Fodder #50
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
What do you do in a world where there’s a seductive anime temptress art AI and also a new department of defense AI.. and these show up from the same crazy billionaire in the same week? Oh, and that AI has a name btw. It’s HitlerGrok.
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!