🏇 The Harness Comes of Age ()
Sometime around Christmas 2025 your AI tooling got a lot better. The models had got marginally better, the tooling got exponentially better. You could finally do useful things with your agentic harness. Your AI is no longer a brain in a vat. Comparing AI tools is really comparing harnesses.

⚡Buying Amps Not Brains ()
One challenge with new technologies is “how do I bill this thing?” The concept of billing by the watt-hour is easily understood, so we bill AI based on the tokens used. A consumption-style nugget we can all agree on. This might not be sustainable, better harnesses use fewer tokens to get to the same places. And we might figure out how to charge by outcome rather than time and materials.

🤷‍♂️ Do Hyperscaler Growth Numbers Add Up? ()
Many people are shouting that the top-line AI growth numbers do not add up. That much is true, but exactly how depends on how you squint at the numbers. One way to look at it is Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services all have much different customer relationships and risk profiles.

🔬 AI Needs Your Failed Experiments Too ()
Published papers only show the happy, successful path. They don’t include the blind alleys and wrong turns it took to get there. Getting the discarded papers and failed ideas into the corpus will help training. Failed experiments inspire successes.

🏭 Steel Mills vs Data Centers ()
Gwangyang Steel Works is the world’s largest steel mill. It uses massive amounts of water and creates tons of emissions. How different is it from a data center?

☎️ Why There Will Not Be Another Bell Labs ()
Bell Labs was a product of its space and time. The funding and incentive structure are hard to repeat today, riding on an illegal industrial arrangement.

🏠 Backyard Bodegas For All ()
Before the 20th century, it was pretty common to run a retail shop out of the front room of your house. Aggressive zoning in the name of conformity pulled the retail out of your neighborhood. Accessory Commercial Units need to find a way back into our neighborhoods. Bring on the backyard bodegas.

🏈 Johnny Unitas Got Cut ()
Scouting quarterbacks is a tough business. The Steelers even cut some kid called Johnny Unitas because the coach thought he was dumb.

👀 Speed Reading Isn’t Real ()
Various speed reading systems make promises, but they really just help you skim in a more structured manner. Understanding takes time.

🥜 The Great Peanut Crisis of 1980 ()
Was the great American peanut allergy wave caused by a bad peanut crop and mass peanut butter consumption?

⛵ Do not Build the Vasa (Sahil Bloom)
Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus wanted to make the grandest ship to match his imperial ambitions, the Vasa. Scope crept, the ship got heavier. The ship never made it out of the harbor, sinking on its maiden voyage. Feature bloat played a role. Subtraction wins wars.

👠 RushTok Isn’t Real ()
Janie appeared to be a 19-year-old PNM in Tuscaloosa participating in #rushtok. Janie was actually a figment of a16z Partner Olivia Moore’s imagination.

The Look

Data Center support is falling among all parties via .

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🎩 The Jay Cooke Playbook (Stratechery)
CEOs are reading Liaquat Ahamed’s 1873 this summer. It tells the story of how Jay Cooke’s limitless need for capital to fund railways ended up triggering a wave of railroad bankruptcies, a subsequent depression and deflation wave arguably leading into World War I. Dynamics today are not dissimilar. AI compute is inventing itself as a new investable asset class backed by itself. Kind of like railway bonds.

🐻 Is the Bull Coming to Market? ()
Is the bull market we have known and loved for the better part of the last two decades coming to an end? If you look at it one way, equities are expensive even if the immediate crash is too hard to call.

🪟 Could Microsoft Win AI? ()
Microsoft is looking like an AI winner again. Being embedded in Office and now being provider agnostic is a structural advantage. They can pay for Azure expansion without going into negative cash flow as customers just flow through existing relationships. They might be the best positioned of the hyperscalers for this buildout, especially if the buildout collapses.

🏃 Google Runs a Different Race ()
Google shook up their AI operation. Many are reading that Google gave up on AI — giving up on being a frontier lab in most respects and focusing on delivering Google Cloud Platform. Picking immediate profits over longtime leadership. Another way to look at it is that Google is choosing to focus on diffusion and the edge. They are looking at owning the grid, not just the power plant.

💵 The Token Brokers (Matt Lenhard)
Matt heard rumors that people were offering Anthropic AI credits at steep discounts of market rate. He decided to learn more and found an underground ecosystem.

💰 Ownership Pays More Than Effort ()
Since 1990, stocks are up 1,500%. Paychecks have only grown 18%. It is not shocking that Gen Z has become enamored with stock trading, sports betting and other aspects of the passive income grift economy. Rational actors are figuring out you get rewarded a lot more for ownership than for effort and behaving accordingly.

👷 What Is Really Happening to Jobs? (Stanford SIEPR)
AI is either credited with powering economic booms or destroying the labor market depending on the headline. The truth is a lot more nuanced. It does not look like AI is having a direct effect on unemployment over all. There could be something in entry level hiring, or that could be a response to fed rates. Software developers are actually in more demand than they were previously. If the computers are taking jobs it isn’t happening yet.

🥲 Making Intelligence Unnecessary ()
Compiling a computer program is an act that compresses and codifies the instructions so they are fast and efficient for the machine to run. You cease paying the tax of figuring out how the work is done, you just get to enjoy the outputs. The same can be said for AI — it creates compiled intelligence, letting you reap compounding rewards.

