Find Your Signal. Find Your Subtraction.

Canonical episode: https://sigsub.show/episodes/ep-002This episode sets the ground rules: what this show is, what it isn’t, and what we actually mean when we say signal and subtraction around here. By the end, you’ll be able to find your own signal and subtraction, with or without AI.First, the news:* Anthropic’s Jacobian Lens (JSpace): a new paper and open tool that lets you peer into a language model’s “subconscious,” the precursors that come before the thinking and the output tokens. Free to play with on Qwen and Gemma, with a GitHub repo. Sam’s take on why it’s news: not that AI got smarter, but that the black box just went a little transparent. Read the post from Anthropic or watch their video here.* Fablemaxing before the window closes: Fable 5 is currently the most powerful commercially available model, and Anthropic’s billing change now lands Sunday, July 12. If you haven’t hit your token limit yet, there’s a few more days.* Microsoft’s Frontier Company: a $2.5B, 6,000-person AI deployment unit embedded with enterprise customers. More evidence that we’ve moved from 2025 pilots to 2026 production. It’s infrastructure time.Then, the method. Sam works through a real example live, by hand:* What makes a signal: recent, specific, first person. If a stranger could have posted it on LinkedIn, it isn’t yours yet.* What makes a subtraction: something you actually stopped, killed, or refused. Past tense. Made, not planned. Not advice for other people.* The analogy layer: recurring meetings as for loops that just count, versus do-while loops that know when they’re done and hold their own exit condition. Convert the for loops into do loops.* Make it testable: open your calendar, look at each recurring event, and ask two questions. What’s its exit condition? Who checks it? No exit condition and no checker means you’re running a for loop for somebody else. Give it a return statement this week.Want the home game? Grab the AI prompts at SigSub.show/find-yours and play with your bot friend anytime.Livestreaming Wednesdays. Polished podcast/video Fridays. Newsletter recap Sunday.SigSub.showSignals & Subtractions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks to the sponsor of this weeks’ show: Harnessie.com! Put AI to work without giving up control with this free and open-source, multi-agentic harness based in agentic collaboration to enable human ownership. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sigsub.substack.com