Yesterday my girlfriend's parents complained about how Democrats and Republicans are both too extreme, and I explained how elected politicians are just geriatric fundraisers now, and we're actually ruled by 27-year-old staffers who mainline extremist X and TikTok slop

We are now entering into an era where any product can be created exactly to a consumer's preferences & needs. I vibe-fabricated a dog door with a wifi-controlled lock, perfectly to the specifications & design of my house. I know nothing about metal fabrication or electrical engineering. It's now getting manufactured and delivered in 2 weeks -- for almost the same cost if I bought a mass-produced item off-the-shelf.

US Marines engaging in high-level diplomacy with Japanese sailors.

10 am wake up screaming 10am - 2pm stoically contemplate suicide 3 - 6pm “research” 7pm radish omelette dinner 8pm - 1am online chess 2am - racist chat room 3 am - breast milk ice cream 4 am - waterboard my husband 5 am - wind down with some more internet chess

What really happened after the State Dinner. The lost Xi camera roll has been found.

How do companies act when they are being existentially threatened by new technology? There’s a big difference between a stock worth buying and a stock worth owning, and we’re undoubtedly going to see a lot of the former in AI disrupted companies…but it’s more difficult to determine which names fall in the latter. When we look at the recent past for example, we see something of a gradual cycle in which it “becomes obvious” a company has been disrupted, everyone sells. Then that overextends the stock to the downside relative to current fundamentals (or relative to headlines announcing the companies are taking measures to adapt), at which point dip buyers come in. In the examples of real disruption, it corrects back to a trend, but the cycle restates itself and the trend proves to be a downward one on a long enough timeframe (downward can also simply be massively underperforming the index by going sideways for a decade). The insidious nature of these names is that technological disruption manifests first as multiple compression, current earnings tend to look reassuring and near-term analyst expectations tend to overestimate the impact (and under-estimate in the long term). This results in better than expected results that can mask the competitive damage. These rebounds don’t actually prove the preceding selloff overshot fair value, and the rally tends to be overly optimistic on what future life should be assigned to today’s profits. Two classic and relatively recent examples. Macy’s had two of these moves. +58% in 2016 and +148% in 2018. But across 2015-2019 the shares still declined -67% compared to SPY’s +73% gain. In 2016, there were skeptics regarding the extent to which e-commerce’s growth sounded a death knell for brick and mortar - after all, malls had been a mainstay of the American town for decades. By 2019, it would be a difficult task to find an investor who owned Macy’s on the thesis that Amazon’s disruption to the company was overstated. And it’s not like these rallies were on pure sentiment shifts. In 2018 same store sales rose 2% YoY. Apple unveiled the iPhone in Jan 2007, BlackBerry’s stock price peaked in 2008 but its revenue didn’t peak until 2011. And even if you shorted the revenue peak you still had to sit through a rally where it tripled on its way to declining 95% by 2013. The most tricky aspect seems to be when companies present as having adapted but, for any number of reasons, can’t actually manage. Kodak, for example, had shifted mix to a majority digital (54%) by 2005. But that simply was no match for the hit to the amazing recurring revenue of the film/processing model. Adding new technology doesn’t make up for losing the disrupted profit pool, especially when it transitions your business model to a less favorable or competitive one. In 2010, Kodak jumped 30% on quarterly numbers signaling a turnaround on lower costs, printer sales and licensing income. They filed for Chapter 11 in 2012. Ive been thinking about what we can we do to avoid falling into the same traps while also not being blind to the potential for real opportunities in poorly understood disruption. Hard to answer without sounding cliche or generic but… At least for now, “having/using AI” is not a solution. That will be the default for every company on earth soon enough. The questions that matter are more nuanced: Do customers still renew? Does pricing hold? Who owns the customer relationship? After the new costs and old cannibalization, does the new strategy/product even replace the old profits? It’s going to be pretty difficult to differentiate the incumbents that deserve to rebound from the ones that don’t but at the very least I’m taking notes as things play out.

Asked opus 5.5 to make a video of openai solving Navier-Stokes. Very nice model, I still prefer Astra and 5.6 as my main drivers as I do a lot of research heavy work but 5.5 Opus is the first time since 4.7 that I want to heavily run Claude. It has great taste.

First AI came for the computer vision people And I did not speak out Because I was not a computer vision researcher Then AI came for the computer linguists And I did not speak out Because I was not a linguist Then AI came for the Go players And I did not speak out Because I was not a Go player Then AI came for the programmers And I did not speak out Because I had no time for programming Then AI came for the mathematicians And I did not speak out Because I was not a mathematician Then the AI came for the bumbling idiots And there was noone left To speak for me

wild chart. market repeatedly underestimating earnings growth in ‘26 and ‘27

This is actually what the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) looked like last night

a normal looking dude could land this in 2006 btw...

I am righteously indignant over the wealth transfer to the very few that these bubbles create. The whole system is about creating bubbles so the grift can happen, both inside companies, transferring wealth to their employees at obscene rates, and in politics, as we see all over.

Anthropic and OpenAI cannot become profitable unless they can reduce the ratio of training cost to inference profits. In the long run, their survival may depend on outlawing competitive open source models. This can only be done under the guise of safety regulation.