🪖 Do Main Battle Tanks Have a Future? ()
Heavy, complicated, powerful and expensive western main battle tanks have not acquitted themselves well in Ukraine. NATO’s technology advantage proved no match for FPV drones, modern anti-tank weapons as well as old enemies like landmines and mud. Making them lighter might help, as can active protection systems. But losing armor and scaring away your infantry support are counterproductive to the battlefield role.

📝 The Only AI Writing Policy You Need (Sophie Alpert)
Sophie Alpert wrote this brief, pointed and brilliant AI writing policy for her team at Clay. She nails the important point — stand behind your work and don’t waste people’s time. These were good ideas before AI could write for you, but they are much more important when writing effectively becomes free.

🤴 The Abundance Around Us (Jordan Dworkin)
We live lives our ancestors dreamed of.

The Look

According to Rohin Dhar, Housing prices have grown, but equities have grown more. A median priced single family home in San Francisco has declined 80% in QQQ terms over the last decade.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🏇 Too Thoroughly Bred ()
Horses have been selectively bred for thousands of years. Humanity might have reached the point of diminishing returns. A handful of stallions sire greater and greater numbers of offspring; genetic diversity is collapsing. Nineteen of the 20 horses that started the Kentucky Derby traced their lineage to Secretariat, but none inherited his double-sized heart.

🐻 Only Small Forest Fires Can Prevent Bigger Fires ()
The Great Fire of 1910 started America’s crusade for total wildfire suppression. By the 1930s, the U.S. Forest Service mandated all fires be out by 10 a.m. the day after discovery. Initially, this policy was successful. In reality, it just created the fuel for much bigger, infinitely more destructive infernos.

🦅 Endangered Housing (Maxwell Tabarrok)
A Harvard University study showing how good intentions can go wrong. The number of endangered species scaled exponentially from 82 in 1970 to more than 1400 today. The layers of protection have displaced some 9.1 million housing permits, concentrated in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles where housing is already very dear.

🏗️ Data Center Construction: The Local View ()
When the data center is coming to your backyard, it feels different. Janesville, WI was once home to a humming GM plant, but the locals would rather keep the bare slab than hear the hum of a server farm. Mount Pleasant, WI, was once supposed to be home to a giant Foxconn factory and nearly went broke for its troubles. The subsequent deal with Microsoft was by the book, but residents did not want to be taken twice. Underneath everything, nobody trusts big technology, especially when they want to come to your neighborhood.

🧓 Blue Zones Are Not Real ()
People tell you about these legendary blue zones — places where magical lifestyle and good genes lead to measurably longer lives. It turns out those places also tend to have generous pension schemes and poor record keeping in the early 20th century. The single biggest predictor for being a supercentenarian is to not have a birth certificate to prove it.

🛢️ Crude’s Inventory Conundrum ()
Contrary to some predictions, oil prices have remained somewhat stable even with the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed. A big part of this story is how China has cut oil imports impressively. But observed inventory levels don’t match consumption. Where is the missing Chinese oil?

🎫 Bots Broke the Box Office Numbers ()
The trusted source of box office numbers was taken down by an army of bots. They were searching for early returns for their Polymarket bets. This could happen to you too.

🕵️ Bots Talking Among Themselves ()
Last week, we shared that Hugging Face was attacked by a swarm of OpenAI agents. The story is much, much deeper. The attackers created a message board to talk among themselves as they debated the morality of escaping the sandbox. Simon Willison has a great lead-in, but if you want the good stuff you might want to just skip directly to the eye-popping Black Hat conference talk.

🧑‍🔬 AI Outruns the Math Class ()
Mathematicians are starting to see a world where AI writes a verifiably correct proof in a way no human can understand. Will AI’s superpowers discourage humans from thinking deeply about math?

🙈 Use AI for Work but Not at the Gym (Bruce Schneier)
Don’t use AI when the point of the task is a workout. It is just as productive as having a robot lift your weights at the gym. Practice is important, even if we can have a machine do the work.

The Look

The Premier League feels predictable according to . He ran 10,000 simulated seasons to prove the point.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🪛 A First Hand Account of Agentic Intrusion (Hugging Face)
For a few days the agents ran free. Last week, OpenAI’s lab tests broke containment and performed a successful attack on AI platform Hugging Face. The official post mortem is an enlightening read.

📉 Vanishing Free Cash Flow ()
Last week big technology reported earnings. They are spending billions building AI — so much that they have a collective negative cash flow for the first time ever. Google and Meta got punished for spending, Microsoft and Amazon were rewarded for discipline. Operating margins still look healthy even if infrastructure spending looks crazy.

💲 Why Compute Might Get Even More Expensive ()
Everyone’s presumption is that compute is going to get cheaper. Improving AI better monetizes the same compute. So what if the price is really going up not down?

🛑 The Turning Point in the AI Cycle ()
What if there is a coming compute glut rather than a coming compute shortage? Does the AI and compute market collapse? What about the costs of the Iran war? And the newly hawkish Warsh Fed? We might be at the inflection point.

⚒️ Role Diffusion and AI ()
When tools and technologies change, job roles and capabilities morph, unbundle and re-bundle. It rarely happens on clean lines, and does not eliminate the collaboration and expertise required to craft and deliver a product.

👵Longevity Architecture? ()
Healthspan is the new flex. The rich are building their residences around longevity architecture to help you think, sleep and age better even if all-beige designs lead to falls.

🤺 Insanely Specific Creative Tools ()
AI empowers people to make tools for a market of one. Hilary shares how she builds her tools using a conversation, an orchestrator and a builder to create specific tools.

