Rami's Readings #153 - Jev & Classifiers
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #153 - 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, The VC Corner and from the AI in Action Conference in Montréal. 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.
🤖 AI Reads
Introducing System One Models & Jev
Notes: Jev definitely captured the ML community’s attention this past week. It’s effectively a “general-purpose” classifier, and that generalization is very valuable. I believe too little attention and investment are going toward improving classifiers, and developers in the applied AI space too often reach for LLMs when a classifier with embedding features (like CatBoost) or a fine-tuned DeBERTa model would do the trick.
Here’s a fun story to share. My wife and I often split expenses from our individual credit cards. I built a small web app and added a CatBoost model to automatically decide which transactions (using the transaction line item) should be split based on our historical preferences. This app took a monthly chore from 1 hour to 1 minute. The model takes the transaction description (Amazon is very descriptive, thankfully) and other features, and is accurate enough that my wife was impressed (this is not a frequent occurrence with my side projects 🥹).
Whether Jev is truly novel or groundbreaking is up for debate. See this Reddit thread and Laya. You can get close to Jev’s benchmark performance with Qwen3.5 4B as well; see OpenJev for a demo.
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash: Omni Senses
Notes: Another impressive model from the Qwen team.
Mozilla’s Inaugural ‘State of Open Source AI’ Report Is Here
Notes: The gap between open-weight AI models and frontier models is shrinking. Mozilla estimates the gap at just 4 months.
Harbor: Evaluate Agents in Sandboxed Environments
Notes: Open source project for evaluating agents from the creators of Terminal-Bench.
DietrichGebert / ponytail: Makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room.
Notes: I love this project! Run the audit command on your repositories.
💼 Business Reads
One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’
Notes: Wired’s interview with Timnit Gebru.
The Next Life of an Iconic New York Skyscraper Is 37 Luxury Homes
Notes: My favorite building in NYC. I make a pilgrimage to NoMad every visit.
Some of the Richest Americans Are Hiding in Plain Sight
Notes: I bought the book, The Everywhere Millionaire.
A $5,000 Private Lounge With BMW Tarmac Drop-off Is the New Airport Luxury
Notes: I guess paying for private terminal access might be worth it at highly congested airports where flight delays are frequent. But I don’t think these terminals are worth it in Seattle or similar-sized, well-run airports. At SEA, I rarely spend more than 15 minutes going from car to gate and the lounges are not crowded.
🔀 Other Reads
One Hot Day Can Change Your Body for Years
Notes: Be careful out there! Heat stroke is no joke.
Pandoc Templates
Notes: Neat website collecting templates for pandoc.
wouterdebie / davit: A Native macOS UI for Apple’s Platform
Notes: For those who want truly lightweight hardware isolation on Apple’s silicon.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.