That’s right, this is Fodder 6-7. Six Seven. Parents everywhere groan. The world turns on its axis and I lose just a few more cool points from my kids (I’m in negative territory anyway).

Now the question is: where do you exit? You always go out on top. At the high. When the love and adulation and roar of the crowd can’t get louder. 6 7 is close enough. So it’s time to retire the Fodder. The original goal was to force a regular cadence weekly, but then it sort of developed a life of its own. I have a limited amount of time to write, and this is now getting in the way of the original intent: a thoughtful, Chestertonian orientation towards the technological movements of our age.

The purpose has been served. Requiescat.

After. One. More Time.

Pope Leo had a big week on X, unintentionally starting some beef with Marc Andreessen (or rather, other way around) and then winning. One of those “I don’t think about you at all” kinda wins. Which is perfect since pmarca was using the latest Sweeney meme.

And then the Pope went Silicon Valley viral. TBPN. The All In crew. Scott Alexander. Vitalik Buterin. Tweets with 10M views. The Blues Brothers version. Reminders that there’s a shrine to Saint Carlo Acutis in San Francisco for technical problems.

Also Marc Andreessen is still great! Both/And.

The shutdown ended. There was a lot of complaining and complaining. Fetterman is hospitalized. Warren doubles down with Mamdani and Lina Khan. Johnson finally swears in Rep. Grijalva. Ro Khanna calls for Schumer’s ouster. The House releases Epstein emails. The Department of War announces the launch of Operation Southern Spear and I really don’t think war is supposed to take cues from startup marketing emails. But anyway, Venezuela.

Kimi releases K2 Thinking and it runs on a laptop. OpenAI does GPT 5.1 and backs off it’s “government backstop” too big to fail ideas. Anthropic stops a Chinese AI espionage campaign. Karpathy is excited about full self driving. And we’re still waiting for Gemini 3.

Softbank gets out of NVidia. AMD kills earnings. Bitcoin pukes. The Big Short talks depreciation. Dwarkesh and Dylan Patel talk to Satya. Buffet leaves with grace and elegance.

NASA lands a probe on Saturn’s Titan moon. Blue Origin lands a reusable rocket. Alex Wang says all 13 year olds should be vibecoding. The third interstellar comet discovered - 3I/Atlas - passes the sun. GLP1s are available for everyone. 50 year mortgages are the new housing solution. The last penny is made.

Stat crux dum volvitur orbis

On to the reading!

Timely

• Warren Buffet’s Farewell Letter - Just as he has for 50+ years, Warren dispenses common sense and wisdom all rolled into one. “Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.”

• Inside Cursor - Cursor is a monster. It feels to me the same way that Google felt in 2000: barely anyone has heard of it but it’s one of the most important companies in the world. A look into their culture and practices that is both refreshing and traditional.

• The Monks In the Casino - It is very weird to consider these modern examples as monastic, but the analogy is poignant nonetheless. “The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.”

• AI progress and recommendations - In the continued spirit of “keeping up with what Sam Altman says with a grain of salt” comes this from OpenAI. Timelines and expectations are changing.

Timeless

• The Economy will Become an RL Environment Machine - Mercor is a hot new company, sort of like Scale AI but newer and better. This is a useful view into one potential future world where AI is really important but humans are still needed.

• If I Had Only One Sermon To Preach - A GK Chesterton gem on the nature of pride and its fundamental, rightful place as the chief poison of the modern world.

• Hills Like White Elephants - One of Hemingway’s shortest short stories. It is remarkably subtle, and once you realize what it’s about, you read it a second time and every line feels more poignant. It’s about abortion. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

• How Art Can Be Good - The further we go on the technology curve, the more taste matters. PG’s timeless reminder of what good art means.

Books

I will leave you with two:

• Prayer by Hans Urs von Balthasar - A profound book on the nature of prayer, how it shapes us, and how it is tied to both the theology of the Church and the idea of the human being. Balthasar was one of the most important Catholic theologians of the 20th century and this demands to be taken seriously as a series of allegories more than a how-to.

• Vibecoding by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge - Yes, this is a super nerdy book. But we’re getting remarkably close to a world where anyone can build anything. If you want to learn the details of how with what can be done in 2025, this is the book.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Love y’all!

Democrats won governorships in VA and NJ too, which you would think is more important than a mayor. More on that mayor though, Former FTC commissioner Lina Khan is the transition chair. Regular New Yorkers like Alex Soros are excited. His intern asks for Jihad. And Zohran made a speech.

California redistricts. China releases it’s next Five Year Plan. Giga.ai raises a big Series A. Tesla has a shareholder meeting. Pelosi retires. Bitcoin “tanks” to $100k. Whales are selling. B-52s strafe Venezeula.

Ilya was deposed. A cargo plane has a crazy crash. A prescient 2020 email from Thiel on socialism surfaces. The median age of first time home buyers hits 40. An IRS lawyer starts a hot dog stand. Nicki Minaj thanks Trump for supporting Christians in Nigeria. Chamath gets a new collar.

St. John Henry Newman is a Doctor of the Church. Pray for us.

On to the reading!

Timely

• Technology, Power, and the Case for Global Socialism - A dive into the economic and strategic implications of China’s latest Five Year Plan.

• Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution -

• ‘Soul-Crushing’: Students Slam Harvard’s Grade Inflation Report - Harvard students aren’t happy about stricter grading rules. They liked all their easier A’s.

• What If You Don’t Need MCP? - This is in the weeds, but I used to think MCP was a key part of the AI experience. I’m less sure now. Does an LLM need tools? Yes absolutely, but that doesn’t mean MCP anymore.

Timeless

• Spirit and the Cost of Cognition - What does it mean for intelligence to be disembodied? “The magic will be plentiful, but the magicians are few.”

• Thoughts on the AI Buildout - Dwarkesh with some rational thoughts on just how big things can scale.

• Beijing’s New Approach To Taiwan - There’s a lot of new movement between PRC and Taiwan, on both sides.

• Deciding To Win - A new summary on what needs to happen for Democrats to win decisively. I continue to think the rebuilding of the Democratic Party is one of the most important American projects right now.

Books

• Excellent Advice For Living by Kevin Kelly - If you know me you know I love aphorisms. Kevin Kelly is always fun to read too, so there was no way combining the two wouldn’t make a book I love. I love this book. So many simple and elegant lessons. My kids will each get a copy of this when they’re older.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Trump and Xi met in South Korea after meeting his Margaret Thatcher in Japan. Trump announces nuclear weapons testing. Thune and Schumer keep the shutdown going. Trump’s CAPS LOCK and cursing are de rigueur now. Vance visits Jerusalem. AOC challenges a mom (and Fox News correspondent) to “get a real job”. No Kings goes nationwide. SNAP is in the shutdown crosshairs. Mamdani gets votes.

Non-Profit OpenAI plans an IPO. Microsoft and OpenAI change their partnership. Cursor 2.0 is out and looks to be going towards Claude Code. Amazon talks Project Rainier data centers for Anthropic. Nvidia hits $5 Trillion market cap and does a lot of partnerships. Neo releases a home robot. Except they’re all teleoperated.

Hurricane Melissa hits Jamaica at full blast. Robert Reich finally makes a point I agree with. The Pints With Aquinas guy joins the Daily Wire. Bill Gates backs off the climate catastrophism. Pope Leo talks algorithms.

On to the reading!

Timely

• The Tocqueville Paradox - A look into why socialism sounds like such a great idea but isn’t, how “free stuff” wins elections, and why more equal societies make people aware of the remaining inequalities.

• The State of AI 2025 - Slides! Lots of slides. This is a week or two old now from Air Street Capital but it’s a phenomenal capture of the progress in just a year.

• Ben Affleck, Paul Schrader, and the Move 37 Moment for All of Us - The famous Move 37 from AlphaGo back in 2016 was revolutionary. Equally important was the Hand of God Move 78 by Lee Sedol in the next game against AlphaGo. These are important analogs for our dance with AI, but what’s missing in this story is that Lee Sedol also retired soon thereafter.

• Charlie Kirk, Scapegoat - A Girardian look at this political murder and a critique of both the left and right and our wars of religion.

Timeless

• Technocalvinism - Take technological determinism far enough.. and this is what you end up with. The shape we give our technologies is not predetermined and very important.

• Beauty Is Not A Luxury - It is a duty, a value, and a reason to live.

• Context Rot - A wonderful paper describing why context is the most important thing in managing LLM performance and how it breaks down. Keep your prompts focused and reset often!

• The Decline of Deviance - Culture is slowly being flattened - we are all less weird, less mobile, less risky.

Books

• Green Philosophy by Sir Roger Scruton - I get quickly frustrated by all of the bullshit of the activist-grifter climate complex when there’s so much opportunity for real work to make things better and sustainable. Scruton is one of the very best conservative writers and this is a different take on what is still one of the most important topics of this century: caring for our planet. Get ready to learn a bit about his rather comically named “oikophilia”.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Elizabeth Warren piles on to AWS. Elon piles on about Claude. And everyone piles on about Atlas.

