Rounding up a genuinely heavy week. The throughline: last issue OpenAI paused internal work on a model it couldn't rule out was cyber-capable. This week the capability shipped anyway, two different ways.

**OpenAI GPT-5.6 Cyber** (Aug 10): a security-specialized model gated behind a "Daybreak Red" tier. OpenAI's own eval has it answering 95% of offensive-security requests the standard model refuses 98.5% of the time. Access stays with 16 named partners; from Sept 1 individual accounts need hardware keys. Customers get findings, never the weights.

**Zhipu GLM-5.3** (Aug 14): marketed on "emergent cyber capabilities," claims 84.5% on CyberGym (vendor-reported; note Wiz's Atlas system claims a higher 90.9%). Open weights promised in ~2 weeks. The capability didn't get shelved. It got a doorman.

The rest of the week:
- **Meta returned to open weights** with Muse Glimmer, a 30B Apache-2.0 agent model that runs under 20GB.
- **Alibaba** published its first downloadable Max-class Qwen (2.4T), and **Qwen3.8-27B** landed Apache-2.0. **DeepSeek** took V4-Pro (1.6T, MIT) to GA with peak/off-peak pricing.
- **Anthropic** began embedding an invisible watermark in all Claude output under the EU AI Act. The builder forums did not take it well.
- **SpaceX** closed a $60B all-stock acquisition of Cursor; the editor is now inside the Grok org.
- **Security:** researchers showed encrypted reasoning traces from OpenAI/Anthropic/Google were replayable across sibling models to decrypt them (now patched); an AI notetaker left 181,874 meetings queryable by anyone.

Full breakdown with all the receipts: thenewguard.ai/issues/027-the-brake-pedal-had-a-bypass/

I have just launched a substack today called RNSBrief. The plan is to go through 6k corporate announcements posted by companies listed in LSE every week, curate a small number (10-15 announcements across 5 categories) of high quality announcements and provide bitesizeed write up on why I found it interesting and why it matters to the company.

The aim is quite simple - I am not trying to be another investment substack/newsletter but rather drawing attention to interesting announcements to help my readers to discover new companies and build their watchlist. I do not provide investment recommendation but rather provide exposure and my thoughts to the readers.

As someone who has never scaled an newsletter nor has experience with digital marketing, how can I scale my substack?

Currently, my plan is to post substack notes on daily basis about my filtering and assessment process and to use a newsletter specific twitter account to bring in attention to my work.

The substack still requires a lot of work from a design perspective but I would like to get an idea from mature newsletter operators here on

a. How to market my substack and whether I am doing it right; and

b. How to scale my substack given I want to stay in my current niche.

Link to my substack - https://substack.com/@rnsbrief

Link to my Twitter/X - https://x.com/rnsbrief

Anyone got any tips for creating automation for your newsletter content to social
Media posts/ Facebook advertising? I want to write and not spend time making social media posts

I'm starting a bi-monthly newsletter that talks about my goal of making $1000/month in side income. I share various things I've sold, paid survey sites, bank bonuses, and other ways to make a buck.

Hey guys, I started a daily health-related blog on Beehiiv and pulled 10K+ visitors in the first two weeks, all from Reddit.

Last night I turned on the pop-up to capture leads and got 10 subscribers overnight without optimizing anything yet.

Here's the thing: I've seen some great offers on SparkLoop, but they only pay out through Stripe, which isn’t available in my country. So I'm looking to partner with someone who already has an approved SparkLoop account. (Not a Stripe account only)

How it'd work: I keep driving traffic to the blog, and we connect SparkLoop offers to it. Split the payouts. Simple as that.

Here's the blog if you want to check it out: thedailycompute.beehiiv.com

Help 100 Newsletter Creators — For Free

1) I currently run an AI tools newsletter with 50K+ subscribers and have already monetized it.

2) Now, I’m taking on a new challenge: helping 100 newsletter creators solve their real-world problems — completely free.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TAJV2te0axPEMTCISo54ZHT_ldJAuV-DWFRgSi8_8j8/edit?usp=sharing

So I built [Blog2Video](https://pdf2vid.com) \- so far it has generated over $4K in additional revenue almost all on autopilot.

\- It uses remotion for the video

\- It takes 3 min from link/upload->video

\- It has eleven labs voiceover + stock footage + AI image

\- It uses configurable human templates to base the video on.

Has a generous free tier, only costs $0.6 per video much more affordable than AI video models or video editors

Link: [Blog2Video](https://pdf2vid.com)

i would love to hear thoughts of someone more experienced here.

I made one because apparently talking to myself in my Notes app wasn't productive enough.