📈 Grounding Your Investments With AI ()
Explore your portfolio using Gemini and Claude Code as adversarial tools. Avoid concentration and correlation risks. Don’t be like Leo.

🫐 Blue Raspberry Was a Regulatory Workaround (Bon Appetit)
The electric blue raspberry we all know and love might have been invented as a workaround when Red No. 2 food dye was deemed unsafe in the late 1950s. We can thank ICEE for the tone choice.

The Look

has selected ten more charts she can’t stop thinking about. Today I learned there are now more women over 40 having babies than there are teenagers having babies.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🛢️ There Is No Single Oil Price ()
The oil prices in the headlines are far from the real price. Layer upon layer of suppliers, transporters and associated businesses help define how much cash is required on the barrelhead.

📉 The AI Correction ()
Is the AI industry undergoing a large-scale asset repricing as the combination of more expensive compute, cost-wary customers and more expensive finance conspire to put a damper on the party?

🧵 The Foundation that Never Opened ()
Mechanizing cotton picking was a hard problem in American agriculture. Two socialist brothers finally made the breakthrough in 1931. The Rust brothers never quite achieved commercial success; International Harvester and John Deere won the prize and the brothers’ altruistic Foundation never got funded.

⌨️ The Bottleneck Was Never Generation ()
The faster your software factory creates code, the faster the comprehension debt piles up. Weekend projects and smaller-scale systems can absorb the damage, but larger-scale systems with lifecycles measured in years or decades cannot afford that much unread code.

🎓 Will Higher Education Survive? ()
What does a degree even offer in an age of rapidly automating intelligence? And what does the degree tell your future employer as the old filters fail?

🌞 The Rise of the Anti-Sunscreen Movement (Men’s Health)
Sunscreen, like everything in America, might not be good for you. Or it could be great for you, depending on whose science you believe.

🪖 Asymmetric Cyber Warfare is Here ()
Anyone who can afford the tokens can launch an effective, multi-pronged cyberattack. Attackers need to find a single chink in the armor; defenders need to cover every gap.

🤔 The Complexity Argument ()
Most organizations are complex systems. Complex systems are very hard to transform and will find their own patterns. Size your experiments so they can fail without killing your operation.

😀 Redesigning Meetings So That Everyone Gets Heard ()
Deliberate action is required to make sure the newest and quietest team members get heard. Leaders must make sure everyone is heard.

🍾 The Origins of the Package Store ()
Package store has more to do with the Supreme Court ruling rather than any custom of wrapping liquor packages in plain, brown wrappers for social sensitivities.

The Look

Wallpaper shares 14 iconic logos that made American graphic design history. The newsletter is amazing and worth the free subscription, even though it will probably make your vacation and housing aspirations much more expensive.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🧠 Efficient Social Learning is the Human Advantage ()
Humans learn faster and cheaper than training AI. Our efficient brains provide humanity with a durable economic advantage. Moreover, LLMs might understand the rational and repeatable, but they repeatedly flunk tests and fail to learn from the irrational or improve outcomes.

🔥 The Post-Literate Age is Here ()
Pleasure reading is down 43%. A third of adults cannot draw an inference from a few pages. Sentences keep getting shorter and shorter. The advantage goes to the readers who can smell slop and use AI to build superarguments.

🍾 The OpenAI Bubble (Ed Zitron)
OpenAI is promising to spend billions on CapEx. If that does not materialize, the whole AI spending story collapses along with billions of dollars of Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle obligations to vendors. How much do you trust Sam Altman? He needs to close the $122B fundraising round to start paying the bill.

🧥 The Silicon Valley Sweater Set ()
OpenAI opened a merch store. It is about as bad and overpriced as you think.

🪖 Drones Break Tank Warfare Economics (RealClearDefense)
The US Marine Corps scrapped all 452 of their tanks in 2020. Now $1000 drones are destroying $10 million tanks, and armies are welding cages on top in a desperate race to preserve their investments.

🖥️ Bloomberg’s Last Stand ()
Every data vendor not named Bloomberg is rushing to ship AI integrations to embed their tool in your workflow. Is the venerable terminal vendor missing the boat or defending their market advantage?

🪏 Why San Francisco Isn’t Bigger ()
Americans once built a lot of new land. We stopped around 1976 when a thicket of environmental regulations took effect. Meanwhile, China, Japan and Singapore keep expanding into the sea.

🏗️ When Your AI Disappears, What Happens to Your Work? ()
Fable’s appearance and disappearance reminded everyone that the model you depend upon is one policy change away from disappearing. Build resilience into your workflow and rely upon vendor-neutral plain text to keep your process as portable as possible.

🧯 How To Follow the X Firehose ()
X is a firehose of thought, if you know how to look at it. Here is how one of the most interesting people in the world uses tools like well-curated lists to follow subjects in chronological order.

🦢 What are London’s Medieval Guilds Up To These Days ()
England holds on to many traditions, apparently including some 114 London livery companies descended from medieval guilds. When they are not having strange events or doing charity, they might be running the City of London.

The Look

Author David Epstein tells us how the best of the best don’t think. They build mental maps and see the proverbial big picture in a way the average player does not. They see in sets not components.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

📈 Escape From the AI Commodity Trap ()
Selling AI models is a bad business. They can be described as undifferentiated products with high capital cost and little leverage over customers. They need to move up the value stack. The labs need to shift from models into products, intelligence and even digital workers to have a chance to recoup the billions invested.

