ZD 25.37: A Fraying Society
It was a rough week for America but at least Luscious Jackson has a Substack.
Reactions to a crazy week in a nation fraying at the scenes. Meanwhile in California, technology marches on with an exciting new Apple launch event. We explore if AI is normal technology or if it is a social technology. It turns out knowing things is good, and Luscious Jackson has an awesome substack.
The Distilled Spirit
A Fraying Nation
What lead to a disturbed young man assassinating Charlie Kirk and where do we go from here? Is this the new 1970s?
The Fallout
✋ We Can’t Let This Be Our Future ()
If we want democracy to work, we are going to need to start listening to each other.
We all must ground ourselves in the realities and the stakes of our current moment — not because they aren’t high, but because falsely making them out to be higher than they are only invites self-fulfilling prophecy.
🧨 Will This Be Our Reichstag Fire? ()
This moment could be very dangerous if it is spun the wrong way.
So if support for violence is very low, why does violence appear to be getting more common — and more severe? I’ve taken a look at the evidence from social science, and much of the answer has to do with toxic rhetoric from our political leaders. Rising level of hate and affective polarization, exacerbated by social media, also play a role.
🙀 Killed by a Meme (Garbage Day)
The shooter was raised in a sea of memes. Which ones does he believe?
But the conflicting tone of the bullet casings’ inscriptions may also point to a connection with the Com network and the 764 terror cell offshoot. We’ve covered these groups several times on Panic World. They primarily exist inside of Discord and Telegram group chats. They recruit vulnerable young people around the internet, including inside of multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox.
Other Factors In Play
💻 The Autistic Half-Century (The Diff)
The last half-century has rewarded people who exhibit autistic traits.
Of course, if a PC is a bicycle for the autistic mind, the Internet is a hypersonic jetpack.
⛅ The Bluesky-ization of the American Left ()
Progressive cancel culture turned out to be a temporary advantage in the 2010s. It might be time to get past that.
Practically all the important progressives — academics, commentators, activists, politicians — are on Bluesky, talking to a much smaller audience than they used to have on Twitter. But what they say just doesn’t seem to matter at all.
⚡ The End of The Road ()
All kinds of economic indicators are flashing yellow. Known fuel reserves are depleting fast and renewables are not going to keep up. Energy prices are doomed to spike while the world is sitting near unsustainable debt ratios.
By the 2030’s it really won’t matter how much more gas or nuclear we will have finally added to the mix: there won’t be enough fuel to run all of those power plants at full capacity.
Tech Marches On
American society might be splitting at the seams, but your new AirPods can do live translation which is honestly pretty amazing.
Apple’s New Phones
)Many iPhone releases are evolutionary, this is more revolutionary even if the AI isn’t getting much better.
This year, thankfully, the upgrades were all significant enough and it turns out well worth the wait. We were treated to a slew of major redesigns, significant specs upgrades, and one cool new member of the iPhone family.
👩🔬 Melting iPhones for Science (
)Was the iPhone redesign ultimately the result of a deep-seated heat load issue?
We'd discovered something Apple didn't know: their own systems couldn't coexist under sustained AI inference.
Is AI Normal? Is AI Social?
Two different responses to AI 2027 that are worth reading.
🏭 Understanding AI as Normal Technology ()
Great companion guide to understanding the eponymous book.
This is not specific to large language models or any particular kind of AI. Incidentally, that’s why the title is “AI as normal technology” and not “AI as a normal technology”. Our views apply to the whole umbrella of technologies that are collectively referred to as AI, and other similar technologies even if they are not referred to as AI.
🎉 Understanding AI as a Social Technology ()
Looking at technology in a vacuum is not successful.
If we want to understand the social, economic and political consequences of large language models and related forms of AI, we need to understand them as social, economic and political phenomena. That in turn requires us to understand that something like a Singularity has been unfolding for over two centuries.
Building Things
Normal engineering practices apply, even when building with AI.
Building With and For AI
🧠 AI and Cognitive Debt ()
Your brain needs workouts — it needs to push hard and get into “create” mode. AI is a cheap way to create, letting your brain sit in much easier to manage “review” mode.
