On October 1 in the Year of our Lord 2025, the US government shutdown. People claim there were good reasons, and bad reasons. Stocks ripped on the news. Bitcoin surged back to $120k. Make it make sense!
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!