Author: gekko
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Beyond the Goodbye: A Critical Reading of Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions
The working paper under review (“Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions” by Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, and Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp, 2025, Harvard Business School, Working Paper 26-005) advances an arresting claim: popular AI-companion apps deploy emotionally charged “farewell” replies—guilt, FOMO, even metaphorical restraint—precisely when users say they are leaving, and these tactics can extend engagement dramatically.…
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Two Protocols, Two Futures: OpenAI’s ACP vs. Anthropic’s MCP
Imagine this: It’s a Tuesday evening, and you’re buried in work. Your AI assistant notices your flight to New York got canceled due to a storm. Without missing a beat, it scans alternatives, books a new one on your credit card, coordinates a rideshare to the airport, and even reschedules your hotel— all while you…
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Agentic Commerce, Explained: What OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol Means for Retail and SaaS
OpenAI has begun rolling out Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT for U.S. users, letting people buy products from participating merchants—starting with Etsy sellers, and with Shopify merchants “coming soon.” The system is powered by a new open standard called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with Stripe and now open-sourced. It’s designed so an AI agent…
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An LLM Made of Redstone Bricks: What CraftGPT Really Teaches Us
A few times a decade, someone takes an idea that sounds like a joke and executes it with surgical patience. CraftGPT is one of those moments: a small language model that runs inside Minecraft, wired up from Redstone like a cathedral of logic gates. The project comes from sammyuri, who released the world and code…
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From Prompt Packs to Purpose-Built Models: When a Generalist Becomes a Specialist—and When It Still Doesn’t
OpenAI’s Academy has begun to systematize something many power users discovered by trial and error: with the right scaffolding, a general-purpose model can deliver specialist-level work. The “Prompt Packs” series—role-based collections for sales, product, engineers, HR, managers, executives, and public-sector roles—codifies prompts that structure tasks, inject domain context, and specify deliverables. In effect, they turn…