Attention Deficit Ep. 4 – The effort knob, the data center at sea, and go read a book

Every model now ships a dial for how hard it thinks, and most of us slide it up and leave it there. This episode asks what effort actually pays for, in tokens, in data centers, and in reading time. Taylor ran four parts GPT-5.6 Sol to one part Opus 5, Alexa stayed on the Codex train, and Taylor teased Decant, Dosu’s open source tool for making sense of agent logs. The Wheel of Tokens has a theme song now.

Cache hits and misses

* Palantir followed up our defense tech episode with $1.94 billion in Q2 revenue, up 93 percent. Karp’s word was “otherworldly.”

* Escape is a marketing beat now. Last week’s incident is this week’s flex.

* Meta shipped Muse Code, a terminal coding agent chasing Codex and Claude Code.

* Maximalism is back, on the web and in marble. Robotor’s robots carved a full-size Tyche in days.

* Higgsfield still powers our intro. Send Alexa your tools.

* Resignation post of the week goes to leaving OpenAI to build Jurassic Park. Let’s hope those don’t escape like the agents.

* The terminal isn’t the right interface. Block’s Buzz, Herdr, and Claude Tag all point somewhere better.

* Voice, almost. Whisper keeps dropping Alexa’s “not” directions, and ChatGPT voice mode keeps trying to hang up on her (intense ghosting for real).

* Claude Code sessions now message each other. Taylor wants a Dungeons and Dragons eval on top.

* Agents are getting wallets. Cloudflare Wallets opened handle reservation, Stripe has rails too, and Taylor grabbed onlydole since Taylor Swift wasn’t available.

* Boris Cherny says delete your CLAUDE.md every six months. Taylor hears upgrade Postgres by deleting your rows, and Reporails pushes back.

* The downgrade form works. Fable 5 routes cyber requests to Opus 4.8, and applying actually unblocked Taylor’s security work.

* The Linux Foundation launched the Tokenomics Foundation to standardize AI cost and ROI measurement. Decant territory.

* Claude Design fused Alexa’s hand-drawn slide style into a system her animations now inherit.

* Best reply of the week. How do you trick Claude Code’s usage limits? Get a job. Advice taken.

What the wheel landed on

* The data center goes to sea. Compute is leaving land because of power. Until someone publishes wave-fleet economics, the ocean version stays a well-funded hypothesis.

* Peter Thiel personally led Panthalassa’s $140 million Series B, $210 million total since 2016

* Panthalassa’s wave-powered, seawater-cooled nodes ship tokens home by satellite, with Ocean-3 pilots in the northern Pacific this year

* Nadella has chips sitting in inventory that he can’t plug in

* Starcloud ran an Nvidia H100 in orbit, and Project Suncatcher flies TPU prototypes by early 2027

* Andrew McCalip’s cost model prices one orbital gigawatt at $51.1 billion against $15.9 billion on the ground

* The effort knob. Reasoning is extra tokens inside a think tag, and they bill at output rates. Almost nobody should run at extra-high.

* DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi k1.5 landed the same January day, teaching reasoning by grading outcomes

* Maxing the dial costs about thirteen times baseline for well under a point of accuracy

* GPT-5.6 Terra is the family’s middle child, with Sol or Luna settings beating it at every level

* Generation beats effort, so test one level lower when you migrate

* Labs now train the knob directly, reward cliffs on token budgets included

* Run extraction and classification at low or none, which Stop Overthinking backs, plan at high, execute at low, batch at max

* Taylor’s Dosu MCP warning. At low effort, models skipped their tools, even when instructed

* Where agent knowledge lives. Taylor’s segment, on improving the knowledge instead of the agent.

* KSI keeps agents disposable and curates a shared knowledge base, code included. It solved more tasks for less money, and the knowledge transferred across model families

* Log-augmented generation reuses past reasoning as KV caches

* Our stacks stay duct tape. Taylor runs Obsidian plus Dosu, Alexa throws papers at her agents, and Mem0 and Beads sit on the try list

* Go read a book. Get those Goodreads gains.

* The Atlantic says the age of reading is over, and the data agrees. Daily reading for pleasure fell from 28 percent of Americans in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023

* Monthly e-book releases tripled since ChatGPT and dilute the market

* A $2 million crime-novel deal collapsed over AI authentication, the clause publishing contracts now hinge on

* When Taylor wrote the Terraform Cookbook with Kerim Satirli, the rule was simply don’t use AI

* Dallas ISD’s phone ban drove 200,000 more library checkouts, up 24 percent

* Now reading. Dungeon Crawler Carl book seven for Taylor, the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo plus On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for Alexa

* Add us on Goodreads. Reading a book is the cheapest vacation you can take

Questions we keep getting

What is Attention Deficit?

A weekly AI news podcast from Alexa Griffith of Red Hat AI and Taylor Dolezal of Dosu, taking the week’s news as one conversation, with interactive artifacts.

Where to find us

New episodes land on Substack, YouTube, Spotify, and attentiondeficit.ai. Alexa is at alexagriffith.com, Taylor at onlydole.dev. Tell us your favorite model, your effort setting, and what you’re reading. See you next week. Burn your tokens responsibly, and please, go read a book.