💦 The Right Worries About Water (Asterisk Magazine )
The thirstiest data center uses as much water as it takes to grow alfalfa to feed 500 cattle. Beyond that, water is nearly impossible to redirect in America due to a web of compacts and collective water rights in the West.
📚 Hey Labs, Digitize the Archive (Res Obscura)
A lot of history is locked up in fragile paper manuscripts in historical archives. This was sad, but immaterial until AI mechanized free association. With a little help, historians can take on millennium problems too.
💸 Cash is Disappearing (Beyond tweets)
Apple pay made credit cards convenient. Italy leveraged that popularity to finally give credit card acceptance and electronic accounting laws teeth. In a country once famous for off-the-books dealing you rarely get asked “with or without the receipt” for an implied discount anymore.
🤯 Is AI Giving You Spaghetti Brain? (writerbuilder)
AI, like a real team, works better when you set expectations up front, agree on the plan of attack and then check the execution at the end. Find ways to set things up so you do some fast feedback rounds, then loose the agents on a 20-minute build. Build your reference set.
📊 Polling Is Not What It Used To Be (The Argument)
Polling was a lot easier when everyone had landlines they answered most of the time. Nobody answers unknown calls in 2026. Most of the polling is done online, and now you are dealing with a population of people who signed up to take polls online. Representative samples get to be hard to construct, and prediction markets just make things worse through perverse incentives.
🤖 Where Is the Intelligence Explosion? (Noahpinion)
Ramez Naam is a futurist who predicted the solar and battery revolutions long before they were apparent. He is a wide-eyed techno-optimist, and he does not see the recursive self-improvement revolution the big labs are touting.
💰 Price is Opportunity Cost (Economic Forces)
Any parent knows that when you hire a sitter, you go to a fancy restaurant. You are already paying the sitter. The same theory applies to wars. Relative prices matter.
🎦 From Multiplex to Funhouse (Stat Significant)
Movie ticket sales have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. The good news for theater owners is that event programming is soaring. Fandom might grow digitally, but the fans want to celebrate together in their funhouse.
🔮 Grading Wired’s Crystal Ball (KK)
Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly found a document of curated quotes from his magazine’s first five years. They are wild.
The Look
Eric Soda asks what if AI isn’t a bubble?
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