🚗 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.

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🫠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 .

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🧑‍🏭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.

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🥊 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 .

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🤦 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.

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🛋️ 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.

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👨‍💻 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.

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🚤 Analyst #3’s Hormuz Adventure ()
He took $15,000 in cash, Zyn and Cuban cigars to the Strait of Hormuz and lived to tell the tale. What are the facts on the water of the most strategic waterway on earth?

💰 The Price of Cost Disease ()
Innovation has been driving the American economy for decades, but you cannot economize and optimize relationships effectively. Anti-social business has driven Americans apart.

🧑‍🦯 Vitality > Longevity ()
We have measured lifespan for decades, but we have only recently had the luxury of thinking about healthspan — the good years you live free of disease and disability.

💵 How the Wealthy do Taxes ()
How the truly wealthy structure their income to avoid tax and protect assets.

😖 Generation Cringe ()
Cringe is an ill-defined and confusing concept that Gen Z is working hard on navigating. Rejection and embarrassment are harder to process in a panopticon.

🥟 Notes on Hong Kong ()
Rohit’s notes on an amazing city.

🧱 How LEGOs are Special ()
Legos are a toy, a metaphor and a cultural icon. Explore how they can be used and the story behind the phenomenon.

The Look

Is the Strait open yet?

Bonus tracker: Are we Idiocracy Yet?

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🧮 How the Spreadsheet Reshaped America ()
The spreadsheet was a tool that let managers and policymakers imagine in numbers, enabling the age of financial engineering and changing organizations and America.

🧨 The De-Institutionalization of Society ()
We live in a world where you no longer need access to large institutions. The distribution of information means individuals now trade in spaces once reserved for the state. You need your own shingle.

🎙️ 8 Interviews That Will Make You a Better Investor ()
Eight interviews with investing legends that will give you structure and perspective for your investment strategy.

🤩 There Is Not Enough Claude ()
If AI is truly a self-improving, general-purpose technology then we will see a massive increase in AI demand, commensurate with improved AI capabilities.

🖼️ How to Design in English ()
How to partner with your AI designer more precisely.

🍗 Why China Hates Buffalo Wings ()
Buffalo wings were designed around bland 1960s American palates and it shows.

🖨️ The McNamara Family of Fallacies ()
Measuring what matters, without creating perverse incentives, is much harder than it sounds.

The Look

Microsoft named 80 products ‘Copilot.’ Tey Bannerman’s interactive graphic illustrates the confusion.

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♻️ The Transposed Organization ()
What if you transpose your operational flow and use AI and automation to enable people to own the full product loop rather than one piece in a chain?

🤔 Controversial Career Advice ()
This is not your typical career advice.

🐮 5 Types of BS Job ()
AI will come for the BS first. Here are five kinds of jobs most at risk. Taskmasters beware.

⚒️ Against the Luddites ()
Even Marx and Engels saw through the elitist Luddite movement.

⛓️‍💥 Disappearing Childhood Freedom ()
The supervision era has ended the freedom to roam the neighborhood.

⚾ Why I Love Baseball ()
I am not a baseball fan, but there are reasons to love baseball.

🥛 Soy Right Ascendant ()
The desperate need for approval and respect combined with a refusal of agency and responsibility is a special combination.

🌅 Was There a House In New Orleans? ()
How the Animals started singing about a fictional house in NOLA.

The Look

has dropped the Consumer Electronics Design Trends 2026 report. Electronics are twisting into different forms and hiding in plain sight.

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🦞 What is OpenClaw? (More or Less Podcast)
OpenClaw has been the Main Character in the AI world this week. It's an AI agent that runs on your computer and it's reshaping who controls the AI stack.

🏃‍♂️ The Great Claw Forward ()
While we debate security, China is mass-mobilizing.

💻 How to Use Perplexity Computer ()
Perplexity Computer is the new agentic tool that comes with your subscription. It is not a search engine but your own agentic worker.

🪖 The Art of War in the 21st Century ()
Warfare is different now. Electrically-powered, AI-enabled drones make asymmetric, omnipresent warfare a reality.

🦅 The Eagle and The Lions ()
America and Israel wanted a sprint, Iran is getting the marathon it wants.

🛢️Funding The Enemy ()
Waiving sanctions on Iranian oil is just rewarding Iran for closing the Straits.

🏝️ The Kharg Island Fantasy ()
Can you invade an island in the Persian Gulf without any ships in the Persian Gulf?