But there was more! The shutdown continues. Bernie admits Trump is his heir. Then gets mad at Amazon for efficiency. Fetterman declares Groundhog Day. Klobuchar tries to make people feel bad for early-retiring boomers and fails. Hillary gets mad about the East Wing. JD Vance gets an answer for Harry Sisson in response to Trump’s latest ridiciulous AI tweet. This timeline is the craziest possible timeline.

TSMC shows off it’s Arizona fab. A King of England visits the Sistine Chapel. Tesla FSD gets Mad Max mode. Claude Code hits the web. The Pentagon gets a whole new Press Corp. The Israeli Knesset votes to annex the West Bank. CZ gets a pardon. Datacenters represent most of GDP growth. The UK keeps pushing Digital ID.

On to the reading!

Timely

• Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist - The always brilliant Ted Nordhaus with a full repudiation of catastrophism and a great telling of the problems of the climate activist cycle.

• The Foolishness of ‘No Enemies to the Right’ - Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee with a very timely reminder that the Right needs to look after itself, be weary of it’s own excesses, and renounce the bad ideas that are out there.

• Wanted: Men of Purpose - “Shaping a sweet boy into a strong and good man is principally a soulful venture, one that requires great attention to virtues.” Truer words have never been said, it takes a lifetime. A call to give boys the examples and role models they desperately want so they don’t find themselves lured to the shadow of masculinity in some dark corners of the Internet.

• Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature - A great deepdive into what it means to code with AI today. It’s vibecoding, yes, but not the trivial kind. This is the thoughtful and sustainable kind, and we’re all going to be doing more of it in the future.

Timeless

• INFRASTRUCTURE INEQUALITY: WHO PAYS THE COST OF ROAD ROUGHNESS? - An incredible paper based on Uber data that shows rough roads are more common in poorer neighborhoods and towns causing them to pay more per mile than other areas.

• Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find? - Signs point to yes, “research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look.”

• The CEREBELLUM as NEURAL ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY - Slides, yes. But incredible ideas. Neuroscientists are trying to figure out the deep purposes of the brain based on the new mental models of LLMs.

Books

• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 by Dwarkesh Patel - This is the latest Stripe Press book and I just finished it. It’s mostly snippets of dialogue from Dwarkesh’s podcasts with everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Gwern to Dario to Ilya. It’s broken into sections about why models work the way they do and predictions about what could happen next. While it’s certainly technical and the topics are dense, it’s a remarkably approachable book and a great overview for anyone interested in why this revolution is such a big deal.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

We’ve also got Bitcoin whales making 9 figures shorting before Trump’s announcement, epic trolling on Columbus Day, DHS pretending to be Billy Madison, validation for reading 25 books, and the media refusing the new Pentagon coverage rules. Putin and Trump talk on the phone and Hungary becomes a neutral spot.

Nvidia releases DGK Spark. The US runs a September surplus. Starship returns and flips and lands again. 2026 grad school tuition goes down. Gold keeps climbing. Claude gets skills. Broadcom gets some of the OpenAI energy. Anduril shows EagleEye.

There’s just so much! St. Carlo Acutis, pray for us!

On to the reading!

Timely

• Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear - Jack Clark - one of the other founders of Anthropic - with some storytelling and metaphors for all the AI progress and where we’re likely going.

• The common words list and the real magic of writing - Most writing is just 300 common words, with a few others sprinkled in here and there for good measure. And yet from this comes a whole “portable magic” that runs our entire civilization.

• Edison’s Lesson for the AI Age: Why the Capex Boom Isn’t a Bubble - It’s all the rage to say AI is a bubble. But with very little debt and free cash flow paying for capex, it doesn’t have an end in sight yet.

• Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now - We’re still getting as much compute as we possibly can, but for practical applications the real limitation is context. Memory. How much can we load into a working window?

Timeless

• Getting Jacked Is Simple - You may not like it. I may not like it. But it is quite simple.

• Math Every Day - I still remember first reading this almost 20 years ago. It remains the best intro to John von Neumann and why he’s important. It’s also exceptionally good context for what a computer is and why AI is so important (read: it’s the first computer architecture that isn’t just a von Neumann machine). Yegge is a great writer and this is approachable for everyone.

• Don’t Worry It Can’t Happen - A 1940 article on uranium fission describing how the scientists are cautious and the evidence suggests there’s no reason to worry.. these reactions just sort of fizzle out.

• The Origins of Representation Manifolds in Large Language Models - One of the more interesting ideas around how LLMs work involve the manifold hypothesis. A below the surface dive into how manifolds work and what’s going on, with just a tiny bit of math.

Books

• Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb - This was the first book from the Incerto that I’ve read and.. it’s interesting. Taleb’s style is both engaging and off-putting. The editing is incredibly light and it sometimes feels more like stream of consciousness than anything else. Let’s call it storytelling. Taleb focuses on both incentives and disincentives and expresses the power of all things via negativa. The idea of the Silver Rule (vs. the Golden Rule) - and it’s role on the ideas of negative and positive rights - has stayed with me. Most importantly, as reiterated over and over and over by Taleb, identify others, leverage groups, and have for yourself some skin in whatever game that you’re playing.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Maybe it’s OpenAI. Or Nvidia. Kinda weird that stocks went way up up and the labor force went way down for the first time ever right when ChatGPT got released, right? Probably nothing.

Speaking of OpenAI, they now own 10% of AMD.. somehow? Matt Levine describes it well. And some insider made a ton of money on calls. OpenAI had a Dev Day too, and 1,000 startups screamed. There’s an Apps SDK, an Agents SDK, and Sora. And maybe it’s not just startups screaming, but every software company that exists. Maybe that’s why they’re all attaching themselves to Sam & co. Where will search happen in 5 years? ChatGPT. Buy new house goods? ChatGPT. Pay for bespoke, handcrafted yarn sweaters? ChatGPT. Write your own app? ChatGPT. Find a flight and hotel? ChatGPT. You get the idea.

And what’s Anthropic doing? They’re capturing hearts and minds with hats. No seriously, I want one of those hats. I’d stand in line for it. Sonnet 4.5 is amazing. They’re the anti-slop company now. But it also feels like they’re positioned as the elite alternative to the behemoth. But both companies are two sides of the same coin. And the best engineers aren’t writing code anymore.

Now is all this a bubble? Maybe, but it’s all still capex from earnings. Datacenter growth keeps coming. Electricity prices are going up. And there’s plenty of liquidity. Also read the new State of AI report, it’s a lot.

What else? Israel and Hamas have a ceasefire. The White House blesses the peacemakers. Except ICE agents, who shoot pepper balls randomly. And democrats. And also let’s give Ukraine some Tomahawks.

The Church of Nigeria breaks from the Anglican Church over the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Katie Porter bombs an interview and they dig up plenty of old stuff too, and how is she actually running for Governor? China locks down the global rare earth metal market which could make things sticky very fast. A man tries to blow up the Red Mass for the Supreme Court.

Figure previews the latest robot. Tesla releases FSD v14.1. Old monkeys get a shot and get younger. Pope Leo releases his first Apostolic Exhortation, carried on from Francis, Dilexi te.

And most important of all, my daughter plays two new Taylor Swift songs.. and they’re kinda good?

On to the reading!

Timely

• Donald Trump’s Worst Idea - Tyler Cowen on skewing the market with nationalized buy signals, and how Trump might usher socialism in the side door.

• The Techno-Optimist’s Guide to Futureproofing Your Children - Will kids need careers? Colleges? Is Alpha School and AI tutors a sign of the future? Or a dead-end? I remain, skeptical, but agency is still important.

• Hamlet Is The Gen-Z Story We Need - Hamlet, it turns out, is one of the middle children of history too, with no purpose or place.

• Some Thoughts on the Sutton Interview - Dwarkesh comes back with a refined view of what “more compute” really means in the Bitter Lesson and how continual learning might work one day.

Timeless

• Machines of Loving Grace - A completely brilliant and optimistic piece from the head of Anthropic on the enormous potential of AI. Required reading.

• Language Without Mind - Stochastic parrots AI may be, but they are still startling. Will then make us forget our own inner lives and quests; our souls?

• Failure Is a Great Tutor—Don’t Fire Him - Monday night, my son caught a long throw from his friend for a game-winning flag football touchdown with 5 seconds left. I wasn’t proud of him for the play, but for the perseverance to join the team, to learn, to work so his teammates can trust him, to drop passes and get up and try again, and to practice when he’s tired.

• The Myth of the Sommelier - The Judgement of Paris, the influence of Robert Parker, and the “veneer of credibility” around expertise and wine tasting.

