🧵Some personal news: After a 6 year hiatus, the Internet History Podcast is back! Yes, the original tech history podcast is back with the first three episodes below, followed by a new one every week for the foreseeable future. Search your podcast app now so you don't miss the amazing interviews we have coming! Start with this one 👇 piped.video/sjkkdcMp2Pk

This is hardly news...AI people have been talking very loudly about their bunkers and escape plans since at least the mid-2010s.

The chief economist at Apollo is warning that mass adoption of AI agents could trigger a bank run as they optimize user investments. Gary Gensler spent his last few years as SEC chair warning that the exact same problem will hit the markets: the pursuit of algorithmic perfection at scale destroys system stability. Personal-finance agents making simultaneous optimal decisions could potentially cause a massive flash crash. Agent acausal coordination, with no messages passed between them, will show up in a lot of places. Markets will get the big headlines, but huge numbers of clever advisors making very similar choices will impact all of human society. Capability gains make this worse, not better. The smarter the agents, the narrower the optimal path; and knowing that other agents see that exact same path lets them move together without talking to each other. Agents do not need to collude to act in unison. Thus, they break no human laws by doing so. Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming, and it is about to start happening very fast.

I’m doing this for my own secrets app right now (different one) and it’s so great.

10 comedy points to Sar. And not in a negative way.

"The last year in the technology industry has felt like 100 years all happening at once. Our industry is destabilized in a way nobody’s experienced since the advent of the personal computer. Every limit AI runs up against collapses within a month. Everything we do with frontier models today, in a few years we’ll be doing instantaneously and for free."

This ain’t Solaris.

You will immediately think of AI bots going rogue and posting on message boards. Yes, and… I remember when Prodigy made us briefly pay per post and we just set it up so we sent a post and then retracted it so we didn’t have to pay but people would still see it.

When NPR staffers flagged strange comments under their podcasts on Spotify as bots, it took a Gen Z colleague to (immediately) figure out the mystery. spr.ly/6012BGYYjw

That DHH saying out loud that the age of writing code by hand is over for the industry, and causing such a huge uproar is a bit interesting, given this was clear enough since ~January for most of us using the models + paying attention. Removed paywall: newsletter.pragmaticengineer…

New York Times I love you but your lists are bringing me down

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge

Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.

Norm Macdonald was Conan’s favorite guest. So here is the greatest joke in late night

If you've noticed how fast claude.ai and the Desktop app have become in the last few weeks, here's how we did it. Lots of juicy learnings & techniques in the blog post for engineers working on speeding up your own apps.

The first photographic portrait of a human being was a selfie, and it was taken in a backyard on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Robert Cornelius was a metallurgist and amateur chemist who worked in his family's lamp and chandelier business at 710 Chestnut Street. Louis Daguerre announced his photographic process to the French Academy of Sciences in August 1839, and the news reached America that autumn. At the time, portrait photography was considered impractical — exposure times were simply too long for a person to hold a pose. Within roughly two months of the announcement, Cornelius built a camera from a box fitted with a lens from an opera glass. He set it up in the yard behind the store to use the daylight, uncovered the lens, walked into frame, folded his arms, and stood still for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes. He wrote on the back that it was the first light picture ever taken. It is the earliest extant American portrait photograph and one of the treasures of the Library of Congress collection. Cornelius went on to open Philadelphia's first portrait studio — and quit photography entirely within a few years to return to the family lamp business.

Can confirm. Great show. Especially as I only had to walk a block to attend it!

We sat down with Rich Jaycobs, the former president of Cantor Futures Exchange & legendary creator of 7 exchanges & 6 clearing houses, and 1/5 of all approved DCMs since 2000. Here's what it really takes to build a compute market. sfcompute.com/news/commodity…