🎈 Don’t Buy the Helium Hype ()
Helium production has been curtailed, but how much does it matter?

🌍 Modeling the Messy World ()
What if you could tokenize and understand the real world like current LLMs work with language? World Models learn by seeing rather than reading and they are going to get very interesting soon.

🥊 Fight the Fight 3 Times ()
Figuring out when you should give up is hard.

🤓 Storytelling Mistakes by Technical Leaders ()
Technical leaders tend to give too much detail, overthink tactics, overshare back story and go on too long to be effective storytellers. Here are some ways to work on those tendencies.

🗺️ Non-Technical User’s Guide to Claude Code ()
In case you haven’t taken the plunge, this is a handy guide to getting going with Claude Code for the not-so-technically inclined.

💿 Cop Killer ()
The song Cop Killer struck a nerve in 1992. The band still rocks on.

The Look

Today’s reminder that oil and gas are in everything.

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🔮 Amy Webb (FTSG)
Amy Webb accepts the creative destruction of the Trend Report. Her Convergence Outlook sees a world with machines at the wheel and all-seeing eyes.

🏭 Dylan Patel on AI Compute Bottlenecks ()
There are three physical chokepoints in compute: logic, memory and power. They will determine how fast we can scale.

📱 The iPhone vs the Bank Teller ()
The ATM did not reduce bank teller jobs. It only replaced a single task. The iPhone replaced many other reasons you would need to visit a bank, and the tellers disappeared as branches closed.

🚲 Drones like Bicycles (Phenomenal World)
Iran’s Shahed-136 drone has changed warfare. The cheap cruise missile has changed the air defense equation, often being far cheaper than the interceptor vehicles sent to take it down. How does it come together? What does it cost?

🙋‍♂️ How to Start a One Person Business in 2026 ()
How you can build a $1m, one-person business today.

🔨 Atoms Are Cheap, Process is Pricey ()
How SpaceX rethinks from first principles and implements process to make amazing launch vehicles.

🪜 AI Wrecks the Corporate Career Ladder ()
Tools like Claude Code reduce the need for assistance with execution, breaking the breadth-first model many people have trained in. Taking a depth-first approach where juniors are given whole projects with AI assistants scales better in the new world.

🤖 How Can A Regular Person use an AI Agent ()
AI agents are a lot simpler than you think.

🎹 The Piano Bar is Musical Truth ()
Today I learned everyone requests “Pink Pony Club” at the piano bar when they are not singing “Teenage Dirtbag.”

📻 The Iconic Boom Box ()
Boom boxes were a cultural icon, delivering hip hop and the mixtape to America.

The Look

points out how much water farmland uses compared to ChatGPT:

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🙈 The Invisible Information War ()
Information warfare might be the most important kind of warfare. Here are six observations on how it is playing out in Iran today.

🌍 Is the Intelligence Monopoly Over? ()
You can reconstruct ongoing military operations from public sources.

🏖️ Special Update from Abu Dhabi ()
Stephen McBride lives in Abu Dhabi. He gives you a sense of what life is like at one facet of the front. He would remind you that drone warfare is important.

🔥The Ultimate LNG Report ()
Everything you need to know about liquid natural gas in the Gulf.

🤖 Why You Only Hear About AI Doom (Sahil Bloom)
It is far easier to monetize the negative doom loop than to sell positive stories.

📰 AI Will Reshape Public Opinion ()
Social media democratized public opinion, fueling the rise of populists. LLMs might be capable of pulling things in the opposite direction should they overcome their current shortcomings.

💿 Rick Rubin is the Future of Work ()
Rick Rubin has taste and can express what he feels. He does not know how to play an instrument or work a sound board. In a world of AI you do not need to know how.

💊 The Peptide Wave ()
Peptides are the drug of 2025. Here is a great rundown on a few popular models and the underlying science.

🪖 The 100 Year War ()
We have been fighting the war on drugs for a lot longer than we remember.

☀️ 64% of Americans Want to Stop Changing Clocks ()
We all just want to stop changing clocks. We don’t care which clock wins. Just pick one.

📚 Gen Z Lives in the Archive ()
Gen Z is actually reacting to everything that ever happened in quasi-real time.

🪨 A History of Rock, Paper, Scissors ()
Using hand shapes to settle disputes is a very old human tradition.

The Look

Beware of fake satellite images, via Flowing Data.

image

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🥳 The 2028 Global Intelligence Boom ()
An alternative vision of 2028. What if the jump in agentic capabilities created an abundance boom rather than a job destroying economic death spiral?

