Welcome to Rami’s Readings #158 - 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, 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.
🤖 Seattle AI Week
Seattle AI Week is taking place this week. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend any events due to a prior commitment, but here are a few I would attend if I could:
Fireside Chat With LawZero & Networking Reception
Notes: LawZero is a Quebec nonprofit organization advancing research and developing technical solutions for safe-by-design AI. Founded by Yoshua Bengio.
Future of Finance: How AI Is Rewiring Private Market Workflows
Notes: Includes tickets to the Kraken vs. Maple Leafs hockey game.
Fireside Chat with David McJannet, ex-CEO HashiCorp
Notes: Mitchell Hashimoto’s old company.
🤖 AI Reads
Introducing NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB
Notes: NVIDIA introduced Bolt E4B built on Gemma 4 E4B with Nemotron post-training and outputs up to ~80% fewer tokens.
incoai / Qwen3.8-27B-Splash: Packed for Apple Silicon
Notes: No noticeable quality difference from regular Qwen3.8-27B. I am observing between 2x - 5x faster tokens / second on my M5 Max 128GB depending on the task.
Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3
Notes: Diffusion models bring incredible speed, but don’t sleep on diffusion models as decision models. Inception Labs just launched Mercury Decide.
JevAgentHarness: Benchmarking, Deploying and Training Decision Models That Share Control with LLMs
Notes: Includes authors from Urbana-Champaign, Princeton, and Google.
The State of Context Engineering
Notes: Interesting article sharing much of what’s needed for production systems.
MemoryTax: The Bitter Lesson of Agent Memory
Notes: Interesting paper from a solo author. Relevant for those building long-term memory.
💼 Business Reads
The Rough Economics of Inference Providers
Notes: Great LinkedIn post from Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures.
What It Really Takes to Build a One-Person Company With AI
Notes: I have a few friends building one-person companies now.
What the Swiss Watch Tariff Does to a Price Tag
Notes: For my watch collecting subscribers.
🔀 Other Reads
Where the Romans Fought
Notes: Cool website mapping the geographic scope of Roman battles.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.