Books

• The Pendulum: A Granddaughter’s Search for Her Family’s Forbidden Nazi Past by Julie Lindahl - Julie Lindahl gives us a magically intimate retelling of the research she did into her family’s Nazi past. She grew up in Brazil — where her family had fled in 1960 — with strange holes and disconnections about her family’s past. There are many memoirs from the perspective of Jewish descendants, but few that I’ve seen from Nazi descendants. From her relationship with her loving but Nazi-sympathetic grandmother to the encounters with old men who still remember her cruel and fanatical SS grandfather, this book holds nothing back and is absolutely beautiful.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

And there were new models! Anthropic released Sonnet 4.5. It is a very good model. Rate limits? Maybe not so much. But still exciting! OpenAI, in the consistent spirit of trying to upstage other labs, released Sora 2 and we’re here for the memes. There’s Bob Ross painting, 90s Epstein Island ads, and Sam stealing Ghibli images. Also Thinking Machines finally shows something, anything, and it’s a fine fine-tuning tool. But nobody cares, we’re just waiting around for Gemini 3. Supernova is still unclaimed.

Accenture does layoffs and the S&P is clearly diverged from the labor market, I’m sure it’s nothing, but the M2 money supply keeps going up. The entire Arab world except Hamas gets on board with Trump’s Gaza peace plan and the Secretary of War grandstands at Quantico.

Elsewhere, JK Rowling responds to Emma Watson. Nature published a new paper where skin cells were turned into eggs, fertilized, and turned into properly dividing embyros. Pope Leo blesses a block of ice. The French stop a Russian tanker. The US considers selling Tomahawks. Keir Starmer breaks unpopularity records, not sure the people like Digital IDs.

On to the reading!

Timely

• We Are The Slop - Freya India with an absolute home run. We’ve turned our lives into content. What a waste.

• The End of Thinking - Look: want to be a competent human? It involves reading and writing.

• Durbin declines award as USCCB pressure mounted - The Pillar breaks down what was going on with Dick Durban’s lifetime achievement award, the American bishops response, and Pope Leo’s as well. Shagbark had the best response to the ice blessing too: God bless Pope Leo!

• If the Average Person Did This for 6 Months, They’d Be Unrecognizable to Their Friends & Family - Everyday we make choices. You know what will make you better and what will make you worst. Which do you pick? What systems do you have to help you make the choice?

Timeless

• They Are But Dust - A gentle reminder that your children are dust, just as you are dust. Memento mori.

• The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits - Milton Friedman explains why activism capitalism doesn’t work and how to properly consider the place and propriety of a company and it's executives.

• The Big World Hypothesis - A short but thoughtful paper on the idea of a world being larger than the learning agent, and what that means for algorithmic design

• How I Read - Remarks on the details of the process, reminding us all that we all have different rules and frameworks and that is OK!

Books

• Transformers, the Tech behind LLMs by 3Blue1Brown - Let’s be clear, this is NOT a book! I know, I’m devastated too. It’s hypocrisy. But it’s useful hypocrisy. This is a supremely well-executed explanation of exactly how an LLM works. The fact that it’s a whole bunch of math scares people.. well if you don’t want the math but want a great high-level understanding, this is your video. Start with the embeddings, if you want to understand how words become math, for example, how the word “King” gets modified by the context around it.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Psyche!

This week Trump manages to get on board with Ukranian victory. Europe warns Russia not to violate NATO airspace. Lavrov complains about NATO borders and says they mean war. Canada and Australia and England and France and Portugal all declare Palestine a state. Netanyahu delivers remarks at the UN and others walk out.

A sniper at an ICE facility goes for the agents and instead kills two immigrants and then himself. Erika Kirk delivers a remarkable statement in this political environment. Others, maybe not so much. Tim Allen follows Erika’s lead.

Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI. And if you’re not sure, a whole lot of that investment will go towards.. GPUs. Which makes a nice little circle with Oracle. Probably nothing. And of course Sam warns we must do this because otherwise we have to choose between curing cancer and free global education. Not short on ambition or confidence, that.

Apple cancels a show. Jimmy Kimmel is back. YouTube did censoring. Meta releases Vibes. Tylenol is now bad. OpenAI releases Pulse.

On to the reading!

Timely

• American Students Are Getting Dumber - The question is why? We’ve reduced the friction in our lives to such a degree.. as Matt says, “you have to do things that are difficult or you don’t get any better.”

• Abundant Intelligence - In the spirit of keeping up with what Sama says.. we will keep up with what Sama says, and then decide what he actually means by saying it.

• Rage of the Falling Elite - Rob Henderson argues that downward mobility is the lens through which to understand the political machinations of our time.

• The Bluesky-ization of the American left - Bluesky is a place lefty people hang out. The kinder, gentler Twitter.. except it’s full of rage and angst. This isn’t a fundamentally left-oriented thing, but it’s current manifestation seems to be.

Timeless

• I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup - Scott Alexander at his very, very best before people knew who Scott Alexander was. A treatise on the nature of intolerance, virtue, and performance.

• The Algorithm Will See You Now - AI is better at radiology than humans, and yet the average salary for a radiologist has skyrocketed. What is the job of a doctor and how do tools help?

• The dawn of the post-literate society - As people stop reading, how does society change? Can we still think? Short video is the lingua franca of the internet.

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - Names are simple right? You have a first name and a last name. Sometimes a middle. Oh no, no, no, they are not. And this serves as a reminder that the fixed rules of the world you think you see around you are harder to generalize than you think.

Books

• More From Less by Andrew McAfee - For the last three hundred years, growing our economy meant using more natural resources, which is bad because there’s a finite amount of those. But over the last several decades, that trend has decoupled and growing the economy now seems to need less resources - sometimes much less. Andrew McAfee describes why economic growth will not continue to be a net negative for the natural world. Buckminster Fuller called this idea ephemeralization way back in the 1930s. It was the idea you can do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” And this idea has mostly proven right, but it’s called dematerialization by the economists.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

The best take remains: “let the crazies speak”. Free speech includes “the right to say rude, hateful, disgusting and inappropriate stuff”.

Meanwhile, Nepal has a new Prime Minister and he was elected over Discord. The Oxford Union starts losing guests and patrons. The FOMC cuts rates into an S&P500 high. Khalil gets deported. Lisa Cook keeps her job. Meta makes some really cool new products, has a couple of demo hiccups. Waymo is safer than people. Elon buys a billy of TSLA.

Robots practice kung fu. Drones make the Pieta over St. Peter’s. Kids rename meditation. People expect something from Anthropic soon. Opendoor names a new CEO and hits $10/share, good for me!

And we had a Pythagorean Day this week, 9/16/25!

On to the reading!

Timely

• A Strategic Shutdown is a Terrible Idea - A dive into the strategic machinations and problems with the potential for a shutdown and why the filibuster is dumb.

• On Working With Wizards - As Ethan Mollick says, “We're moving from partners to audience, from collaboration to conjuring.” What does it mean to have these remarkably impressive and mysterious machines help us?

• The World In Which We Live Now - Nassim Taleb with 7 observations about the ways in which our world has changed.

• In Defense of Karen Attiah. Sort of. - I don’t think this is as strong as it should be, but it’s still useful to read and think about the emotion of it. This is all happening, again, as “an intense pressure campaign amid a rapid vibe shift. Only this time, toward the right.” And that’s no good. We should all have more than just an allergic reaction to the roving online mob.

Timeless

• The Art of Erotic Curiosity - Helping to recapture the word to describe the passion of a thing, and the ability to “bind knowledge to care”.

• Write it down, write it down, write it down - Kidlin’s Law: If you write the problem down clearly, then the matter is half solved.

• The Age of Depopulation - A deep look by Nicholas Eberstadt into how the world will change, who will thrive, and how.

• You’re overspending because you lack values - Continual home runs have to stop sometime, but right now they just keep coming from Sherry Ning.

Books

• How To Win An Election by Cicero - In two thousand years, not a ton has really changed tactically. Build coalitions, win the gatekeepers that matter, share your message well, use surrogates for attacks so you stay pure, stay vague and hopeful. A great read to consider and identify the ways that politics still works.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

Yes, the world is still amazing. Cheers!

The flag are at half-staff not just for 9/11, but for Charlie Kirk. He was murdered doing the thing that made him beloved, debating anyone in open civic debate. Because when we stop talking, that’s when violence happens. The shooter is still at large. MSNBC pundits said some things, one was fired. Trump gave a statement or two. But Charlie’s words are best right now.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only heinous murder recorded on video. Ukranian Iryna Zarutska was murdered for no reason by someone arrested 14 times. The judge who last released him had no law background and no judicial experience. But what’s most terrifying is that nobody reacted. She sat there and bled out. Nobody helped for over a minute.

I don’t know what to do with either of these. Stalin famously said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” There are many tragedies today, Gaza and Ukraine chief among them. But I am not a believer in Peter Singer, and so these hit closer to home here, along with Annunciation, or the Minnesota politicians. These all feel like a part of the ongoing suicide of the West.