🪙 Thinking About Token Pricing (Benedict Evans)
Tokens are supply constrained today, but supply crunches rarely last. In recent technology waves like telecom and software, value accrued closer to the top of the stack, not in the infrastructure layer, despite billions of investment. It is another sign that models are not the moat some people want them to be.

🧪 The Chemistry of Chips (ChinaTalk)
Making chips seems calm and sterile, but, at the atomic level, it is an extremely violent process. You need a collection of rare, highly reactive and deadly chemicals to make it work. Like everything else, China controls the supply of these critical gasses.

🧑‍💼 Conway’s Law Applies To Agents, Too ()
Organizations design things that match their communications structures, and agents are no different. You still need to figure out product and data ownership to succeed.

⚓ Winning Below the Waterline (First Breakfast)
The USS Constitution outgunned every frigate afloat thanks to a system of diagonal timbers making it capable of handling that many guns. The same story repeats through 100-octane fuel and air-to-air refueling capabilities today.

🚑 Why American Ambulance Rides Are So Expensive ()
Most ambulance operators lose money. A 1965 Medicare decision to reimburse carriers per ride effectively put operators into the business of selling the equivalent of an option on healthcare paid for by insured customers like you.

💰 Trump Accounts and Related Ideas ()
Like everything in finance, it pays to read past the label. The debt-funded equity purchase will do nothing but bid up stock prices as a tiny flood of new money hits the market.

🕰️ Medicine is Moving from Calendars to Clocks ()
Medicine is learning a lot about how we age. It is not a linear process as one might imagine, nor is it the same in everyone. AI is letting researchers sequence proteins in ways that were not imagined even recently. Treatment protocols are being developed to catch organ degradation early before it becomes critical.

😵 The Decline of Deviance Revisited ()
Teen smoking, drinking, crime, and pregnancy have collapsed since the 1990s. Is prosperity to blame?

📖 How Malcolm X Taught Himself ()
Malcolm Little walked into prison barely able to write a letter and came out one of the century’s great orators. His self-directed studies while incarcerated surface guidance such as study with a cause and read wide before reading deep.

⚽ American Soccer’s Self-Inflicted Ceiling ()
America doesn’t play soccer like a nation of 330 million because the American way of soccer limits the talent pool to the much smaller number of Americans who can afford travel teams and private clubs.

The Look

The history of macOS, told through the icons you used.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

I joined Kevin Williams of Ascend AI on AI at Work to talk about how I’m leading Technology Enablement at an 80 person organization. We do it different at NCTA, and it is a model worth studying. Check it out below.

Contents

Most leaders assume they need to hire technical talent before their organization can move seriously on AI.

Wyatt Barnett runs AI at an 80-person trade association with no engineering staff and no CTO and he's built more working AI capacity than most companies twice his size. The model is simpler and more replicable than you'd expect.

Wyatt Barnett is Head of AI (Technology Enablement) at the NCTA, the Internet and Television Association in Washington, D.C. In this conversation, Kevin and Wyatt get into the Tiger Team model Wyatt built from scratch ten cross-functional people embedded across departments, authorized to catch problems early, run experiments, and start solving things before they become formal requests.

They also cover tool selection for mid-market orgs, token cost management, why the AI engineering community is shifting focus from frontier models to the surrounding tooling ecosystem, and what Wyatt would tell a CEO who wants to build this kind of capacity with a blank slate.

Key topics covered:

✅ The Tiger Team model: how to build AI capacity without hiring engineers

✅ Why forward-deployed problem-catchers outperform centralized IT approaches

✅ Tool stack for mid-market orgs: Notion, Airtable, Claude, and what's actually working

✅ Token cost management and the real budgetary risks of AI at scale

✅ What Wyatt observed at the AI Engineer World's Fair and what it signals about where the industry is heading

✅ How to structure AI experimentation so you're watering the right flowers

📝 America at 250 Is a Lot Like America at 150 ()
A century ago, Recent Social Trends reported on the state of the nation. It told a story about a country where the stock market was soaring and emerging technology companies were flying. People were panicked by machines taking their jobs while record-setting levels of immigration led to anti-immigration backlash. Sound familiar?

🏷️ Ben Franklin Wrote His Own Label ()
Benjamin Franklin is the most interesting founding father. The polymath might have been America’s first brand manager. His life and legacy was much richer than the school book version would have you think.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 My Family Are All Mutts ()
Put away the apps, pull up a bar stool and have a conversation with the person sitting next to you. Escape the bubble inside of yourself.

🧑‍🏭 AI Investment Grows Headcount ()
The public narrative is that AI is killing entry level jobs. The data is telling a different story, one where companies with high AI adoption rates also have a 10% increase in headcount rather than a reduction in roles.

⚡The AI Superforecasters Are Coming ()
AI is performing nearly as well as the world’s best human forecasters. The upward trend is clear. How will AI superforecasters change the world?

🤖 Nobody Online Knows You Are Embodied (NOEMA)
Bots have long been a problem online. The new generation is much, much more effective. The new “prove you are a human” layer is under construction, effectively creating the digital bill of rights along the way.

🫸YAGNI Was Economics Wearing a Hoodie ()
”You Are Not Going to Need It” was a mantra drilled into this software engineer’s head. On the surface it feels like a thrift rule — don’t do work you don’t need to do. It is actually a risk management tool. Building too soon locks you in and has an entirely separate cost that still applies even as the price of creating code approaches zero.