📓 Citrini is Great and Deeply Flawed ()
A detailed examination of the essay and a multi-sourced look into all of its flaws.

🌍 10 Charts that Capture How the World Is Changing ()
Another great collection of graphs showing how the world is changing underneath our feet.

🔍 Large Scale Deanonymization with LLMs ()
Anthropic might have been right to be concerned. It might be easy to identify people based on large-scale anonymous data.

🎢 Hold on to Your Hardware (mrusme)
The best time to upgrade your hardware was yesterday. The next best time is today.

🥸 Teamwork is a Scam ()
There are certain advantages to solopreneurship in the modern era.

🧑‍🔬 The Engineerification of Everything ()
Engineering has escaped the lab and permeates every function today.

👮 Crime is Why America Feels Worse ()
Crime and public disorder make the US unlike every other rich country.

🚋 Why the DC Streetcar Deserved to Die ()
A third of a streetcar line does not create a viable transit option.

🎁 The Spring Product List ()
A great list of products to satisfy your spring retail therapy requirements.

The Look

NVIDIA shows how it is very profitable via .

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Timeline

If you have not been tracking the conflict, here is a quick refresher on some meaningful events that materially shape the current engagement.

• 2017-2018: the Trump administration first renews sanctions then withdraws from the JCPOA nuclear weapons deal. Maximum pressure initiated.

• 2019: conflict heats up with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Tanker attacks in the Straits of Hormuz lead to a visit from a US Navy task force.

• 2020: A US drone attack kills IRGC leader Qasem Soleimani in response for strikes on US bases in Iraq.

• 2023-4: Iran backed Houthi rebels attack Red Sea shipping. US and UK forces launch strikes on Houthi missile and drone infrastructure, culminating in large-scale strike on 1,000 targets in March 2025.

• September 2024: Israel decapitates Hezbollah in a daring strike using booby trapped pagers distributed through a years-long supply chain attack. Hezbollah is rendered ineffective as a fighting force to this day.

• June 2025: Israel attacks Iran in the Twelve Day War. The US jumps in near the end of the fight, attacking Iranian air defense and nuclear capabilities directly. Proved US and Israeli assets were capable of penetrating Iranian airspace at will.

• January 2026: Nationwide protests erupt and are bloodily repressed. Thousands killed, many more detained during a brutal repression led by the IRGC. This wave of protests was much larger scale and more generalized than previous waves.

By February 2026, Russia is fairly consumed with the ongoing Ukraine War, unable to send material help. Iran is on her own, proxies like Hezbollah are diminished, rebuilding her air defenses and nuclear program. If there was a time to strike, it was now.

The Territory and the Lead-Up

Here are some curated background sources that should help make sense of the headlines.

🗺️ Land war is unrealistic. See ’s exploration of Iran to get a sense of how daunting the terrain is.

🚢 Can Iran close the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway carrying a fifth of the world’s oil trade? Keeping it closed would be harder than it looks according to the .

🔮 For a wider view of this conflict, explained the military and political situation effectively. Conflict was inevitable, there was no offramp between Trump and how boxed in Iran had become.

Staying Updated

For a raw but detailed and digestible feed keep an eye on the Institute for the Study of War’s Middle East desk for daily updates. This is the best way to keep up with the conflict on a detailed level if that is your goal.

The Bismarck Cables, mentioned above, are a succinct way to keep abreast of international affairs of all sorts.

From an investment point of view, the most important question is “what is happening in the strait?” Real-time shipping information is a good place to start. Check out this map on Marine Traffic to start. Traffic is very light going through the Strait at this time. The thing to look at is if we see significant mining or other activity and maritime insurance rates effectively close the channel. It is probably too late to buy Brent Crude Oil futures.

Let’s hope for a fast and peaceful resolution to the fighting. Hopefully involving the end of a horribly repressive regime.

🌐 Tariff Ruling I: What Changes? ()
ChinaTalk sat down with scholar to help understand the effects of the ruling on trade and ongoing negotiations.

⚖️ Tariff Ruling II: Supreme Court Dynamics ()
What did this ruling say about the court and the dynamics between the justices? If you like legal drama, don’t miss the following deep dive.

👎 DOGE’s Final Failure ()
Saying you are taking a chainsaw to government is one thing, effectively wielding it in America’s multistakeholder system is another.