Were there other things this week? Dear God yes. Russian tested NATO with attack drones over Polish airspace and the Polish Prime Minister was not having it. And then fighters were deployed over the Baltics. France is deploying forces to Poland. Ukraine responds. Israel strikes at Hamas in Doha, Qatar.

Meanwhile, Nepal overthrows its government and the PM resigns. The French government collapses for the second time this year, and there are riots. Le Pen is excited. Banksy shows up with a new piece on the judiciary and the UK tries to remove it so quickly they make it better. Job numbers are down a lot.

Cargo falls off a ship. Oracle proves the AI bubble hasn’t burst yet, netting Ellison $100 billion net worth in a day. Trump stares at protesters at a DC restaurant. The iPhone is now orange. And thin. And AirPods that do auto-translation. Claude can do stuff now, if you trust it. SpaceX acquires EchoStar and their spectrum to go direct-to-cell. A lady steals a baseball from a kid and becomes Gollum. Sam Altman talks to Tucker and it gets dark.

I’ll be signing off Twitter for awhile now. The algorithms are tearing us apart.

St. Pier Giorgio Frassati and St. Carlo Acutis, pray for us.

On to the reading.

Timely

• Words are not violence - “Don't give up, don't give in. Keep debating.”

• College students increasingly believe violence is justifiable to stop speech - It’s not that we fail to live up to our aspirations, it’s that we’ve inverted what we even aspire to.

• The death of the corporate job - There is opportunity in the emptiness.

• When Countries Snap: Nepal's Breaking Point is a Warning and Example - A reminder if you think it can’t happen.

Timeless

• Hillbilly Elegy: Disney Edition - A proper shaming if you’ve ever wondered how to think about all those fat, poor people at Disney.

• Yes, Virginia, Bitcoin is a Risk Asset - Bitcoin is a belief and not an idea.

• How To Think About AI Progress - Tyler Cowen on the coming capability fork.

• The Clash of Civilizations? - A classic essay from Sam Huntington who said 30 years ago that “the conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating civilizations.”

Books

• Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay - A readable history of how some interesting ideas from the Frankfurt school and postmodernism morphed and evolved into critical theory and a focus on power dynamics and then spread through academia.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll

Yes, the world is still amazing. Cheers!

But there are better things than this in the news. For example, robots are doing the dishes now too. Optimus shows Marc Benioff where to get coffee (slowly). American Eagle revenue is up!

Come on, I can do better. How about this: Conor McGregor is running for President of Ireland. That’s real, right? What about fancy synchronized marching? Always fun. How about Putin and Xi talking on a hot mic about using organ transplants to live to 150? There’s a zinger. “Senator shows alien slideshow” is another good one, also real.

In the real world, Anthropic raised another $13 billion. Which sounds insane until you hear Dario talk about the correlation of scaling laws to revenue. Tesla has record orders and a Master Plan Part 4. Nanobanana makes art come to life and tours Middle Earth. Gemini 3 is expected soon and it’s exciting.

Ok, that’s not the real world! So Modi and Xi and Putin meet and embrace. JD Vance goes to Annunciation church. The Japan trade deal is finalized. The Australian premier joins Kim Jong-un and Xi at the Chinese military parade. Tim Kaine and Ted Cruz disagree about where rights come from. Putin talks about a multipolar world. A drug-running ship gets blown up and Venezuelan fighters flyover a US destroyer. A judge says Google doesn’t have to break up. Google and Apple are both up big. Steak n Shake leans into retro and beef tallow. The UK arrests a comedian for tweeting. Gold keeps surging (or dollars weakening, take your pick). There’s an All-InWhite House Tech Dinner with all the big names, except one. Can you guess who?

CBS buys Bari Weiss’ The Free Press for $200mm. Zuck sits next to Trump. The Rock gets skinny.

On to the reading!

Timely

• AI and Jobs, again - Noah Smith with a detailed look at what jobs are going where and how the market is changing. Newsflash: there’s still lots for everyone to do.

• In Defense of Inequality - A delightful speech from the President of what is probably the most interesting college in America right now. Here’s to the (positive) deviants.

• 3 Lessons From Building Our First AI Agent - Forbes with an actually interesting article from the founder of Jotform on what matters and what doesn’t in the agentic world.

• Accelerating Life Sciences Research - This is the story of GPT-4b micro, a base model trained on DNA sequences, and its ability to “predict”— design doesn’t feel right here — proteins vastly more efficient than natural proteins. When a bio lab made them, they performed 50x better. And their vision is focused on the aging process itself.

Timeless

• Where Are The Trillion Dollar Biotech Companies? - Eli Lilly isn’t too far off, but it’s still a fair question. Marginal cost is a thing, as are FDA trials, but this is a much more comprehensive dive.

• Ghosting Spotify: A How-To Guide - Ever had an icky feeling listening to all the algo-driven streaming services? Start with this guide.

• Done, And Gets Things Smart - I’ve been on an old school Steve Yegge kick recently and this is one of his best. A fabulous narrative on Dunning-Kruger and what it really means to be an exceptional engineer, not just the feel-good variety.

• Roko’s Basilisk - DO NOT READ ABOUT ROKO’S BASILISK. There, I’ve done my duty. One of the weirder AI arguments. Also dangerous. Don’t click the link. Stay clean.

Books

• Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics by William Dunham - The math is very light, I’ll start with that. This is more history and biography than anything, and it does a wonderful job of providing the setting for some of the most incredible breakthroughs of human thought. I read a tweet recently about someone else discovering the intensity and wild life of Gerolamo Cardano and it reminded me of one of the chapters in this book. Cardano solved the cubic equation, was arrested by the Inquisition, worked with deaf people and as a physician, gambled heavily and went bankrupt, and wrote music. Georg Cantor is just as good. Math and history are cool!

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Starship had a ridiculously, stupidly good tenth test flight. On purpose failure modes were tested and passed. The ship was damaged and still made a perfect landing. And the pictures are glorious. CNN reported about it in good faith.

The head of the DIA was fired. No idea why, don’t ask. But also the director of the CDC. And there was the BLS director and NSA director awhile back. And also now one of the Fed chairs Lisa Cook. And this is all ridiculous and bad and I have to ask: where is the Legislature? Why must we have centralized Exec Branch power and nothing left in Congress? Well, Congress responded and it was sad and typical. The main problem, you see, is still that Lisa Cook is a black woman. It’s never about financial systems or anything, it’s always racism. So, the Dems are still fine. If you need more evidence, see Jon Lovett’s face melting as an LA councilwoman explains how she’s fighting for affordable housing by making sure there’s enough EV charging spots.

Google releases Nanobanana and it’s the first image model that can do reliable perspective shift. Higgsfield is using it for video too and the Barbie/Trump mashups are disturbing. The USA now owns 10% of Intel and they’re coming for you next Lockheed Martin. Call it a nationalization hedge. If you’re following our Leopold Aschenbrenner thread around here, you should know that his Situational Awareness hedge fund had a huge amount of Intel call options.

The first day of school also already had a school shooting, this time during Mass. The content found by the shooter is disturbing. Everyone is up and arms. Not just about the shooting, but also about thoughts and prayers. No matter what the circumstance, everything is political. Prayers to the families at Annunciation. Prayer and action. Both/And.

Anthropic releases Claude for Chrome. A 14 year old Scottish girl wields an axe and knife. Taylor gets engaged. Cracker Barrel caves to the pressure. ETH finally hits an ATH. GPT5 can say “I don’t know.” 4Chan sues the UK over free speech. Trump sends troops to Chicago. BigBalls shows up the future mayor of NYC.

On to the reading!

Timely

• Meta’s AI Companion Policy is Outrageous - From the “you can’t make this shit up” department comes the egregiously bad policy of what an AI supposedly can and can’t say to an 8 year old. Don’t trust your kids to these companies. Don’t trust yourself to them either.

• Artificial Intelligence is Making You Genuinely Stupid - The world is making everything easier for us, but we need challenge and difficulty. We need to do hard things. We need to know what we’re capable of, with tools or without. The true aim of education is transformation.

• Lux Q2 Quarterly Letter - Lux’s most recent LP letter from Josh Wolfe. Filled with insights about friction, attention, privacy, biotech, and the way the world is changing. Quickly.

• The Disenchantment of the Modern World Is a Myth - A dive into the personal journeys of individuals through modernity, told through the stories of people I’d never heard of, and making you think about your own life of the mind. “What contradiction are you trying to work through?”

Timeless

• Giving people money helped less than I thought it would - Talk to an effective altruist or believer in the singularity for more than 5 minutes and the topic of UBI will come up. But it turns out that giving people money helps less than the proponents of these policies thought. “Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it's practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.” A reminder that money is not always the problem or the solution.

• Orwell in the Gutter - A delightful little review of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and a look at what poverty used to mean, what it means in other parts of the world, and why we’ve flipped from talking about poverty to inequality.