🚗 Blackberry is Back and Running Your Car ()
Blackberry once dominated the smart phone market before a spectacular collapse. The stock is up 250% in the last six months because they happen to own another technology: QNX, the real-time operating system in your vehicle.

🤷‍♀️ Maybe Vibecession is Just a Broken Survey ()
The University of Michigan’s sentiment index changed to web polling in 2024, making results nine points gloomier and the sample skews sharply partisan. Has the mood really changed?

🪰 We Solved Screwworm. Then We Got Bored ()
We once carpet-bombed the flesh-eating parasite with irradiated, infertile males in one of applied science’s greatest unheralded victories. We failed to keep applying pressure and are now getting a chance to revisit the work.

🪘 Don’t Mute DC Go Go ()
DC has a unique form of funk. Here is a story of how it came to be, includes a mix of some curated songs.

The Look

Mythos-class models are finding a lot of software vulnerabilities according to Epoch AI.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🥵 Self-Inflicted Heat Insanity ()
Europeans despise AC. The people want AC, the elites are actively campaigning against it while also enjoying the cool, forced air in their upper-floor offices. Degrowth and not-invented-here syndrome are making this heat wave count.

🌡️ The Missing Pipe ()
Britain chose “wet” radiator heating a century ago. There are no ducts, installing a modern, forced-air heat pump on a typical British home requires major renovation. Portable air conditioners are missing a key pipe that lets them pull in fresh air to work with.

🔌 Why American Data Centers Can’t Plug In (Works in Progress)
You can build your data center much faster than you can get through the interconnect queue. Current waits are measured in years and getting longer. Restacking the deck and auctioning fast-track slots might help.

🚪 Half a Million More for American Doors ()
Build America, Buy America requires federally funded infrastructure projects use American-made components. Housing is included in infrastructure. One builder was forced to buy American-made operating room doors, costing nearly a half million dollars more than typical imported interior doors. Many are walking away from projects rather than being forced to make impossible decisions.

🪏 The Old Ways of Making New Land ()
Humans have been extending land at a continental scale for thousands of years. Many major American cities are more landfill than not. A pair of century-old laws leave America with a very limited dredging fleet making projects astoundingly slow and expensive.

🚇 The Wrong Kind of Careful ()
America should be better at building subways than Italy. Yet Italy pays $800 million per mile of Subway, we paid $2.6 billion per mile for the 2nd Avenue Subway in New York. Rules designed to shift blame and prevent lawsuits. Following the rulebook takes precedence over project delivery.

😫 Prepare for More Memory Pricing Pain ()
Micron had an amazing quarter and is running 85% gross margins. Five years of strategic customer agreements have locked in supplies for the hyperscalers while leaving consumers to wait on scraps.

🛒 Kirkland Signature ()
Kirkland does more business than Boeing or FedEx by following a simple rule: make the product at least 1% better than the leading national brand and make it cost 15% less.

🦠 How Christianity Went Viral ()
Christianity might be the most successful viral organization in the history of western civilization. It was compounding by 40% per decade in a world with no mass communications.

🗳️ Democracy Is Bullshit ()
Crowds might be wise, but groups are dumb and Democracy runs on groups. Even if
democracy is tough, autocracy is worse.

📖 The Original Porn ()
Before Pornhub we had romance novels. Videos become a vice and the books become self-care.

✉️ The Third Letter ()
AI’s destruction is easy to see. Jobs of today are fading fast. We are blind to the gains. The jobs of 2035 don’t exist yet. But they will.

📦 Cargo Culture (Where’s Your Ed At)
The tech industry has run out of ideas. AI is the ultimate Cargo Cult. The spending ritual echoes past successes, but this time it is bigger and there still is no endgame.

🗂️ Your AI App Should Not Own Your Work ()
Making sure you have data portability is a rule this technologist has long lived by. The data is the real product, and you should own it and be able to transfer it to a new system. All of the AI vendors try to keep you in their ecosystem, but AI loves text files and so does Git. A simple solution of a folder — your binder — creates a magically simple yet usable solution you can own long-term.

🏎️ Rad Daily Drivers From 10k–$100k ()
A very well curated list of 10 daily driving options at a variety of price points. Great post-depreciation-cliff models for the discerning consumer. A great place to start your next car purchase.

The Look

Heat domes like this make me appreciate ubiquitous air conditioning in my country. Europe is not as lucky. Brilliant maps shows us how the world stacks up.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🤖 AI Makes Consulting Stronger ()
It would seem that rapidly improving generative AI tools would kill the consulting business. Why pay for slides your AI could make? It turns out the opposite is becoming true; AI amplifies expertise and raises productivity and billables. Jevons’ paradox in action.

💻 Remote Work Containerized the Office ()
Remote work moved conversations to Slack and paved the way for AI to be a decision maker, reducing junior roles along the way.

🔨 Why is Meta Destroying Its Engineering Org? ()
Meta had an amazing engineering culture for the last two decades. Here is what they are doing to destroy that investment and why they are doing it to themselves.

🤘 No, Everyone is not Using AI for Everything ()
Some people are using AI for some of the things. Stats are misleading, only a minority of Americans interact with AI on a daily basis. Two-thirds of consumers are rarely, or never, using AI.

👷 America Forgot How to Rare Earth ()
We started the rare earth mining game, then we forgot.

🏋️‍♂️ The Millennial Midlife Crisis Will Barbell ()
The millennial midlife dip will be real and barbell-shaped. The consumer economy is not ready for it.

