Government still shutdown? Check. Crypto Insanity? Absolutely. But maybe there’s peace in the Middle East? Seems like it. Now finally Hamas can have some public executions.
We’ve also got Bitcoin whales making 9 figures shorting before Trump’s announcement, epic trolling on Columbus Day, DHS pretending to be Billy Madison, validation for reading 25 books, and the media refusing the new Pentagon coverage rules. Putin and Trump talk on the phone and Hungary becomes a neutral spot.
Nvidia releases DGK Spark. The US runs a September surplus. Starship returns and flips and lands again. 2026 grad school tuition goes down. Gold keeps climbing. Claude gets skills. Broadcom gets some of the OpenAI energy. Anduril shows EagleEye.
There’s just so much! St. Carlo Acutis, pray for us!
On to the reading!
Timely
Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear - Jack Clark - one of the other founders of Anthropic - with some storytelling and metaphors for all the AI progress and where we’re likely going.
The common words list and the real magic of writing - Most writing is just 300 common words, with a few others sprinkled in here and there for good measure. And yet from this comes a whole “portable magic” that runs our entire civilization.
Edison’s Lesson for the AI Age: Why the Capex Boom Isn’t a Bubble - It’s all the rage to say AI is a bubble. But with very little debt and free cash flow paying for capex, it doesn’t have an end in sight yet.
Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now - We’re still getting as much compute as we possibly can, but for practical applications the real limitation is context. Memory. How much can we load into a working window?
Timeless
Getting Jacked Is Simple - You may not like it. I may not like it. But it is quite simple.
Math Every Day - I still remember first reading this almost 20 years ago. It remains the best intro to John von Neumann and why he’s important. It’s also exceptionally good context for what a computer is and why AI is so important (read: it’s the first computer architecture that isn’t just a von Neumann machine). Yegge is a great writer and this is approachable for everyone.
Don’t Worry It Can’t Happen - A 1940 article on uranium fission describing how the scientists are cautious and the evidence suggests there’s no reason to worry.. these reactions just sort of fizzle out.
The Origins of Representation Manifolds in Large Language Models - One of the more interesting ideas around how LLMs work involve the manifold hypothesis. A below the surface dive into how manifolds work and what’s going on, with just a tiny bit of math.
Books
Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb - This was the first book from the Incerto that I’ve read and.. it’s interesting. Taleb’s style is both engaging and off-putting. The editing is incredibly light and it sometimes feels more like stream of consciousness than anything else. Let’s call it storytelling. Taleb focuses on both incentives and disincentives and expresses the power of all things via negativa. The idea of the Silver Rule (vs. the Golden Rule) - and it’s role on the ideas of negative and positive rights - has stayed with me. Most importantly, as reiterated over and over and over by Taleb, identify others, leverage groups, and have for yourself some skin in whatever game that you’re playing.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!