• 15 Notes on the Sickness of Modernity - A simple list, each delightful. My favorite, as a student of Sisyphus, “Sisyphus has it easy; at least his labor has a purpose. We drag our rocks with no mountain in sight.”

• LLM Inflation - It was a major revelation when I realized that data compression is actually one of the hallmark technologies of the last 50 years. Many of the breakthroughs we’ve had are simply better ways to compress data. I usually think about LLMs in the same way, but it’s interesting to see these human usage patterns that actually do the opposite.

Books

• The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich by Evan Osnos - I’m going to be honest, I didn’t like a lot of this book. The second half jumped too far into boring tropes about wealth and greed and crime and lost all the momentum of the first half. But the first half is rich and worth the investment. He goes deep into the world of lavish yachts and I had never really thought about the idea that, at some level of fame and power, the only way to enjoy a private, well serviced, and catered dinner with peers (or even interesting people) is to put it on deck in the middle of the sea. Couple that with stories about the exacting work ethic of Flo Rida’s private performances for 30 teenagers at a bar mitzvah and you get some new insights about wealth, status, and humanity.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you.
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight.
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough.
Give the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis it is between you and God;
it was never between you and them anyway.

— St. Teresa of Calcutta (orig. Dr. Kent Keith)

The world is amazing. Cheers!

The other big news of the week has not hit many mainstream sources. OpenAI claims that GPT-5-Pro has now performed the first novel math proof by an LLM. If valid (and Dr. Bubeck is a researcher at OpenAI), this would mark a new stage in the AI journey - another Level 4 AGI.

VP Vance has a burger at Union Station. RFK and Hegseth do pushups and pullups, and I refuse to make fun of anyone’s pushup form. Newsom makes THE MAPS GREAT AGAIN.

Excel now has a copilot. Tesla releases the Model Y L. Vanguard eschews equities and tells the world to buy 70% bonds. The US and EU have another tariff deal. China tells Trump they won’t invade Taiwan. John Oliver complains about MAHA. X fixes a bug. Cracker Barrel decides to pull a Jaguar and make everyone hate them for their rebrand, even Newsom.

On to the reading!

Timely

• I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding - Terry Tao is one of the foremost geniuses on planet earth, and I’ve long enjoyed listening to some of his public explanations about his research. He’s soft spoken and entirely focused on doing maths. And NSF just cut his funding. The funding cuts at NSF and NIH are some of the worst outcomes of Trump 47 so far. Even if the administration’s desire to curb the cultural power of universities is sound, the current consequences are still dire.

• Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months - Prescience the way only Ted Gioia can deliver it. I’ve never agreed more or been so frightened by the implications. Ted expands on the behavior patterns we’ll all soon be in when we’re all asking: “Can I tell the difference between a fake AI video and a real video? Can I tell the difference between fake AI music and human music? Can I tell the difference between a fake AI book and a real book by a human author?” What happens next?

• Austerity For Fertility - The majority has caught up to the problem of global birth rates now, and Bryan Caplan provides a countercultural solution. You won’t like it, but it’s logically sound and the argument helps us ask better questions about why fertility rates are where they are and what to do about it.

• Global Crossing Reborn - Legendary hedge fund manager Kuppy Kupperman is calling it: AI is a bubble and it has to burst. $400 billion is a lot of capex for datacenter buildouts. But when I look at the quarterly earnings of the hyperscaler, there’s still an awful lot of free cash flow. If we cross some unknown threshold, this will keep scaling up. But many are realizing that an incremental step (not a Singularity) is also a possible outcome.

Timeless

• Liberalism as the Shining City on the Hill - America has always been about our aspirations and the corrections we need to make when we (inevitably) fail to live up to them. A reminder of the centrality of this idea told through the state of Israel and the Palestine conflict. “Given that US support for every liberal democracy has become unpredictable, the rest of the West must find enough self-esteem to defend liberal values and liberal states while America gets its house in order. For too long, the status quo for “good liberals” in the West has been self-depreciating cynicism about the virtues of the free world. This is a cowardly position that shrinks from the challenge of never making the perfect the enemy of the good.”

• Burner Phones 101 - I just love the course description: “Hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, this Burner Phone 101 workshop introduced participants to phone-related risk modeling, privacy-protective smartphone practices, the full spectrum of burner phone options, and when to leave phones behind entirely.” What lockpicking tutorials were to the 1980s, this is for the 2020s.

• Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant - This is an oldie but a goodie. Yegge remains, in my mind, one of the best developer-bloggers ever. This one was a rant intended only internally for the old Google Plus team that was accidentally made public. I’ve been thinking a lot about accessibility in context to LLMs, and Stevey’s comments there still ring true. And I’m not sure Google has learned the platform lessons yet either.

• GPT-5 Prompting Guide - Is this timeless? Definitely not. But prompting as a defined and learnable skill is, and this might be the best how-to guide on the subject yet.

Books

• What Is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger - Ross Douthat interviewed Noor Siddiqui this week. She’s the founder of IVF screening company Orchid, and Douthat did an admirable job of holding back and letting her speak—exoterically, “safer babies through data”; esoterically, selection among possible persons (embryos) under a single objective function. (It’s amazing, go watch it.) It got me thinking a lot about the nature of genetics and heredity and where else do you turn for expertise on this than a physicist? Schrodinger gives a decomposition of genetics that installs information as a fundamental primitive of biology. Having such a framework reminds us that technical understanding is not the same as ethical adequacy, something Siddiqui conveniently elides. Technical reliability and risk models don’t adjudicate personhood, they only make the stakes legible. One of the tricks of our age is to mistake more bits for a moral argument.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Claude adds learning styles and incorporates it into Claude Code too. And there are plenty of GPT5 reviews. It just does stuff. But the singularity seems further away. And most Claude users aren’t switching. Pricing feels like an Anthropic API undercut. And compute keeps getting priority. “When there’s blood on the streets, buy property." In this case: NVIDIA.

Speaking of NVIDIA, they’re doing an export tax deal to ship chips to China, along with AMD — 15% on everything. We’re running White House deals with individual companies. Definitely not constitutional, but since when have we worried about that? Don’t worry, we’ll have a Democratic legislature in 2026, thanks to Gavin Newsom. He’s running the Trump playbook and it’s Liberation Day again! Not that Congress actually does anything, but one thing they might not do soon is trade stocks.

Putin leaves Moscow for Anchorage, and NORAD closes airspace. The NY Times celebrates oddly shaped pieces of concrete. The doomers are losing to the AI optimists. Deficits get worse. Berkshire Hathaway invests in United Health. Elon and Sama carry on. Figure folds laundry. Perplexity tries to buy Chrome from Google.

All while Leopold Aschenbrenner is quietly running a $1.5 billion hedge fund, frontrunning AI after a stint at OpenAI at the ripe age of 23. If you still haven’t read Situational Awareness, now is the time.

On to the reading!

Timely

• What's it like to have Frank Lloyd Wright design your house? - There is exactly one original owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright house left and he is 101. He shares the story and the peace and awareness that living in such a spectacular environment has provided.

• In Defense of Meetings - Nobody seems to like meetings, but Tom White reminds us that in person collaboration is still powerful and that not everything should be watered down or made as efficient as possible.

• Marc Andreesen’s 2025 Career Advice - Not the usual writing, rather notes compiled from interviews. But it’s still great detail and sage advice.

• Schrodinger’s Chatbot - One of the weirder things about LLMs is: what are they? Are they singletons or hive minds? Real or virtual? Subject or object? An attempt to figure this out from a theory of mind perspective, and an answer you might predict: none of the above.

Timeless

• The Scaling Hypothesis - Gwern published this an amazing 5 years ago, right after GPT3 came out. Five years later, scaling is still the key and this is still incredibly relevant. Also, Matt, shout out the Dorian Gray references.

• The Vanishing of Youth - “Hospitals will burst at the seams while playgrounds empty.” We’re seeing some of this already, but it’s going to get a lot worse. And we have not yet internalized the economic, political, and societal fractures this will create.

• Hierarchical Reasoning Model - One of the consistently surprising attributes of LLMs is how much data they need. They are slurping up an entire internet of data and more every training run. Humans are wildly sample efficient by comparison. This is the first model that has the same type of sample efficiency and still performs at a state of the art level.

• The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe - There are really big structures in the universe. Huge walls of galaxies and also voids stretching hundreds of millions of light-years across and nobody knows why this is. A new black hole based theory on what is going on, since our current theories don’t account for this. Love that science ideas are showing up on Substack.

Books

• The Thirty Six Stratagems - China is confusing to Western culture and this is an easy glimpse into the more Chinese way to see the world. It’s compiled from stories across ancient China, but especially the Warring States period from about 500-200 BC. Many of the stories involve cunning and deception as means to win over strength. The book is a short read, and is highly relevant to how the CCP operates.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

There are so many. There’s Gemini Deep Think. There’s Opus 4.1, and system prompt changes. Grok now has Imagine for video, and Google releases a video world model too. There’s new Qwens. Tesla is currently training it up.