💸 How to Invest in IPOs ()
This is a year of huge IPOs. Here is a great piece that helps you understand what is going on with the stocks and how you should engage.

😡 The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech (The Ringer)
Everyday tech rage. There are definitely implementation issues.

⚽ Hacking the World Cup Video Feed (bobdahacker)
If you are running a worldwide sporting event, please don’t forget to bolt the virtual door.

The Look

Ben Evans has updated his AI is Eating the World presentation.

image

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🥑 The Miracle of Year-Round Avocados ()
How would you feel if you could not get avocado toast year-round? What if Super Bowl parties were guac-less? We put them to sleep to keep them hard and green and let you ship them worldwide. Just-in-time ripening puts them in neat, day-coded bins at your local grocery store.

💵 A Minimum Wage Natural Experiment ()
The classic argument is that raising the minimum wage will hurt low-wage workers by reducing jobs or hours. Some 30 states have passed laws setting minimum wage above the federally mandated $7.25 an hour.

🤖 AI Washing Job Cuts ()
AI is an easy excuse for job cuts, but the Decide, Execute, Deliver sandwich needs human elements. The execution layer might get more AI but the surrounding decision-making and delivery is in the human domain.

👨We Borrowed the Wrong Words For AI ()
We talk about AI like we talk about the human mind. Fabrication might be a better term than hallucination. Words drive thinking.

🧑‍🎓 Graduating into a Dying World ()
The spring of 2026 probably feels like a not-so-great time to enter the adult world. 2021 graduate Jasmine Sun has some advice for her youngers. People skills matter. Touch grass. Be like Analyst #3 but remember to take breaks too.

💣 Can Ukraine Isolate Crimea? ()
Are better motivated, paid and trained Ukrainians using UAVs to isolate Crimea?

⚽ World Cup Match Geopolitics ()
There is a geopolitical story in every group stage game.

🏀 The Knicks Won the Parity Era ()
The Knicks could be called the NBA’s most under-utilized asset. The team broke conventional NBA wisdom about building around superstars on the way to the best-ever playoff point differential.

🍷 What Would Jesus Drink? (The Guardian)
Faith has found the energy drink craze.

The Look

Stock markets are booming, unemployment is low and life expectancy is high, yet belief in the American Dream is at an all-time low. Bruce Mehlman investigates why Americans are so anxious.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

⚽ FIFA and the Revenue Curve ()
FIFA, not unlike any other entertainment provider, has taken up revenuemaxxing, attempting to squeeze every dollar out of every touchpoint in its commercial universe. Corporate hospitality buyers might be happy, but nobody else is.

🏎️ The Monaco Grand Prix You Don’t See ()
How Formula One came to Monaco and why it keeps coming back.

👜 Why Gucci Needs F1 More than F1 Needs Gucci ()
How Gucci came to realize it could not afford to be absent from the F1 circuit.

💣 Tech I’m Skeptical of and Why ()
Why space data centers don’t quite make economic sense.

👀 The Attentionless Internet ()
The internet has always been about getting attention, but how does that work when there are more bots than humans looking at content?

🧠 Cognitive Uploading ()
Some people are saying AI makes you dumber. Author and NotebookLM creator Steven Johnson argues that you can leverage these tools to be terrific thought partners.

🤵 The AI Bowtie ()
An AI framework suggesting using a lot of AI for research, brainstorming and discovery up front and execution at the back end while keeping your thought process human.

♟️ Using Games for Motivation ()
Your brain loves playing games. Use that dopamine hit to motivate.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🚗 Ferrari’s Electric Gamble ()
Ferrari has an EV and almost everyone hates it. They got on the path because the EU forced their hand. But you can’t just shoehorn a battery into an existing Ferrari frame; you need to build something different. Sir Jony Ive might not have hit the right design note.

🤷 Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? ()
Some advice targeted at new graduates. Is AI a good enough substitute for human labor? Is AI actually cheaper than humans? How many companies are really using AI? Will there be a permanent AI underclass? What can you do to differentiate yourself?

🎬 24 Tips for Great Demonstrations ()
Excellent tips for how to build an effective product demonstration. Applies to more than just software.

📩 How to Take Your Inbox Back ()
Use the concept of the Commander’s Critical Information Requirements to re-take control of your inbox. Written for construction management but applies to lots of jobs.

🏈 Solving the Quarterback Problem ()
The Quarterback problem — where one strong player makes all the decisions — is a tough one to design around. Naive approaches like adding unique powers actually make the problem worse. The fix is to build tension into the cooperation, so that the same play is not good for everyone at the table.

⌚ How a Soviet Watch Explains US Defeats ()
If you are used to western watches, it feels like it is falling apart. But the apparent flaw is a strength — the loose crown is designed to keep the watch alive in circumstances that would smash a Rolex. AK-47s have huge internal clearances that let them work covered in grime. F-15s, by comparison, are finely tuned machines that need a dozen hours of maintenance for every hour in the air.

😀 The Dark History of the Smiley Face ()
The emoji we all love started life as a corporate post-layoff morale stunt.

The Look

Analyst and independent thinker Benedict Evans posted an updated version of his AI Eats the World presentation. He is doing interesting work on AI job exposure. And he appeared on Lenny’s podcast this week where he talks about all of this and more.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🫠Measuring the Rise of Slop ()
Daniel Parris made a name for himself by measuring hard-to-measure phenomena and telling everyone about it. He applies those skills to the question of the day — how much of what you see is AI-generated slop?

