It’s FOMC week and we got a rate cut because there’s no labor statistics and lots of layoffs. Markets just followed the earnings. Google. Meta. Microsoft. Amazon. Apple. It’s a teensy bit of a busy market week, so don’t feel bad if you miss something. Also Bitcoin came in with the wildest monthly candle that didn’t actually change much.
Trump and Xi met in South Korea after meeting his Margaret Thatcher in Japan. Trump announces nuclear weapons testing. Thune and Schumer keep the shutdown going. Trump’s CAPS LOCK and cursing are de rigueur now. Vance visits Jerusalem. AOC challenges a mom (and Fox News correspondent) to “get a real job”. No Kings goes nationwide. SNAP is in the shutdown crosshairs. Mamdani gets votes.
Non-Profit OpenAI plans an IPO. Microsoft and OpenAI change their partnership. Cursor 2.0 is out and looks to be going towards Claude Code. Amazon talks Project Rainier data centers for Anthropic. Nvidia hits $5 Trillion market cap and does a lot of partnerships. Neo releases a home robot. Except they’re all teleoperated.
Hurricane Melissa hits Jamaica at full blast. Robert Reich finally makes a point I agree with. The Pints With Aquinas guy joins the Daily Wire. Bill Gates backs off the climate catastrophism. Pope Leo talks algorithms.
On to the reading!
Timely
The Tocqueville Paradox - A look into why socialism sounds like such a great idea but isn’t, how “free stuff” wins elections, and why more equal societies make people aware of the remaining inequalities.
The State of AI 2025 - Slides! Lots of slides. This is a week or two old now from Air Street Capital but it’s a phenomenal capture of the progress in just a year.
Ben Affleck, Paul Schrader, and the Move 37 Moment for All of Us - The famous Move 37 from AlphaGo back in 2016 was revolutionary. Equally important was the Hand of God Move 78 by Lee Sedol in the next game against AlphaGo. These are important analogs for our dance with AI, but what’s missing in this story is that Lee Sedol also retired soon thereafter.
Charlie Kirk, Scapegoat - A Girardian look at this political murder and a critique of both the left and right and our wars of religion.
Timeless
Technocalvinism - Take technological determinism far enough.. and this is what you end up with. The shape we give our technologies is not predetermined and very important.
Beauty Is Not A Luxury - It is a duty, a value, and a reason to live.
Context Rot - A wonderful paper describing why context is the most important thing in managing LLM performance and how it breaks down. Keep your prompts focused and reset often!
The Decline of Deviance - Culture is slowly being flattened - we are all less weird, less mobile, less risky.
Books
Green Philosophy by Sir Roger Scruton - I get quickly frustrated by all of the bullshit of the activist-grifter climate complex when there’s so much opportunity for real work to make things better and sustainable. Scruton is one of the very best conservative writers and this is a different take on what is still one of the most important topics of this century: caring for our planet. Get ready to learn a bit about his rather comically named “oikophilia”.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!