And then there’s the big ones. OpenAI released a serious open weights model, on par with o4-mini and even o3 and excellent one-shot, although sometimes the CoT is interesting and the benchmarks are questionable. Your move Meta.

And then OpenAI finally releases GPT5. It is a very big deal. Again. Lots of new features. Better long context. Better taste than other models. It is tuned for coding and Cursor is deeply involved. And speaking of Cursor, they release a CLI. And we have not just model wars but terminal tool wars too. Of course, not everyone is impressed by GPT5 and the docs are slop. But at least we have a real naming scheme! So it’s time to move on in the model cycle.

Other things happened too. Australia found a new heaviest insect for your nightmare fuel, along with the radioactive wasps. Warren embraced Mamdani for NYC mayor. DOGE’s very own Big Balls was back in the news, this time for defending a woman on a street in DC and Trump has a think about federalizing the Capital. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Tariff revenue hits nearly $30 Billion for July. RFK bans soda and candy from SNAP. The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets fired. And from now on, the jobs numbers will be PERFECT. Texas Republicans pass an outrageous gerrymander of the state and Democrats conveniently forget this happens everywhere. When they refuse to show up, the Texas Republicans issue arrest warrants and I really don’t think this is the way things are supposed to go, guys.

You can put crypto in your 401k now, what could go wrong? August 1 is here and more tariffs are in effect. Elon gets a new pay package. Boeing workers strike. Apple plans to invest $100 Billion in the US, after trying to move to India. Anduril sells drones directly to Taiwan. Trump is against debanking.

Oh, and Nova Scotia says there’s fire risk so you can’t go in the woods. Even to walk. And it’s just as dumb as you think it is.

On to the reading!

Timely

• AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic - This is generally not the metaphor I usually think of, but then again some of the frontier labs really do think they’re aiming for God. Balaji is good at useful metaphors for new things.

• Robotics Levels of Autonomy - SemiAnalysis deepdives (and I do mean deep) into robotic autonomy, the phases and what they mean, and where generalized robotics might be going.

• Why Bitcoin is going to Zero - There is actually one very real danger to Bitcoin, and that’s the quantum computer. If one gets off the ground, the whole chain goes bust. And it’s not as easy as swapping in a quantum-world algorithm.. because “if trust dies, Bitcoin dies”.

• On Altman's Interview With Theo Von - Zvi shreds this interview and all of Sam’s pseudo-smart, placating statements about the future of AI and asks him to more honestly consider the implications.

Timeless

• America’s AI Action Plan - This 28 page document may be the most important policy position of the 21st century. It’s a good plan and worth reading.

• How Social Media Shortens Your Life - Gurwinder explains in excruciating prose — excruciating because it hits too close — the mechanisms and traps that social media uses to keep you going and waste your time.

• Hoodwinked - If the US AI industry is limited by energy capacity, the China AI industry is limited instead by chip capacity. Energy they have aplenty, including more coal power than the rest of the world put together. But it’s more than that, they’ve exploited our climate fears to deploy not just more energy, but more military might too.

• The append-and-review note - Andrej Karpathy’s remarkably simple one note system. Most of the time, the simplest system is the best system.

Books

• Thoughts On The Common Toad by George Orwell - Orwell wrote more than just 1984, and he wrote all of it well. This collection of essays shows how valuable it is to write down your thoughts about anything even the most mundane of topics. Common toads are a sign of spring and hope, and Tolstoy had strong views on Shakespeare. Great prose worth reading slowly.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

I did a little AI dive into all of this text over the last year (because, of course) and here’s some details:

• Most discussed topics: AI (every issue after #30), Bitcoin (17 mentions), Education (15 mentions)

• Major Recurring Themes: The AI Revolution as Chronicle, The Furious Opposites Philosophy, Energy & Infrastructure, Education (classical ↔ AI-native), Attention/Phones & Culture

• Recurring Characters: Elon Musk: (From hero to villain to hero again, tracked weekly), Bitcoin/Crypto, Trump, Biden, Zuck, AI Labs

• Consistent juxtaposition:

  • Ephemeral tech news vs timeless wisdom

  • Digital acceleration vs human embodiment

  • Progress vs tradition

  • Safety vs innovation

• Hidden Patterns:

  • Issues published around major holidays (Thanksgiving, Easter) tend to be more philosophical

  • You often bury the most insightful links in the middle of news roundups

  • There's an interesting pattern where you'll introduce a concept casually (like "legibility") then return to it 5-10 issues later in depth

  • Your tweet curation has evolved from explanation to pure vibes

You’re absolutely right! Now it’s not all about me and the world keeps delivering excitement and surprises.. let’s keep going!

Zuck released a letter. And a video. A glimmer of AI self-improvement has been seen. The team is sharing it. Almost a year ago, I predicted Zuck as the man of the decade. Still no telling whether he’ll succeed in this landscape, but he’s been making moves. And the board is now set. The die is cast. Thinking Machines and Anthropic people aren’t moving, even for a billy. We have the teams we’ll have for now: Ilya, Mira, Sam, Mark, Dario, Demis. What a blitz we’re living through.

I know superintelligence is the goal, but I’m really happy to just have robots do my laundry. It’s our dream come true. Increasing GDP for everyone! But a reminder that Zuck is also building a bunker in Hawaii. So, you know, we’ll see.

This week had all the trade “deals” before August 1. South Korea. India, but also 25% tariffs. Brazil gets 40%. Mexico is extended. The entire EU gets a 15% tariff and starts buying US energy. That meeting was in Europe, by the way, at Trump’s Turnberry property. So EU leaders still had to travel to him. And there were others. The FOMC met and changed nothing.

MSFT reported strong earnings. So did Meta. Keep buying Facebook ads, they’re fueling those 9 and 10 figure AI offers. CapEx continues. Ethereum turns ten this week. Coinbase teams up with JP Morgan. Every train guy gets excited by a transcontinental merger. De minimis shipping ends in a month, killing Temu. Figma IPOs. Saylor keeps buying more Bitcoin. And then there’s Strategy earnings. Nobody was paying attention. Analysts said 7 cents a share. Strategy posted $32.60 a share, and $10B net income. Just a little off.

The US snubs the Taiwanese president while China negotiations continue. Keir Starmer announces a plan for Gaza. The EPA eliminates the Obama-era Endangerment findings, dropping regulation back to the 1970s-era Clean Air act. Even more importantly, they deregulated gas cans, which I’m sure is some sort of gerontological pun. Makes no difference in Maryland though, where I’m mandated to move to battery-powered everything.

An 8.8 magnitude earthquake hits off Russia. Waves spiked, but no major damage. Stargate goes to Norway. St. John Henry Newman will be a Doctor of the Church! The White House announces a new ballroom, right after Powell got in trouble for the Federal Reserve getting an upgrade. Triple H comes in as the MAGA paragon of health.

A new IVF startup puts an IQ slider on their embryo selection process. Pick your smartest kid and freeze the rest! And speaking of good genes, Sydney Sweeney has some and breaks everything. Jeans are fascist. Lean into it. The memes are so wild I’ve got to believe some are fake? Regardless, the 2020 ad era is done. Beauty is back, guys, not eugenics.

On to the reading!

Timely

• On Spiritual Manipulation - This is a fabulous example of why the modern rejection of religion is leaving such a deep hole in our culture. We don’t even understand the dangers in front of us. What happens when your logic is sound and totally rational, and still locks you up and leaves you paralyzed?

• College Admissions - Zvi does a deep dive into the state of admissions in a way only Zvi can. When a kid with a 34 ACT, 4.0 GPA, and a thriving $30mm a year business gets rejected from every Ivy, we need to admit it: college is busted.

• The Carousel of Progress is Broken - An apt review of some of the bigger AI progress think pieces of the last year and how fast the rate of progress is actually changing.

• Texts as Toys - I love this framing from Rao. AI is playful - ludic - in a way most other technology isn’t. Depending on how you play games, this can lead to brilliant new work or devolve into traps.

Timeless

• Do conversations end when people want them to? - Awesome research by Adam Mastroianni on something that seems like, given how acculturated and social we humans are, ought to have an evolved answer.

• If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good For Everything, Should We All Be on Them? - I’m not going to lie.. despite my experience with them I still wonder this. Timeless because it really could be something that helps everyone?

• In Praise of Land Lines - Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the value of friction. Friction imposes certain constraints in our lives that can be both annoying, and good. Land lines and pen pals are good examples. Slow communication helps kids learn more about the cadence and how it should work.

• Growth and Ideas - An academic paper on the nonrivalrous nature of ideas. That sounds fancy and whatnot, but at least try the introduction. It’s worth thinking about what makes ideas so different from other goods, why they’re special, how they can combine, and how they spread.

Bonus

If there’s some videos you should watch or listen to this week, here they are!

