This week was full. There were AWS outages, there were new AI web browsers, there was memory for Claude, there was a crazy pullback in gold, and most importantly there were new Dwarkesh podcasts.
Elizabeth Warren piles on to AWS. Elon piles on about Claude. And everyone piles on about Atlas.
But there was more! The shutdown continues. Bernie admits Trump is his heir. Then gets mad at Amazon for efficiency. Fetterman declares Groundhog Day. Klobuchar tries to make people feel bad for early-retiring boomers and fails. Hillary gets mad about the East Wing. JD Vance gets an answer for Harry Sisson in response to Trump’s latest ridiciulous AI tweet. This timeline is the craziest possible timeline.
TSMC shows off it’s Arizona fab. A King of England visits the Sistine Chapel. Tesla FSD gets Mad Max mode. Claude Code hits the web. The Pentagon gets a whole new Press Corp. The Israeli Knesset votes to annex the West Bank. CZ gets a pardon. Datacenters represent most of GDP growth. The UK keeps pushing Digital ID.
On to the reading!
Timely
Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist - The always brilliant Ted Nordhaus with a full repudiation of catastrophism and a great telling of the problems of the climate activist cycle.
The Foolishness of ‘No Enemies to the Right’ - Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee with a very timely reminder that the Right needs to look after itself, be weary of it’s own excesses, and renounce the bad ideas that are out there.
Wanted: Men of Purpose - “Shaping a sweet boy into a strong and good man is principally a soulful venture, one that requires great attention to virtues.” Truer words have never been said, it takes a lifetime. A call to give boys the examples and role models they desperately want so they don’t find themselves lured to the shadow of masculinity in some dark corners of the Internet.
Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature - A great deepdive into what it means to code with AI today. It’s vibecoding, yes, but not the trivial kind. This is the thoughtful and sustainable kind, and we’re all going to be doing more of it in the future.
Timeless
INFRASTRUCTURE INEQUALITY: WHO PAYS THE COST OF ROAD ROUGHNESS? - An incredible paper based on Uber data that shows rough roads are more common in poorer neighborhoods and towns causing them to pay more per mile than other areas.
Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find? - Signs point to yes, “research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look.”
The CEREBELLUM as NEURAL ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY - Slides, yes. But incredible ideas. Neuroscientists are trying to figure out the deep purposes of the brain based on the new mental models of LLMs.
Books
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 by Dwarkesh Patel - This is the latest Stripe Press book and I just finished it. It’s mostly snippets of dialogue from Dwarkesh’s podcasts with everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Gwern to Dario to Ilya. It’s broken into sections about why models work the way they do and predictions about what could happen next. While it’s certainly technical and the topics are dense, it’s a remarkably approachable book and a great overview for anyone interested in why this revolution is such a big deal.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!