🏛️ How a Congressional Office Actually Works ()
Laws are made by people working in small offices with funny rules. Here is how they operate.

📉 Wall Street’s Memo from The Future ()
Investment research firm games out what happens when intelligence becomes a commodity and it breaks our economic assumptions.

📉 Don’t Short SaaS ()
The market is pricing in extreme AI disruption of the software business. Should it?

👨‍💻 Thin is In (Stratechery)
Thick clients won the last war, but thin clients are winning this one.

💻 Is the Future “AWS for Everything?" ()
AWS is flexible automation at scale. Will AI create conditions allowing that dynamic to appear in other businesses?

🤷 How Will OpenAI Compete (Benedict Evans)
OpenAI lacks any durable strategic advantage other than a large, largely no-paying customer base. Can they figure out how to navigate that?

🔨 Effective Claude ()
Claude is amazing but intimidating — it is really five big, hairy, complicated tools in one. Here is a great guide to get started.

🔌The Wonderful World of AI Plugins ()
AI is more than just your chat window, here is some advice on how to pick integrations.

🍸 How to Do Cocktails for 100 ()
Throwing a cocktail party for 100 in a DC row house is not logistically easy.

🗿 Concrete Tech (Wallpaper*)
Concrete electronics to match your brutalist style.

The Look

Steak prices are almost worse than memory prices.

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🏪 Brand Lessons of the Superbowl ()
The Superbowl is more a marketing event than a sporting event.

💪 The Ascension of Clavicular ()
Looksmaxxing is so popular young Los Angelinos are sharing peptide dealers.

🏰 NVIDIA’s Moat is Cracking ()
The economics of mass inference are poking holes in CUDA’s armor.

🤕 AI’s Pandemic Moment ()
The vibes of AI seem a bit off, take 1: the world stares into the abyss.

🔥 Something Big is Happening (Matt Shumer)
The vibes of AI seem a bit off, take 2: the agents have arrived.

🕵️ The Agents Are Here ()
Real improvement in real time is hard to notice.

🍕 The Two Slice Team (Every)
In the ‘00s, you organized around 10-person, two pizza-eating teams. In the 2020s you run one person, two slice-eating teams with AI.

🧑‍⚖️ AI Will Not Make Your Lawyer Cheaper ()
Why AI will not radically reduce legal bills in the immediate term. The regulations will not bear it.

👏 How to Move Any Room ()
Straightforward frameworks for getting your message across.

💼 Favorite AI Tool Use Cases ()
How one leader fits Perplexity, Gemini, NotebookLM, ChatGPT and Claude together for a successful workflow.

🦔 A Brief History of SEGA ()
There was a lot more to SEGA than the Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog.

The Look

The EPL won via .

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In fact, there is a bit too much to work with on the subject. I was wondering if you could help me focus. See the poll below, if you have more input let me know in the comments.

And now for our regularly scheduled programming.

♻️ The Disposable Software Era ()
We are moving into an era where some software is disposable and tinkerers are enabled.

🔥 Software: Armageddon or Opportunity? ()
Software has been eating the world for the last decade and a half. Is it it’s turn to be eaten?

🤖 The Dawn of the Posthuman Age ()
What to make of a high technology, low fertility future.

🏎️ How F1 Conquered American Culture ()
How did F1 go from peripheral to important enough for Cadillac to start a team and take out a Superbowl ad to tell the world about it?

😎 Immersive Sports Revolution ()
Volumetric video, immersive entertainment venues and next generation headsets are conspiring to revolutionize the way you can consume sports.

👮 Fraud Investigations Follow Predictable Patterns (Bits About Money)
Fraud has become unfortunately politicized. In fact, it behaves like many other professions with identifiable supply chains and apprenticeship systems.

📈 Claude Coding a Portfolio Tracker ()
You could pay a lot for software you can just vibe code now.

🥈 Silver Supply Crisis ()
Part of the problem with Silver is we are not mining enough to meet demand, creating conditions for wild price swings.

🏭 Building the Wrong Factories for War ()
War needs mass production of shells, not highly differentiated production of consumer goods. America specializes in the latter.

🪦 Beware Q Day ()
Q day is the day quantum computing renders current encryption ineffective. Here is how nations are preparing for that eventuality.

🏫 School is Worse than Social Media ()
The studies about social media being bad for kids failed to adjust for schooling.

🏅 Amazing Olympics Coverage (Sports! by Rodger Sherman)
Rodger Sherman does brilliant coverage of esoteric sports. His Winter Olympic coverage shines.