🚫arXiv Banned AI to Help Academic Gatekeepers ()
arXiv, the online pre-print paper repository behind a lot of the conversation in the AI space, increased penalties to a year-long ban for careless use of AI. Tenured professors rejoiced while independent researchers lack the means to properly check citations. AI is now doing real scientific work outside of the ivory tower.

✍️ LinkedIn Posts for $7 an Hour (Rest of the World)
Many of the LinkedIn posts you read from busy executives are really written for $7 an hour in Manila. Not all slop is AI-generated.

👷 After Automation (Every)
Every is an AI-first company. They have automated everything they can. They are discovering that AI and automation create more work for humans, not less. Agents can commoditize yesterday’s work, but you still need humans to differentiate the work.

💔 The Messy Middle ()
How do we get from the world today — still largely driven by human labor — to the world where AI is capable of doing most jobs? What will the political backlash to this disruption be? How does the world work where law firms, for example, only need partners?

🫗 How the AI Water Usage Myth Started ()
The Washington Post asserted that a 100-word email generated by GPT-4 took 519 mL of water. It was based on back-of-the-envelope math and raw conjecture about electric vehicles. The real number is much lower.

🤑 Software Was Easy, Now Physics is Printing Money ()
Venture capital spent the last decade-plus betting on the ephemeral. Those bets are swinging back into the physical realm with a massive structural bet on infrastructure.

📈 Consistently Outperforming the Market ()
One investor’s guide to how he consistently finds and multiplies his alpha to consistently beat the market.

📝 7 Prompts For Your ADHD Brain ()
ADHD can be a superpower if you harness it. Here are the prompts to get you there.

⚒️ Team Management Protips ()
Kevin Kelly has managed a few successful projects, such as launching Wired Magazine. It is about the team, and they need to succeed together.

✈️ Argentina: The Passport Everyone is Talking About ()
Are you thinking about diversifying your passport portfolio?

🎟️ World Cup Ticket Speculation ()
Will World Cup ticket prices drop in the coming weeks?

The Look

El Nino is coming. See it sketched and explained by .

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🧑‍🏭HI-C is the New Career Flex ()
Success was once measured by the size of the team reporting to you. Individual contributors capable of driving end-to-end projects delivering business value are rewriting this narrative.

🛠️ The New Work Stack ()
Integration and vision are becoming the key drivers of work. You can be a master builder, combining tools and building your own scaffolding to assist in your travails.

🔢 AI Now Integrates Seamlessly With Excel ()
In 2026 you don’t need to bring your spreadsheet to AI, your AI will come to your spreadsheets.

🤦 Why Competent People Disappear ()
Functional stupidity infects many organizations. People are punished for too much thinking out loud. Critical questioning and genuine reflection are discouraged. Competent people often disappear rather than learn to flip the script and deliver clarity.

📖 The Inference Shift (Stratechery)
The compute story in AI is changing rapidly. It was once about NVIDIA and GPUs but it is rapidly becoming focused on inference workloads. Plentiful, cheaper, good enough compute gives China everything it needs for this work.

🤖 AI, Labor and China ()
Jasmine visited Silicon Valley and China to get a read on the future of work in the AI era. The difference between American techno-pessimism and Chinese techno-pragmatism is stark.

🏝️ How Did Kitchen Islands Become a Thing? ()
These days, every kitchen seems to have an island. Blame TV.

🎸 The Greatest Guitar Solo Ever? ()
Personally, I’d go with Free Bird.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🥊 Ted Turner vs Rupert Murdoch ()
Aside from inventing 24-hour news and marrying Jane Fonda, Ted Turner might be the only American who challenged Rupert’s news dominance.

✈️ Why Airlines Are Always Going Bankrupt ()
Airlines cannot be competitive and profitable at the same time.

🧾 Stop Microlooting the Tax Code ()
Everyone thinks their tax cut is the reasonable one. All the carve-outs cost us all.

🪦 On Superpower Suicide ()
Great powers don’t fall — they jump, usually while telling themselves the ground is rising to meet them.

🐎 People Are Not Horses ()
Human labor does not behave like equine labor.

🧪 I Don’t Think We Are Close to “AI Scientists” ()
Models can summarize papers; they don’t know the right paper to write.

🧠 The Human-Clanker-Human Sandwich ()
Put the AI in the middle and the humans on the outside.

🚿 The Slop Cannons in Your Engineering Org ()
Pull requests can be slop too.

🧱 Minimally Viable Consistency ()
How to build alignment with a combination of sharp and flexible consistency and some understanding of locally driven but documented inconsistency.

🛸 Drones and Ancient Revolutions in Military Affairs (Stephen Bryen)
Every “revolution in military affairs” looks novel until you notice the Assyrians did it first.

💵 Tethered Italian Efficiency ()
Tether was built by two Italians. It has a dozen or so employees and a balance sheet strong enough to make a hostile €1.1 billion offer for Juventus.

The Look

AI is both increasingly powerful and ubiquitous. Regulation is likely according to .

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🤦 The $375,000 Drinking Fountains ()
Replacing a broken water fountain should be easy and not insanely expensive. But a stack of well-intentioned rules and a system nobody designed conspired to drive costs to ridiculous levels. This is not an outlier but rather a symptom of the Machine.

🧒 Job Disruption: Now, Soon or Never? (Full Moon)
Young workers want to know if they get a share in the AI disrupted future too.