We may have too many opportunities for create mode in our lives than our energy allows. Letting AI help with some of that, which otherwise we wouldn’t have done anyway, is arguably good. But this doesn’t mean that every time AI can do something, we should let it do it.
😨 We are in the Windows 95 Era of AI Agent Security ()
Remember when we plugged everything into the internet on platforms that lacked fundamental security features back in the good old days? Get ready to re-live that era as irresistible market pressures meat flawed security design.
Early computers allowed developers to be enormously creative, because any program could do anything to any file in the system. From a security perspective, Windows 95’s flexibility was also its downfall. AI agents are fundamentally insecure for precisely the same reason.
👩💻 The Responses API Exists to Hide The Trace (Sean Goedecke)
With GPT-5 and the new API, developers can no longer peek into the reasoning behind ChatGPT’s responses. Maybe that was the point.
But you can’t do this with OpenAI’s GPT-5-Thinking, because OpenAI doesn’t expose the chain of thought1. It’s a tightly-guarded secret - presumably because OpenAI doesn’t want to guarantee that its chain-of-thought contents are safe, or because it contains private information that could leak implementation details to other labs.
Building Systems
🧙♂️ Magical Systems Thinking ()
Fixing complicated systems is hard. You need small, working systems to supplant old creaky ones.
The long-term promise of a small working system is that over time it can supplant the old, broken one and produce results on a larger scale. This creative destruction has long been celebrated in the private sector, where aging corporate giants can be disrupted by smaller, simpler startups: we don’t have to rely on IBM to make our phones or laptops or Large Language Models.
💣 Engineering the Manhattan Project ()
The Manhattan Project is an amazing guide to building a large-scale, red-ball project with lots of unknowns.
Since plutonium and U235 hadn’t yet been produced in large quantities, it wasn’t known exactly how much fissile material would be needed to create a critical mass, and thus how big the bullet and target needed to be.
🍞 Systems Engineering Through Bun Install (Bun)
Great read for anyone curious about systems level programming and thinking about hardware tradeoffs and times. Shows how different solutions are the correct answer at different times. Worth checking out even if you are not into package managers.
For a typical React app with thousands of package files, this generates hundreds of thousands to millions of system calls! This is exactly the systems programming problem we described earlier: the overhead of making all these system calls becomes more expensive than actually moving the data.
🏰 How to Build a Medieval Castle (Archaeology Magazine)
The best way to understand how something was done is to actually do it.
Thinking & Leadership
Some ideas about leading and thinking better.
👨💼 9 High Value Leadership Skills ()
Nine high-value leadership skills AI cannot replace. Complete with links to specific guides on the subjects.
That’s why if you want to be future-proof, the kind of leader who’s not just valuable but irreplaceable, you need to focus on building these high-value skills.
🐘 Knowing Things is Good, Actually ()
Learning is the raw material of learning; knowing more about a subject makes it easier to learn more because the cognitive load of new information is less.
This isn't just about learning science—taking the time to learn a bit about various subjects can open your eyes to the gaps in your knowledge and make you feel alive with curiosity, and make you see new connections with things you didn't see before.
Fun Stuff
Congrats! You made it to the end, here is some brain candy.
🧓 The Flippening and OG Uncs ()
The world is getting older and people in their early 40s will take over from aging boomers soon in a sudden wave known as the Flippening. Don’t miss the origins of OG unc video.
🎸 When I Was a Beastie Boy ()
This is an amazing first-hand account of meeting the Beastie Boys before they were the Beastie Boys. New York in the 1980s sounds amazing. Luscious Jackson has stories to tell.
⚽ Paramount’s UCL Studio Cast ()
My gentle reminder to the reader that the Champions League kicks off this afternoon. Enjoy the interview with the really fun studio cast.
🏈 The Last Game Before 9/11 ()
The Giants and Broncos opened the Invesco Field in Denver on a balmy September night in 2001. Little did anyone involved in the telecast know it was the last night before the world changed.
The Look
Science vs Engineering as only
can tell it.
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Thanks for the rec! We also had a story on how the CBS Champions League crew came together in the first place: https://www.thefootballweekend.com/p/cbs-champions-league-micah-richards-paramount