AI will cure cancer and it will kill us all are not contradictory positions, they are both rhetorical methods to make the exact same argument: the future is defined by AI. You are a satellite revolving around the AI sun, at best. These undefined prognostications of future omnipotence distract from accountability in the present. This rhetoric has two effects 1) it distracts from today’s upside down value capture versus value creation equation 2) it forces a psychological centering of AI and AI companies at the expense of humans and the rest of the world’s institutions. Any technology’s utility is a function of our ability to control it, not its raw hypothetical power without controls. Chemotherapy requires precision to kill cancer and not kill a host. Nuclear reactors are defined by their controls more than the reaction itself. That a given technology’s utility is bound by the precision of its controls was Palantir’s fundamental insight at its inception: the amount of security the US government can guarantee its citizenry is defined by how much it can guarantee rights to privacy more so than the raw capability to identify threats. If you do not enhance both privacy and security, your product is a toy. AI is not the first technology that couples control with utility. In the present, the models are voraciously consuming knowhow like a parasite eating its host until both die. Every company I speak to is sprinting to control a spend:outcomes ratio that exploded on them before they could learn how to govern it. They are observing their intellectual assets eroding like a sand castle into the ocean. They are stuck between being upside down on value leakage, yet being told they have no agency over their future. The inevitability of the arrival of a deity forces individuals to define themselves as a function of that deity. Nobody wants to be that luddite who tells you the Wright Brothers will never fly. Nobody wants to run Polaroid or Blockbuster. No young person wants to be a part of the permanent underclass. Forward leaning humans are psychologically berated into defining their skillsets and objectives as a function of AI. Their careers are lottery tickets. They define utility through how good they are at tickling a model. “Ride the exponential” is a mantra that allows you to be “good” in a moral sense, without earning it. If you dare to expose yourself as a luddite that is not getting results today, well that is a “skill issue,” or you simply aren’t using enough tokens. This propaganda pursues an inevitable centering of AI, with humans as peripherals. The only thing you have real agency over in the future? Using more tokens of course. I think if you are going to virtue signal about protecting our future, you should also own the implied vice that comes with your position. Prognostications of armageddon are inextricably linked with acceptance of the bad things that exist in the world today. 350,000 people die of sepsis in hospital settings in the US alone every year. Life expectancy in the US has flatlined over the last 20 years while healthcare spending per person has doubled. 30-40% of the food supply is wasted while 18% of households with children experience food insecurity. 19.5% of drinking water is lost in transit to consumers. A significant portion of the world’s energy supply is threatened by a fanatical regime because the strait of Hormuz is still contested. Putin’s death machine continues to slaughter Ukranians every single day as technological efficacy literally defines meter over meter of protected or conquered land. The CCP has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States and the implied ability to control the world’s commerce and security. $1.7 trillion of excess, unproductive working capital is locked up in the top 1000 companies in the US, capital that is not producing goods and services for every day Americans. Americans paid over $250 billion in credit card interest at over 20% APR last year and more than half of savers earn less than 3% interest on their savings. Real wages have stagnated, middle-wage workers real income is up only 6% since 1979 while low-wage workers are down 5%. We have a shortage of ~7 million homes in the US. 8.5 million acres burned in wildfires so far this year. As of year end 2025 2,060 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity were waiting for grid interconnects (double the capacity of the existing power fleet). I digress. We are making real progress against each of these miseries, and many more, because of the incredible progress in AI systems over the last several years. Perhaps ironically, success in all of these domains is a function of how precisely controlled the models are. For the cognitive labor humans know how to wield to achieve real world outcomes today, open source or off-frontier small models are already at parity for at least a plurality of use cases on a price/performance basis. Those customers reliably outperform the frontier when they incorporate their own proprietary data and decision traces. The most consistent pattern I see over and over again is real world use cases shrink their reliance on general purpose AI’s over time. They encode deterministic knowledge and/or post-trained models on smaller model footprints. It is empirically a wildly optimistic future with AI as an accelerant for the pluralistic, wonderfully diverse means of advancing the human condition against problems you can measure and make progress against today. We should also own that these horrible challenges persist because these systems are not yet good enough to fully solve them. They are worth improving. The bay area is abdicating responsibility for the world as it is today while claiming ownership of the world as it might be tomorrow. DC and our political leaders are polarizing into zero sum positions. These are the luxury beliefs of children. Build something people need today, at a price they are willing to pay when not pressured by the social herd, if you want the opportunity to do it again in the future.

6,000 years of human history in one chart?

Gave GPT6 Pro torn-apart images and asked to reconstruct - 30 minutes later it found all albums

Japanese humanoid robotics supply chain (Goldman)

Yann Kebbi

a 20yo stanford student turned SF into a playable open-world GTA using apple maps + codex. i've been playing @cdngdev's "San Francisco: the game" this weekend and am genuinely impressed climb buildings, steal cars, hang-glide across the SF skyline. players have logged 16k miles and 880+ hours within 24 hours of launch but what's most impressive is the shipping velocity: Thijs is pushing player-requested features (teleport-to-address, multiplayer, avatar picker) in near real time, straight off replies to his tweets - running it like a full live-service studio of one a cool glimpse into the future of AI-native game dev. 1 person iterating at the speed of a whole studio