Fodder #54
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Summer is winding down and it was a calm week. How calm? BTC still goes for a new all time high. ETH gets close. Trump follows through and federalizes Washington DC and this invokes Jan 6 debates. The mayor wants DC statehood instead, but there’s not a great case for it, apparently.
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!