Fodder #56
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Expectations are a funny thing. Beat them by a hair and you’re a genius. Miss them and you’re a failure. On Wall Street, analysts put out expectations and that’s the target. But when you’re NVIDIA it’s not so simple.. you must crush them. A beat on revenue AND EPS means an after-hours drop of 5%. Because that makes sense. But the AI surge is still on, the banks still have targets. And NVIDIA sold no H20s to China yet. The market remains safe and sets more highs.
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!
