Fodder #53
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
You get a model, and you get a model! Everyone gets a model!
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!