic close to my heart: connecting Montréal’s startup excellence with West Coast tech to unlock new opportunities in AI.
📅 When: October 29, 4:00 – 7:00 p.m.
📍 Where: 920 5th Ave, Seattle, WA
🔗 Register here. Limited spots available!
Joining me on the panel:
▪ Carl Chouinard – CEO, Vooban Labs
▪ Josh Jensen – Co-Founder & CEO, Inspectify
▪ Rheia Khalaf – Director of Partnerships, Mila – Quebec AI Institute
If you’re a founder, researcher, or ecosystem builder interested in the intersection of AI, cross-border collaboration, and startup growth, come join the conversation!
🤖 AI Reads
Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks
Notes: Fantastic solo paper out of 🇨🇦 proposing the Tiny Recursive Model, which is shows significant performance gains on ARC-AGI-1, better than DeepSeek R1, o3-mini, etc. despite having less than 0.01% of the parameters. Four different subscribers sent it my way.
LFM2-8B-A1B: An Efficient On-Device Mixture-of-Experts
Notes: MIT’s Liquid AI just released a MoE model that you can run on the edge. It’s available on HuggingFace.
Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
Notes: YES! Read this paper from Stanford, SambaNova Systems, and Berkeley.
Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-Constant Number of Poison Samples
Notes: All you need is 250 poisoned documents. From Anthropic, UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute.
tiny-classifier.cpp — Our First Tiny Classifier
Notes: I love these short articles, even more so because it’s written with C++.
💼 Business Reads
The Real AI Risk is ‘Meh’ Technology That Takes Jobs and Annoys Us All
Notes: Mediocrity is the enemy.
Nassim Taleb Warns to Hedge Against Crash as Debt Crisis Looms
Notes: Stock market warnings are becoming more frequent.
Why Microsoft Has Lower Borrowing Costs Than the U.S.
Notes: Wild that a few top-grade corporate bonds have lower yields than US Treasuries.
G-Drive Fire Destroys 125,000 Officials’ Data
Notes: Yikes. Subscribers, please back up your data to more than one location.
🔀 Other Reads
Stop Avoiding Organizational Politics
Notes: A great summary for engineers.
The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review
Notes: Sharing for my colleagues.
UTF-8 is a Brilliant Design
Notes: UTF-8’s backward compatibility with ASCII is indeed brilliant.
Bulk Operations in Boost.Bloom 1.90
Notes: Bloom filter are incredibly important data structures when you’re dealing with web scale. Boost.Bloom is now significantly faster.
Cap’n Web: A New RPC System for Browsers and Web Servers
Notes: Worth investigating if you’re looking for an RPC system for your distributed web applications.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.