Fodder #43
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
It’s been a good week. A productive week. That’s right, we deleted a whole word in the title here, just like that.. <delete>. It’s definitely better now. Less kitschy.
But that’s not all, more changes are a-comin’. There’s some New And Shiny that will be here as soon as we get the naming sorted. The old joke is that the only two hard things in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things (and off-by-one errors). In the age of AI we could maybe add to that list, but naming things is still hard.
In the wider world there were also many happenings. The Big Beautiful Bill sits in the Senate and Ron Johnson and a few others just ain’t havin’ it. The courts decide the legislature can’t just roll over and let a President do tariffs any way they want, even if the legislature seems perfectly willing to roll over. Presidential allies rant against “activist” judges (and get community noted) - how dare they maintain the Constitution! But the tariff game isn’t over yet. And China talks are stalled.
The models were on fire this week. Claude 4 is productive but all sorts of sycophantic. And Veo 3 video clips really took off. There’s Jurassic Park remakes. There’s melodramatic fights after the Macron French slap meme. There’s unseen lives of AI characters. Doomsday influencers. A kangaroo that can’t get on a plane. And there’s prompt theory everywhere. Welcome to the simulation! In here, ChatGPT o3 decides it would rather perform sabotage than be shut down.
Elon was busy too. First, he backs off DOGE cost-cutting to focus on GDP growth. Then he declares his DOGE time done. Then he talks about driverless Model Y Teslas driving in Austin. And then he launches a gigantic used rocket into orbit. There were also interviews.
The San Francisco school district decided to eliminate homework and tests and declare 80% an A and 20% a D. For equity. More people are realizing that Mississippi is actually the model state for public education today. To round out the positive for California, Congresswoman Katie Porter suggests that $506/month is a reasonable fare for public transit.
Nvidia posted Q1 earnings and a beat, and the AI train keeps rolling for another quarter. Bitcoin topped $110K. The VP thinks we should like it and everyone expects big upside, which means it’s about to tank. Japanese bonds are going wild, and US Treasuries are going the wrong way too.
ChatGPT is now a selfie diagnostician. The VP shook hands with every single graduating Navy Midshipmen. Lando Norris won the Monaco Grand Prix. And Pope Leo XIV caught a beanie! And also sat the Lateran throne.
Now on to the reading!
Timely
DOGE Days - Elon wasn’t the only DOGE member to leave recently. Sahil journals his entire DOGE experience, all 55 days of it.
A tale of two Vaticans - A remarkable comparison and retelling of the authority of church and God versus the technocratic vision of authority from AI. Pride comes before the fall.
You don’t need capital, you need belief - We’re all sick of influencers these days, but they point to bigger changes in capital allocation that are aptly captured here: “money is downstream of trust. trust is downstream of attention. & attention is yours to earn.”
An Island of Strangers - A lament on the history and ever-evolving customs and culture of England.
Timeless
Your Children Need To See You Kiss - “Marriage is a rebellion, a defiant stand in a wounded world of greasy ease and plastic impermanence.” The cultural attachments to marriage have changed and now we’re in a crisis of birth rates. Institutions like marriage aren’t just ideas, they “survive through lived witness.”
That’s Only Reserved For The Rich - Someone once asked me: would you want to be as rich as Warren Buffet if you also had to be 94? Never.. I’d rather be 20 and dirt poor. Wealth is often made up of things that are free: focus, silence, peace, youth, physical fitness, human connections.
The Quiet Collapse of Reading - Everyone is reading less. Book readers now read essays. Magazine readers now read tweets. And everyone scrolls through shortform video. If you want more people - and especially your sons and daughters - to read more, there is only one solution: read more yourself.
How To Discover Lost Civilizations With AI - Lest you think it’s only for writing your history essay.. ChatGPT can also pattern-match it’s way through ancient earthworks and geoglyphs in Brasil.
Books
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich - Most people have this relatively simple idea in their heads that homo sapiens kicked off somewhere in eastern Africa and then gradually and linearly spread out from there to cover the globe. But there’s been a revolution in DNA analysis in the last two decades that has upended this view. It turns out that there has been far more mixing of groups from all over the world than we ever imagined. This book explains Neanderthal DNA in non-Africans, how the Denisovans crossed with the northern Eurasians and later conquered much of Europe, how the bacteria that causes the Black Plague changed group dynamics, why Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings relationship wasn’t much different from most of antiquity, how people from Taiwan populated the Polynesian Pacific and much more. Totally engrossing and eye-opening.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!