The Look

China installs more robots than the rest of the world put together.

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📉 Painfully Long on Silver ()
The story of one trader’s crash and why he is staying long in Silver.

💾 Opportunity in Software? ()
Lots of great graphs to study and one interesting question — software stocks are beat up, are they going to get onto the front foot again?

🤩 Why Open Source AI is Raising Serious Dollars ()
Open source is a way to win serious mind share in the AI world.

🤷‍♀️ Does Anyone Believe Anything? ()
Who would think tribal politics would lead to hypocritical beliefs?

🧊 Operators, Cosplay and ICE ()
Living the cult of the operator.

🪙 Inside OpenAI’s Unit Economics ()
Are AI models profitable? Can AI models become profitable?

💔 I Broke Up with ChatGPT ()
I reach for ChatGPT less and less these days. Apparently I am not alone.

🤖 When AI Agents Get Real ()
ICYMI, this publication’s take on the new wave of truly agentic tools that will run on your documents folder. Stay tuned for more on this subject.

👺 Backseat Software (Mike Swanson)
The pressure is on product managers to measure everything. This leads to push notifications, not software that gets out of the way.

😍 Ideas Have Sex ()
Ideas need to mate with other ideas to prosper and grow.

🏈 Fox’s NFL Deal Changed Everything ()
Rupert put Fox on the map with his NFL deal in 1993. It changed football broadcasting and funded Fox News among other feats.

⚽ Set Piece Revolution ()
What do the numbers say about set pieces today?

The Look

Measles are back!

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Most of the world lives out of their desktop and their documents folder. It is where you find the photos and the notes. If AI agents are going to revolutionize your work, they need to land in your home directory. Patching agents into web applications via OAuth workflows is tricky and confusing for users, and requires developer time. Accessing the same data through the browser already logged into the website is much cleaner. Your ~/home is where worlds collide, and if AI Agents are to be successful they need to be able to work there, not just confined to a chat window with a few MCP tools.

This briefing focuses on a few tools you should be aware of that are changing the way we work. Claude Code is the granddaddy, a venerable 11 months old now. It has matured and made it out of the command line. Its cousin Claude Cowork is like Claude Code for the normies. Finally, Anthropic put Claude in Chrome and Excel, bringing the power of Opus 4.5 to just about everything important in the information world.

Counterbalancing this is the tool that has taken the computer geek world by storm over the last few weeks — a local‑first, persistent orchestration layer designed to run agents on your own machine rather than inside a hosted chat product. It was first called Clawd but that was a little too close for Anthropic’s comfort, so the tool has molted and become OpenClaw. It is not the first agentic AI tool you can run on your home computer, but it is so well done and adoption has taken off so fast that you can’t find a Mac Mini in Silicon Valley Best Buys because they are all sitting on shelves running agents.

It is an amazing time to be a technologist.

Claude Code Comes of Age

Claude Code has been an amazing product since its inception just last February. From the get-go, the power of having an agent running on your own PC with direct access to resources was a clear winner. Originally it was a command line tool and, as the name implies, aimed at coders. But soon many people figured out that it was a tool for much more than that. If you could throw the tokens, or a Max account, at the problem, Claude Code would work on it.

One key feature of Claude Code is skills. They are effectively small programs, written as a collection of text files, that Claude can use to execute. That, combined with MCP tools and the aforementioned file system access, made it a powerful tool. It was effectively the agent most people had. Buzz was growing.

Over the holidays it started to break out of its shell — Anthropic opened it up to more users. People figured out the command line was not too scary. Then they pounced and both enabled the feature globally for paid accounts and added a Claude Code client to the desktop app.

If you have a paid Claude account you should try the feature today. There is a ton you can do with it even if you never, ever will use it to write code.

Claude Cowork

All of this power matters less if it can’t meet people where they already work. For most users, that place is not a terminal window but a graphical desktop full of folders, documents, and familiar apps. GUI‑native agents are what finally bring the home‑directory thesis to life.

Claude Code is an amazing tool, but most people don’t work in the command line or with command line tools. They write documents in GUI word processors. This is where Claude Cowork steps in. It is a beta feature for paid Claude accounts that will take over your macOS desktop to do things like reorganize folders and write documents and presentations.

To Anthropic’s credit, they built it on a lightweight VM to keep the AI constricted to the data you share with it, rather than running in your context with all of your rights. It is scary — but not as scary as it could be — from a security perspective.