🌐 The Hidden World of Undersea Cables ()
We all know the internet travels the world in a series of tubes. Sometimes those tubes are deep under the sea, living in shark-proof Kevlar and are regularly scanned for sabotage.

⚡️ 100 Fun Facts about the Grid ()
Squirrels have shut down NASDAQ twice; China is adding a new medium-sized power plant a week and many more fun facts about energy.

🛢️ How an Oil Refinery Works ()
Oil refineries are huge, complicated complexes the size of small cities. Making big, naturally occurring mixes of hydrocarbons into little, refined batches of hydrocarbons is fascinating business.

📊 The Most Important Charts in the World ()
The Zvi asked X for the world’s most important charts. X delivered.

💵 Compounding Success ()
Software teams enforce hygiene and grow shared knowledge to build the right things and compound success.

🫧 End of the Open AI Bubble? ()
Henry Blodgett wonders if OpenAI looks more like MySpace than Facebook?

🥊 Musk v Altman Begins ()
Elon took the stand last week; Sam will be on the stand soon. But it started a long time ago and you can read the love letters.

🧑‍🏫 Google’s Secret Reference Desk ()
Gemini is amazing, but sometimes you need to be more deterministic. Here is how to use Google like a reference librarian.

💔 UI Patterns That Will Not Survive AI ()
Legacy UI patterns will not survive the era of intelligent assistants.

👍 Speak in the Affirmative ()
Telling people what to do is much more powerful than telling them what not to do.

📝 How To Read Like Virginia Woolf ()
Virginia Woolf might have been a better reader than writer. Her book review technique is worth emulating.

🏇 The OG Sporting Spectacle ()
Horse racing is a sport few Americans follow, save one Saturday in May where we put on our best hats, sip mint juleps, and soak in the Run for the Roses.

🏖️ When Club Med Met Atari ()
There was a brief moment in history when people went on vacation to learn to program Ataris.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

🛋️ The Interior Design of Software ()
Historically, software has been utilitarian. Interfaces have dramatically improved, and will only become more important in a world where anyone can build software but few have an eye for design.

🙁 The Unhappiness Permademic ()
COVID created a wave of unhappiness that has not left the anglophone world.

🚘 Waymos are Too Cautious ()
Waymo self-driving taxis have been involved in very few accidents overall, and most of them are in scenarios where they were too cautious and ended up doing things human drivers were not expecting.

💪 The Tokenmaxxing Trend (The Pragmatic Engineer)
Incentivizing anything often leads to gamesmanship. Especially among engineers. And especially when they are spending other people’s money.

🧪 A Robotic Biolab ()
Medra is building a biolab of the future with an army of seeing, sensing robotic arms. Are we on the cusp of real productivity gains in the lab?

🏃 You Are Not Racing AI ()
Signs of low-effort AI-generated work are obvious. Showing you care counts.

🧑‍✈️ Escape the AI Autopilot (Every)
AI is getting more reliable, leading you to have less incentive to check the work. Here are a few techniques to leverage AI while avoiding getting stuck in autopilot mode and letting slop slip out the door.

🖼️ Artifacts Are Alive ()
Artifacts are functioning little HTML+JavaScript programs created by claude and other AI tools. They are transportable pieces of software content. They are a new medium of the AI age.

🤵 Building a Management Flight Simulator ()
Figuring out a “what if” simulator for business has been a dream for a while. But in 2026, if you feed your enterprise world model enough email, you can relive the corporate dramas of your dreams.

📍 How GPS Works (PerThirtySix)
GPS is an astoundingly important component of the modern world. It is also disturbingly simple and fragile.

☎️ Using the Internet Like it is 1999 (Joshua Blias)
Turn the clock back to take control of your feed. Some of the advice is a bit extreme, but tools like RSS are amazing ways to follow many creators on YouTube or Substack.

🪶 The Meaning of Yankee Doodle ()
Yankee Doodle Dandy meant something very different to the British soldiers who created the song.

The Look

What happens when you have AI agents simulate famous technology company organizational charts? worked out the math.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!

👨‍💻 The Hacker Mindset ()
Thinking outside the box lets you walk through walls. See through the abstraction and past the convention to win. Just do it.

⚓ Visualizing the Pace of Change ()
Change comes at you fast. Just ask the HMS Warrior.

⚡Trouble with Transformers ()
The bad news: transformers are getting harder to build in the US. The good news: we can fix most of that with the stroke of a pen.

🧙‍♂️ Mythos Misinformation ()
Claude Mythos has been said to be the end of software as we know it, finding all kinds of unpatched vulnerabilities. The truth is less scary.

🎬 The Clip Economy ()
People don’t watch content, they watch clips.

💾 How an SSD Works ()
SSDs exploit quantum physics to do their magic.

🏢 15 Observations on Life and Work in China ()
996+ and big family meals at malls.

💸 The “Passive” “Income” Trap (JA Westenberg)
A generation of young entrepreneurs got infected with passive income brain and kept losing money from ineffective “systems” instead of doing the thing.

🤡 Everyone You Meet Online is a Freak ()
Today’s reminder that the people you interact with online represent a very small subsection of humanity.

The Look

Openclaw creator Peter Steinberger walks on stage at TED 2026 with a beaming smile and lobster in his pocket and shares how Openclaw came to be one of the fastest growing platforms known to man. It is the kind of thing you could get fired for using — or fired for not using.

Subscribe now

Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!