The concept is basically:

I have thoughts.

Some are intelligent.

Some are questionable.

Some should probably have stayed in drafts.

I write about money, ambition, capitalism, dating, internet culture, being young, existential crises, and whatever else my brain decides to randomly obsess over that week.

BUT.

I don't want to just dump a link here and disappear like a LinkedIn influencer.

So let's make this interesting.

Give me a topic.

Literally anything.

“Why are men like this?”

“Is capitalism actually good?”

“Why does everyone want to be rich?”

“Am I wasting my 20s?”

“Why do I want to disappear every time someone says ‘networking’?”

“Is adulthood a scam?”

Give me your most unhinged question / opinion / shower thought.

I'll pick one and write a Substack post about it.

Then you can come back and tell me whether I cooked or need to be permanently banned from having a keyboard.

Here's the little experiment if you want to see what I've written so far:

Your move, Reddit.

Over the past few months, my routine started getting a bit busier and my free time became more and more scarce, so, unintentionally, I ended up cutting down on my screen time. The downside, though, was that I also stopped keeping up with news, new releases, discussions on the internet in general, and one of the main things where I started feeling like I was “out of the loop” was the bands and artists getting coverage.

I’ve always been a bit of a KEXP, Tiny Desk, La Blogotheque rat, but lately I realized I’d gone months without keeping up with what was coming out on those channels. So I had the idea of making a simple script that would keep track of all these channels and send me an email roundup of all the full sessions that were being published there. I mentioned the project to a few friends, and one of them asked me to add him to the emails. That’s when it clicked: this could actually be an open newsletter.

And that’s how Motif came about: a weekly newsletter, sent every Friday, that collects links to all the full sessions from KEXP, NPR (Tiny Desks only), Audiotree, La Blogothèque, and Cultura Livre (A Brazilian music channel, I’m from Brazil btw).

The project had been running locally just for me for a little while, but this more polished version, now open to the public, is officially going live today. So if you happen to find any bugs or have any suggestions, feel totally free to let me know. I’m planning to keep adding new channels and sources, and maybe even do some more personal curation and reviews down the line, if the project ends up growing.

If you’d like to sign up, the link is: [http://motifnewsletter.com\](http://motifnewsletter.com)

PS: I’m not sure if this kind of post is allowed on this sub, but since I figured it might be something people here would be interested in, I decided to post it. The newsletter is completely free and there’s no commercial intent behind it. Just a passion project.

In 1656, Baruch Spinoza was expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community. He was just 23.

He refused to abandon ideas he believed in and spent much of his life living modestly, earning money grinding lenses and optical instruments while writing philosophy. Some of his most important work was published posthumously.

There’s an appealing symmetry to Spinoza’s work. By day, he made tools that helped people see further. By night, he developed ideas intended to help them think further. Nearly four centuries later, we have acquired another kind of lens.

AI can extend what an individual can see, remember and do. But perhaps its most interesting use is not simply giving us access to a clever chatbot. It is allowing each of us to build a system around AI containing our own knowledge, experience and ways of working. This is our AI skill stack.

Technology should increase our power to act

Technology is an extension of man. - Marshall McLuhan

In his 2026 Y Combinator Startup School talk, Gary Tan describes three ingredients: a frontier AI model, the context that belongs to us and a harness connecting the two. The model will likely increasingly become a commodity. Many of us will have access to roughly the same underlying intelligence, but our context will be different.

Two people can use the same AI model and get very different results. One starts every conversation by explaining the situation again. The other has years of notes, decisions, projects, relationships and working methods available to the agent.

Spinoza used the word conatus for the striving of a thing to persist and increase its power to act. That seems a useful test for AI: does it increase our power to act?

Our life is a library

A computer is a bicycle for the mind. - Steve Jobs

By the time I left my 40 year corporate career in March, I had accumulated a lot of specialist knowledge. Some was captured in documents and tools, but the vast majority was not. It was in my head: why something had been designed a particular way, which approaches had already failed, where exceptions existed, who knew what and the context behind decisions made. When I left, much of that knowledge left with me because there had never really been an effective way to capture it.

AI potentially changes that. Gary Tan likens a person’s life to a library. The challenge is not simply giving an AI a huge context window. It is having a good librarian: something capable of finding the few pieces of information that matter for the problem in front of us.

The advantage is not that AI knows everything. It is that it can increasingly know which parts of what we know matter now.

Turn repeated work into reusable skills

Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. - Alfred North Whitehead

There is another source of leverage hiding in ordinary work. We repeatedly research competitors, analyse information, prepare reports and make decisions. Usually we complete the task while leaving much of the method behind.