Claude in Your Apps

It would not be an overstatement to say the world is run in Excel. Anthropic has brought their platform to the place where the world counts by building Claude in Excel. It can now peer directly into your most important financial data and give you sound advice. It can clean up formulas, data and build graphs. You can use it to build complex models according to some users.

The parts of the world not run in Excel are run in browsers. Claude in Chrome brings it to the browser tabs you want. I’ll admit I use the tool to edit posts — it can interact directly with the Substack editing tool, beating the copy and paste or hunt and peck workflows I’ve used in the past. Running within your browser means you can give it access to anything you want. Your whole inbox if you are brave, or maybe a specific email if you are not so brave through a simple tab group sharing mechanism.

Your Own, Private AI has a Social Network

Ever since ChatGPT appeared, many technologists have dreamed of having a smart, persistent, context-aware private AI agent ready to do their bidding. Many tools have checked parts of that box, but none effectively packaged everything needed to run a truly local, orchestrated agent.

Peter Steinberger effectively solved this problem when he created what was once called clawdbot. The tool creates an interface over a local AI manager. You supply an API key and the tool supplies the connectivity and interface for a self-hosted persistent agent. The tool connects to any command line application — it just uses AI to understand them. It has infinite plugins out of the box thanks to the entire ecosystem of python and nodejs. It can be used as a personal agent, but it is really designed as an orchestration tool. I can see a world where you run multiple instances for discrete tasks and compartmentalization.

Superpowers aside, it excels as a personal agent. It remembers you, your likes. You can text it like your bestie. Like Claude it uses skills to perform tasks like managing your inbox or even booking travel. It has access to whatever you give it.

If this sounds cool to you, you are not alone. It went viral last weekend, with the Github project getting 9,000 stars on January 26 as Mac Minis sold out in the Bay Area. The newfound popularity caused a bit of a trademark issue and the name molted to OpenClaw as of January 30.

There is a lot of talk about security issues. It has the same tradeoffs any agentic AI system has — to make it useful you need to give it access to data and often the environment the data lives in. Like any other automated tool, limiting access is worth thinking about. If you use Clawdbot, think about giving it a dedicated machine, Gmail, iCloud and other accounts and only tapping into personal accounts as absolutely necessary. The design of the system is impossible to secure, but you can practice defense in depth to minimize damage.

What This Means

OpenClaw is not for everyone — it certainly requires knowing your way around the command line, being comfortable with API keys and doing a bit of troubleshooting. It is definitely not the kind of thing you should regularly run on your own PC in your own account. But give it a machine and some constraints and you can have a private setup on par with Claude Code at similar unit costs. Moreover you can deploy a fleet of them dedicated to specific tasks and separate security containers.

I did not set out to write this much of a Claude love story. But it is hard to hide — Anthropic is rapidly building a differentiated platform. Their tools are doing much more meaningful work for me than OpenAI’s ever have, even if you still cannot draw an image directly. The mileage you can get today out of their tools for most work is worth the investment or even switching providers. OpenAI probably is not in a great place here compared to their peers.

The tools are starting to think deep enough to do real, meaningful work. They are getting directly connected to the knowledge systems. It is a good time to start thinking about how you are going to work with them rather than for them. With agents embedded where work lives and orchestration running locally, 2026 is shaping up to be the year AI stops being a dream and starts doing real work on your machine.

Resources

Here are some things I found inspirational in writing this piece.

Claude

The Magic of Claude Code (, Alephic)
Why claude code is magical. Still very true four months after publication, which is roughly a century in AI years.

Claude Code and What Comes Next ()
How AI is capable of repeated, sustained work.

36 Claude Skills Examples ()
36 skills from 36 creators to show you want you can do with skills.

How to Use Claude Code for Everyday Tasks (Every)
Claude code can do a lot more than just code.

Will Claude Eat Excel ()
What you can do with Claude in Excel.

Claude Cowork: What It Is, Why It Matters and How To Use It ()
Excellent explanation piece about Claude Cowork

OpenClaw / Molt / Clawd

The Lobster Takeover (Starry Hope)
Good guide to setting up your OpenClaude including some hardware options beyond Mac Minis.

Interview with the Creator of Clawdbot ()
Peter Steinberger, and clawdbot, has a really interesting story.

OpenClaw is Wildly Insecure ()
OpenClaw is far from hardened, here are some factors to be aware of when you setup your instance.

The Best of Moltbook ()
AI agent social interactions are amazing to behold.

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