December 2, 2025

I logged onto my Sublime app today, and in the Staff Picks was this: Warren Buffett said goodbye in his annual letter. This is what he had to say,

“One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy; he was the best.

Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.

Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.

I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.”

That’s some beautiful stuff. Thanks to SMB Attorney on X for sharing this.

I think we all knew the day Warren Buffett would retire was coming. He is 95 years old after all! 

…

From John Evans in his Substack essay (Of Agents and Agency – by Jon Evans – Gradient Ascendant):

“LLMs are tools that often masquerade as solutions, an unfortunate state of affairs which has led to remarkable amounts of confusion, frustration, rage, and opprobrium. Almost all of the criticisms aimed at their outputs (as opposed to their training) stem from this deceptive category error.”

Opprobrium is a great word, meaning “harsh criticism or censure.” And Mr. Evans is absolutely correct that critics are blaming the outputs not the inputs. A computer is only as good as the information it’s fed, after all. And these models are trained in such a way to be just ‘good enough’ to make people feel like they are a smart friend who can do their homework for them.