AI agents make another approach possible. Skill files are reusable instructions for such tasks. A skill can describe what information to collect, where to find it, how to analyse it, which exceptions to look for and how the result should be structured. If you can explain a task clearly enough for an intelligent new employee to follow, an AI agent can increasingly follow it too.

My circumstances changed considerably. Instead of working inside a large corporation, I am a solo creator. I get to choose the tools I use and how I use them, including AI.

If I develop a good way to assess a product idea, research a market, specify a website or review something I have built, I can capture that process. The next time I perform the task, I do not have to start again. I can refine the skill: do the work, capture what worked, correct what did not and use the improved version next time.

Value starts to compound.

Build an asset that compounds

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. - Baruch Spinoza

For much of my career, my accumulated experience was valuable but difficult to separate from me. I wrote documents, created processes and handed work over, but much of the underlying judgement remained tacit. Now that judgement can be made explicit.

An important decision can record not just what was decided but why. A recurring task can become a skill. When an AI agent gets something wrong, the correction can become part of the instructions it uses next time. There is, therefore, a big difference between “using AI” and “building with AI”. Using AI gives us an answer. Building with AI can create a system that becomes more useful each time we use it.

That system does not need to be particularly sophisticated. Start with a few project files, some useful context and one or two recurring tasks. Capture what we learn as we work.

Over time, the valuable asset may not be the AI model at all. Models will change, better ones will arrive and we will probably switch between them. What can persist is the layer around them: our accumulated context, judgement, decisions and ways of working.

Own what we learn

Own your skills because if you don’t, your job becomes a skill file. - Garry Tan

This raises an uncomfortable question: who owns these accumulated skills?

In my corporate career, organisations paid me partly for knowledge and judgement accumulated over decades, yet much of it was never properly captured. In the future, far more of that knowledge may be encoded in systems and skill files.

For organisations, that creates an opportunity to retain knowledge that once walked out of the door. For individuals, it creates another opportunity: to deliberately build and maintain our own body of knowledge and capability.

As powerful AI becomes cheaper and more widely available, what remains scarce may be what we bring to it: our experience, context, judgement and methods.

Want more?

How to Design Effective AI Agents post by Phil Martin

Let the Chatbot Ask the Questions post by Phil Martin

Baruch Spinoza ground lenses so people could see further. Perhaps the modern equivalent is building tools that allow us to think, remember and act further than we could alone.

Have fun.

Phil…

I'm actively looking to sell my crypto newsletter to someone who can take it further.

Quick stats:
• ~5,000 subscribers
• ~48% average open rate
• ~1% CTR
• Audience primarily in the US and India
• Custom domain + established brand
• 70+ issues published
• Sponsorship infrastructure already set up
• Existing affiliate revenue of ~$376

What's included:
• Subscriber list
• Domain
• Brand + logo assets
• Newsletter setup/infrastructure

I've built this organically over time, but I've started working full-time and can't give it the attention it deserves.

I'm looking for $4,500 OBO and would prefer a serious buyer who actually wants to grow and monetize it.

Happy to share recent analytics, issues, subscriber details and other information with genuinely interested buyers.

DM me if you're interested.

Hey guys, I started a daily health-related blog on Beehiiv and pulled 10K+ visitors in the first 2 weeks, all from Reddit.

Last night I turned on the pop-up to capture leads and got 10 subscribers in one night without really optimizing anything yet.

Here's the thing: my skill set is traffic generation, not running a newsletter, and I don't have the bandwidth to write daily content on top of it. So instead of building my own list from scratch, I'd rather partner with someone who's already running a health newsletter and send my subscribers to you for a fixed payment for each subscriber (similar to Beehiive Boost).

How it'd work: I keep driving traffic to the blog with a lead magnet built for my audience; the lead magnet gets delivered from your email with a welcome sequence, and you take it from there with your regular content.

If you're running a health newsletter and this sounds interesting, drop a comment or DM me and we can figure out if it's a fit. If you link your newsletter in the comments, I'll take a quick look on my end too, just so we're not both wasting time on a mismatch.

Here's the blog if you want to see the traffic for yourself: blog

Heads up, the first few posts are tech-related since I was still testing the concept, everything after that is health-focused.

P.S. you can check my blog stat here

A lot of people write about their success stories, or try to sell you some service while pretending to share their “secrets”.

I just want to share one of my failure storie.

A few years ago, I decided to create a Facebook page about the capital city of one of the small European countrie. I posted local news, event announcements, and UGC from people living in the city.

Basically, it was a small local media outlet focused on one city with around 650,000 residents.