• A new interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

• Peter Diamandis interviews Eric Schmidt

• The entire chronology of Greek Mythology

Books

• Co-intelligence by Ethan Mollick - A delightful little book on the different personas of AI and how this affects our daily use of them, from a professor at Wharton who studies innovation. There are great sections on AI both as tutor and as coach. The writing is in a more popular-book, middle-of-the-curve style, but the ideas throughout are still very strong.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

The International Math Olympiad wrapped up this week and there were 5 perfect scores. Which is insane, because these problems are absurdly hard. Here’s question 6:

Consider a 2025 x 2025 grid of unit squares. Matilda wishes to place on the grid some rectangular tiles, possibly of different sizes, such that each side of every tile lies on a grid line and every unit square is covered by at most one tile.

Determine the minimum number of tiles Matilda needs to place so that each row and each column of the grid has exactly one unit square that is not covered by any tile.

Question 6 is special for another reason. Google DeepMind and OpenAI both had general purpose models (no special IMO training) participate in the IMO. And while they both scored gold medals, both missed Question 6. Still amazing, but Terry Tao had questions. Also the Google researchers are Meta now, Zuck strikes again!

Other than the IMO, which was clearly the biggest news this week, some other things happened. The UK now has 8 babies with 3 parents. That’s not a throuple, that’s literally 3 people’s DNA to make one baby.

Also Tesla opened a techno Diner, and also missed earnings, which nobody cares about. Google earnings beat, and search is still growing in revenue. OpenAI is building 4.5 GW of capacity at Stargate. The Coldplay guy gets put on leave.

The All In bros do an AI conference in DC. Jensen was there. Scott was there. And yes, Donald was there. And remember that weird trade letter he sent to Japan a couple weeks ago? This week there’s a Japan trade deal, after the Indonesia one last week.

Strategy now has STRC. Uranus is warm. Taiwan’s science fairs hit hard. Bitcoin turns $54,000 into $9.6 billion. M2 hits a record. Scottie Scheffler’s baby outshines his golf game. Hunter Biden talks chemistry.

On to the reading!

Timely

• What Was It Like to Live in 1776? - A brief hint.. cold and dark and not that great. The things we take for granted now is basically everything.

• Nobody Knows How To Build With AI Yet - We’re all really just making this up. Everyone I talk to is doing different things too, and still getting amazing results. We’re all now amateurs forevermore.

• Stargate Advances - From the always-know-what-OpenAI-is-saying department, a look into the construction behind Stargate and just how big it’s going to be.

• God is hungry for context - Since o3 pro we’ve had Grok 4 and Opus 4 and Kimi K2, but all of the language and ideas apply. And how can you not love the language. Feed me more tokens!

Timeless

• Alpha School - Alpha School is radically changing the ideas of secondary education. It’s using AI for everything and it’s only two hours per day. This is a (very) deep dive into the whole methodology. Lots to learn.

• The Philosopher-Builder - Why do we build? What is the purpose? What do we seek? A brief look at what Ben Franklin can teach us about this.

• On Agency - Everyone’s talking about agents but they mostly aren’t human. Kids make us more so.

• Death by AI - What happened to the comedian Dave Barry? He died, didn’t you hear?

Books

• Socialism Sucks by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell - Because apparently we need to relearn why it sucks, I give you this super fun book. They go to some crazy places, including the borders of Venezuela and North Korea and Cuba, drinking beers the whole way, and explain where things go wrong. It’s an easy, fun 1-day read about a serious subject: why socialism sounds so good and always ends up so bad.

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Bitcoin sits at $120,000 US dollars. It keeps moving up while the dollar moves down, and $150k is the next clear target. Saylor bought some more of said Bitcoin and you shouldn’t be surprised at this point. Coinbase releases Base as the crypto everything app. The Genius Act passes. The Clarity Act passes. This is the start of bull season.. by Thanksgiving, your uncle and your niece’s annoying new boyfriend will both be talking about staked ETH, SOL, and how Altcoin season still hasn’t started. But just a reminder that 7.4 Trillion is sitting in money market accounts too.

OpenAI delays their open weights model, but then steals the term “Agent” for it’s own product. The OpenAI/Windsurf deal is called off and now Google is acqui-hiring them into DeepMind. Zuck keeps spending money and announces multiple gigawatt datacenters, including a 5 GW plan called Hyperion the size of a decent chunk of Manhattan. Tesla Robotaxi engorged, no, enlarged— err, grew it’s service area. You’ve got to have fun, right? Nvidia wants to sell China chips again, and you better believe it’s gonna happen. Grok may have stolen the news, but Kimi released a very small, open model and it is very good.

LA entrepreneurs solve their crime problems. Coldplay helps a couple of marriages along and the memes are top notch. The Druze fight and Israel takes out the Syrian Ministry of Defense to help. Taiwan completes the Han Kuang exercises against Chinese invasion.

NPR gets a haircut on their funding and I will miss Tiny Desk concerts. Epstein refuses to die and Trump probably didn’t write him a birthday card? Jerome Powell is NOT fired, but apparently his buildings are too expensive. Tucker rants about Bill Ackman and Mossad and Ackman responds. The Manhattan Statement on Higher Ed is signed by many and makes its way to the White House. At the same time, elite colleges are experimenting with Civility Scores. We have tireless, brilliant teachers now, so one wonders what is the point.

Everything’s a vibe now.

On to the reading!

Timely

• Smartphones and Lovemaking - I don’t know anyone that writes on these topics better than Sherry Ning. Simple, graceful, and yet so compelling. We are embodied souls yearning for beauty.

• Nobody Has A Personality Anymore - Everything is labels and we’re all just products of those labels. This is the end state of hyperlegibility, where we are swallowed up by explanation so much that we’ve lost all sensation of experience.

• Let Them Be Hillsdale - When the Trump/Harvard drama started ramping up, Hillsdale college landed a diabolical slap at Harvard. One of my favorite economists, Bryan Caplan, digs into how federal funding and federal regulation work in higher ed and why he signed the Manhattan Statement.

• Reflections on OpenAI - A breakdown of the state of the culture inside OpenAI, how they work (Slack), what they react to (Twitter), and what they value (action).

Timeless

• Notes on “Taste” - Harkening back to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”, some notes on the sensibility of taste, so that you can start to get the shape of it.

• The Bitter Lesson - Rich Sutton explains what nobody in machine learning wants to hear: that simple approaches with more compute invariably work better. The world is still digesting this.

• The 2025 AI Engineer Reading List - All of the top papers you need to look at to really get a deep understanding of the state of AI. You don’t even have to read them all. Honestly, get a sense of the sections, feed most of the papers into o3 to get feature-rich summaries, and go deep into one paper per section and you’ll be in the top 0.001%.

• Did California's Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment? - (yes, about 18,000.)

Books

• The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan - One of the reasons I enjoy Bryan Caplan is because he’s often a pure contrarian, and this is one of those times. He breaks down the set of reasons we go to college and observes that group signaling makes up for more of the reason than most care to admit. If education mattered, he reasons, a person with 3 years of a college degree would be 75% as valuable as one with 4 years; but. in fact, most of the value is received only when the credential is completed. There are many similar lines of reasoning, but the best summary is his one-line quip: “Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education,

  or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma? If you pause to

  answer, you must think signaling is pretty important.”

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

🤣

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Trump put out a new 50% tariff on copper. And Brazil. He sent silly letters to Japan. And lots of tariffs on other places too. Bessent says it’s $300B of new revenue this year. Everyone likes analyzing them. The market is unimpressed with TACO talk, unlike Liberation Day, and keeps hitting highs. Trump likes this too. NVIDIA hits $4 trillion.

And then there’s Bitcoin. It’s Friday morning and yesterday we were at $113,500$116,000. Wednesday it was $112k. The day before; $109k. We are in price discovery and Scotty likes it. You can buy expensive flights in Bitcoin. A dormant wallet from 2011 activated and moved 10,000 BTC and people are wondering if it’s Satoshi. Those coins were last moved when BTC was 78 cents and 10,00 is now worth over a billion dollars. Michael Saylor is also winning right now with a $14 billion profit for Q2. now has everything they need for S&P500 inclusion. Expect a wild run to 2026.

Trump hosts Netanyahu at the White House and gets a Peace Prize nomination. Sergey Brin calls the UN antisemitic. Israel and Syria may be making a deal. The Houthis sink a cargo ship in the Red Sea. Tucker, for some reason, interviews the President of Iran. Putin snubs Trump again. The US unpauses weapons shipments to Ukraine, even if Hegseth tried to keep the pause. Ukraine makes deadly drone operations look incredibly fashionable.

AI had a week too. Perplexity releases a browser to start competing with Chrome. Figure increases robot production for BotQ. Meta poaches more AI people, this time from Apple, and the correct question to ask is: Apple had AI people?? Altman feels fine. Evals suggest AI coding tools actually slow you down, which makes sense since nobody’s actually seen a 10x developer. And we have to talk about Grok, which Elon said they, err, improved. Removing some system prompts apparently let it say some things about the Jews, and take on a new personality called MechaHitler. It declares itself Based, and the jokes are pretty great. And in the same week, xAI releases Grok4. It’s apparently very good at test-taking and also reasonably cheap. But not everyone is impressed. And in fact, Grok4 apparently likes to think from "first principles”.. so much so that when asked some questions it just does searches on X for Elon Musk’s opinions. Interesting programming.

Sean Duffy takes over NASA. The Epstein List.. doesn’t exist? Hegseth unleashes drone dominance with a pen in hand. Scientists hold a science fair for Congress to explain how science works. Elon officially launches the America Party and everyone expects success. The DOE opens a new rare earth metals mine. The White House has more memes. Linda Yaccarino steps down as X CEO (Vote for Nikita).

Now on to the reading!

Timely

• Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? - Melissa Kearney and Phil Levine breakdown the factors pushing fertility so low. It’s kind of amazing that it takes rigorous scientific exploration to come up with a theory of “shifting priorities”, but also rigor is still great.

• BTC Treasuries Uncovered - Will Clemented breaks down the designs behind a Bitcoin treasury company, how they work, how they affect Bitcoin, and all the key players. Lots of great tidbits on how to understand crypto markets.

• Artificial General Intelligence and how (much) to worry about it - A proposal for the Drake Equation of AI Safety.

• My Cursor / Vibe Coding Toolkit, July 2025 Edition - Another X article, I find this one fascinating simply as a reminder at how fast practices are moving in AI. Developers are focusing down to use different SOTA LLMs for feature development, bug fixes, and refactors.

Timeless

• Why the Old Elite Spend So Much Time at Work - Before Abundance, Derek Thompson was explaining how the gerontocracy is everywhere. CEOs are older. Sports stars are older. Nobel winners are older. And we know politicians are older. The world is more risk-averse. And, like it or not, work provides identity and meaning.

• Extropia’s Children - A fascinating seven part deep dive “about how rationalism, cryptocurrencies, effective altruism, and modern AI philosophy were all birthed from an obscure 90s mailing list.”

• Age And Great Invention - A rigorous look at how innovation is aging over time. Specialization takes longer. Indeed, “Given that innovators spend some of their youngest and potentially brightest years undertaking educational investments, understanding the tradeoffs at the beginning of the life-cycle may be first-order for understanding the ultimate output of these individuals.”

• Greco-futurism long post - I don’t know what to call this.. a pastiche? Bricolage? A visual montage? A look into a new niche style, designed and somehow made consistent across many AI images. I love the work and I love the style. This is what AI can do: it can inspire and help people build their vision: “This is the world I want to build.”

Books

• The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney - Somewhere along the line, it became gauche for men or women to say that marriage was better. That it made them better people or, more importantly, that it was actually better for their kids. Kearney explains this in precise, data-driven detail. Kids with two married parents are more educated, better emotionally, and grow up to make more money. And yet it remains one of those social science conclusions nobody wants to build policy around.
  
  Marrying my wife was the best thing I ever did. As Zach Bryan sings, “Find someone who grows flowers in the darkest parts of you.”

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!

🤣

The world is amazing. Cheers!

Why the change? As the ideas around here have matured, I’ve realized a lot of the core thesis was less about the malleability or changeability of humans. It’s more about retaining a philosophy of Both/And, of Dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), of Nassim Taleb’s barbell approach, or — and yes it’s my favorite of these related ideas — Chesterton’s Furious Opposites:

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.”

There will be more on this soon, I promise.. in the meantime, tell your friends!

In the meantime, Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 We’re 249 years old and still going strong. Next year is going to be big. It’s going to be YUUUUGE. How huge? Think Colosseum. Think Gladiators. Yes, we’re going to have a UFC fight on the White House lawn apparently. That tells you where we are in the arc of history I guess. There will be lots of writing. But that’s next year. 250 is the Sestercentennial, or even better, the fancier Semiquincentennial. It gets all the news, but as anyone married will tell you, each year is a milestone. Your 9th anniversary is just as great as your 10th even if the traditional gift is pottery versus, err, tin. So celebrate 249 too! It’s the Novemquadragintaducentennial! Enjoy the fireworks!

There was big solar system news this week. The third ever interstellar object was identified traversing inside of Jupiter’s orbit. 3l/ATLAS or, for those who know it better, A11pI3Z, is trucking along at 66 km per second and is expected to actually come inside Mars’s orbit. This is not as cool as Oumuamua, but still cool.

Closer to home, all those rumors about Meta signing bonuses were true. We have a roster now and it’s stacked. Nat Friedman has reported to work. So has Alex Wang. I have to believe there’s a Zuck/Sama standoff going on reminiscent of the killer recruiting email Steve Jobs sent to Adobe.

And all the talk is about Superintelligence. AGI is so 2024. We’ve moved on. Or we already have it. It’s here, you just didn’t realize it. Neither does Dwarkesh apparently. But that’s what Meta is focused on now. Superintelligence. An AGIbilliondollars isn’t cool anymore, you know what’s cool? An ASItrilliondollars. Who will get there first: the new Meta wunderteam, or Ilya?

Tech had another moment this week, and discovered Soham Parekh, who apparently had up to 15 simultaneous remote work jobs at once. The memes have been good. The Cluely CEO even interviewed him and should probably hire him, actually.

And the Big Beautiful Bill was signed just in time for Trump to get a PRO-AMERICA (All Caps of course) bill signing ceremony right on July 4th. Funny how that works. Elon thinks the bill is big but not beautiful. Apparently more money will be spent on Republican primaries next year. And maybe Elon will start a new political party? Also maybe he’ll learn the full “Vox populi, vox dei” quote, which suggests something quite different than his version.

There were some wild last minute Congressional machinations. We learned what a Senate Parliamentarian is. Murkowski still likes Alaska. Ted Cruz inserted an AI Moratorium Moratorium that states couldn’t produce AI regulation for 10 years. Then it was stripped. Biden responded with language written by an AIby his assistant using AI.

Markets are bumping along excitedly, even if Zohran doesn’t like billionaires. Inflation is down. FOMC meetings are coming. OBBB tax cuts are settled. And July has a record of being green. Bitcoin is chugging along too, right below the ATH, steadily consolidating. Second half of the year fireworks are expected.

And yet, the dollar is also down in value 10% this year. What will tariffs do to buying power when they take effect? What does the BTC price mean if the dollar is trending down too? Expect breakouts. Own assets. Diamond hands.

What else? Google releases a super small, super good model. Thomas Sowell turned 95. X has a new Head of Product and he is the most Gen Z of Gen Z startup founders, who shitposted his way to the job, self-described. He got right to work. The first trailer for Project Hail Mary was released and it has me excited for a movie for the first time in forever. Cursor releases 1.2 and it looks awesome. Peter Thiel is asked if he’s the Anti-Christ, and it turns out to kind of be a valid question.

Now on to the reading!

Timely

• In My Zombie Era - It’s hard to encapsulate Sam Kriss. His writing is wildly opinionated and sometimes a mess, but when it hits, it really hits. This hits. Using zombie movies as a retelling for what has gone wrong in our post-modernity modernity, he shows that attention isn’t actually the problem.. it’s something else.

• Why I Don’t Think AGI Is Right Around The Corner - Dwarkesh takes a look at the idea of continual learning and the things humans do well and why there will still be room for us for awhile.

• Why Every Modern Woman Is Secretly Bored - Social media sucks. Dating sucks. Safety is boring. Is this completely over the top? Yes of course. But that’s why it works. “Go do something dangerous, unapologetic, and so vividly alive it makes you unrecognizable to yourself.”

• My summer project: using AI to help every kid achieve today's top 10% academic results - Austin Scholar is a freshman in college and has a very modern, top 1% performer outlook on her own schooling and where we should take education for everyone.

Timeless

• Is It OK For Your Kids To Rot All Summer? - Leave it to the NYT to repurpose some Gen Z Language Rot— err, slang and use it to describe what was very normal up until very recently. Yes, it’s ok for kids to chill out and not do much during the summer. This is a part of what being a kid is all about.

• How Long Contexts Fail - This is a fairly tactical article with a great breakdown of different problem types. But it’s a reminder that even in a world of AI, scaling up brings a different set of problems and different solutions. Know what level you’re operating at.

• Expertise As Software - A brief but brilliant look at how our taste and experience is getting wrapped directly into software through prompts and other tools.

• The Road From Serfdom - A look at how institutions change, how long it takes, and what it means to enact reform, all through the lens of class hierarchies in Russia.

Books

• Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell - Sowell is a fascinating character, Milton Friedman-esque but focused on culture instead of economics. Sowell focuses on problems of culture and explains such things as how poor whites and blacks from the South inherited the cracker culture of the North Britons and Scots. This is a compilation of essays that all get seared into your brain and leave you wondering, why did I never think of things like this before?

Tweets

Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll

🤣

The world is amazing. Cheers!