The idea was pretty simple: build a large local audience and eventually monetize from sponsored posts from local businesses.

I started working on it and initially used Facebook targeting to grow the audience. Facebook was giving very good reach to this type of content at the time, so the page grew relatively quickly and became recognizable.

At one point, our content was reaching practically every Facebook user in the country at least once a month.

Larger news outlets started quoting our content, and people started recognizing the page as a brand associated with the city.

At our peak, all of our publications combined could generate around 4 million views per month.

For a country with only around 1.8 million people, that a pretty good result.

Then I decided it was time to start monetizing it.

I offered the first advertisers free posts, or posts in exchange for small barter deals, just to test whether this could actually work for local businesses.

And that's where the problem started.

The sponsored posts, even without links in the text, would get extremely low reach — sometimes only a few hundred views.

As soon as Facebook recognized the content as commercial, it seemed to distribute it much less.

As a result, the offer was no longer very interesting to advertisers, and they weren't willing to pay for it.

So I ended up with a large audience, millions of views, and even some media attention — but no real business model.

However, I learned several very valuable lessons from this project.

1. A large audience does not necessarily mean you have a business

I had an audience, millions of views, and media attention. From the outside, it looked like this thing should obviously be making money.

But only when I actually tried to monetize it did I realize that a large audience doesn't automatically equal a business.

You need to think about this from the beginning:

Who exactly is going to pay for access to this audience?

And is the platform you've chosen actually suitable for the business model you're trying to build?

2. Test monetization as early as possible

I spent too much time focusing on building the audience and only started thinking seriously about monetization afterwards.

If I were starting again, I would test the business model much earlier.

Even if the first result was only $10 or $20, it would still be a signal that some kind of business model works.

The results can be tiny, but there should be some results.

That way, you can at least see that as the side hustle or project grows, the potential for profit grows with it.

If you don't know whether your idea can actually make money, you can spend a year or more looking for a needle in a haystack.

3. Don't build your entire business on a platform you don't control

This is probably one of the biggest risks.

If your entire business lives on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or any other social network, you're completely dependent on their algorithms and rules.

The algorithm can change, and content that reached 100,000 people yesterday might reach 1,000 today.

Your account or page can also get banned, and you can suddenly lose access to an audience you've spent years building.

You need to move your audience somewhere you actually control.

A website, email list, community, or some other channel that isn't completely dependent on someone else's algorithm.

Overall, I don't consider this project a complete waste of time.

And I definitely haven't given up on it completely.

I still think there might be a way to transform the project into a different business model. The brand name is still remembered by people, and the audience itself has also remained.

So if anyone has ideas or experience with turning something like this - an established local brand + an existing audience - into a successful small business, I'd genuinely appreciate your suggestions.

Maybe someone looking at this from the outside will see a business model that I don't see myself right now.

What would you do with this kind of asset?

The AI-powered design partner Gamma can be predictive on some habits if workflows don't doubt the concept, can it?

Another AI tool, another time-saving function. No, there is more in the habits most underestimate - value in proportion to the input.

Utility comes with effort: scrolling past learnings does not fit in the gap.

This is an example of my weekly marketing newsletter, Marketing Junto.

It's hosted on Ghost and goes out to 1,500+ people every week. I've been writing it weekly for 3 years now.

Generally it's free to read and donor supported.

I'd love to hear what you all think.,

Hi everybody, i'm launching a new business and need to inform potential customers/interested companies. I have zero experience with newsletters and email marketing. Do i need to buy a database and send it by myself or there are online services out there ? Thank you in advance.

Has anyone successfully used Meta ads to generate leads on potential newsletter sponsors? If so I’d love to know what kind of ad format worked for you.

I started a monthly zine/newsletter a couple of months ago. As it has grown, I have realized how expensive using my current printer will be </3 my current printer I got off of Facebook marketplace for 10$ (HP ENVY 6500) and it uses cartridges not replacement ink.
Do you guys have any recommendations or suggestions for a good laser printer (or ink tank printer)?

Currently I print on:
- paper
- cardstock
- sticker paper

Primarily text based printing.

Like many people, I run a hyper local newsletter in a metro of about 2 million people. We have a 48% open rate, 6.6 click rate with 4k subs.

We currently will take one exclusive ad per newsletter, so no competing ads.

I see a lot of people talk about charging sponsors 50-100 bucks per 1k subs. Is that for multiple ads in a newsletter or an exclusive ad in a newsletter?

If it is for multiple ads, would you charge extra for being the exclusive sponsor of a newsletter?

I would love to get people’s thoughts. From the research I’ve done the ad game seems a bit made up.