Friday Fodder #30
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Agency appears to be the word of the week. New intelligence levels are unleashed and demonstrated every week now, so agency trumps intelligence. Plus, Jensen said 2025 is the year of the agent. Must be right.
Hot on the heels of Grok 3, Sonnet 3.7 was released and it is incredibly good. Reasoning when necessary, incredible output, large context windows, fantastic coding. And then OpenAI says GPT 4.5 is coming real soon!.. but only for some because there’s not enough GPUs. The model wars are clearly not over (expect DeepSeek R2 soon). NVDA 0.00%↑ had earnings right in the middle of all this and despite a top and bottom beat and a great forecast and everyone saying they desperately need more GPUs, it still dropped 10% because.. vibes. Womp womp.
Bybit was hacked and over $1.4B of ETH was stolen making it the biggest financial hack in history. The culprit? North Korea. BTC has driven down from near $100K to touch the $70s again in the last week and we’ve finally had a decent bull market correction.
Pope Francis battles health concerns in the hospital. We should all pray for him as he focuses on recovery. But not everyone thinks he will recover and they’re betting on it. Don’t worry, if there is a Conclave this year there will be betting on that too, and that’s nothing new apparently. In case you’re tracking the new betting platforms, sports betting is legal right now in 38 states, but there’s brewing questions from the CFTC on whether this will get federal regulation. Kalshi is regulated by the CFTC already and is fine in the US. But Polymarket is not ok.
What else? The house passed “one big, beautiful bill” — no, really they called it that themselves, so it’s clearly true. Diet Coke apparently is bad for you (burying this one down in a paragraph, hi to everyone I know). Tech Support — er, Elon I guess? — shows up at a cabinet meeting wearing a cheesy tshirt. Personalized mRNA treatments show tremendous opportunity in pancreatic cancer patients.
Did I mention Bitcoin under $80k?
On to the reading!
Timely
What happens when knowledge is commoditized? - The world is a very different place than it was 2 years ago and all those things you know that you painstakingly studied and learned and obsessed over.. a lot of them don’t matter as much. In this new world, Jack Raines asks one of the right questions.
Brain Drain - Erik Hoel explains the darker side of all these new powerful AI tools - the remarkable ability of skills to atrophy and the danger this presents especially to children who could struggle to develop the skills in the first place.
What I think DOGE is really up to - If you’re mad or sad or just plain baffled about what DOGE is doing and how they’re operating, join the very large club. Noah Smith tries to follow the behavior and draw a rational conclusion on the real goals.
Is This What America Voted For? - One of my favorite parts of The Free Press is the quality of the writers, many new to me. Ruy Teixeira is traditionally a very progressive writer, so this is a remarkably candid piece on the first month of Trump 2.0
Timeless
The Soul of Craftsmanship - A meditation on welding and programming and the common threads that make both craft.
The Most Precious Resource Is Agency - Do children today have useful childhoods? I’m not sure sometimes, but it’s a far cry from the studios described here. Certainly many children don’t feel like they can be useful until too close to adulthood and that’s a shame. Agency is something we should cultivate more.
How To Be More Agentic - A small and brilliant set of guidelines for getting things done. My possible favorite: “Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable.”
RNA neoantigen vaccines prime long-lived CD8+ T cells in pancreatic cancer - One of the dramatic possibilities of mRNA therapeutics (I hate calling them vaccines) was the potential to personalize them to specifically attack the cancer cells in a particular person. This is the first application to one of the more deadly cancers: pancreatic. The 3 year survival rate was 75% (vs. less than 20% for the control.)
Books
Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens - One of the most spectacular and unselfconscious memoirs ever written by a modern virtuoso. Every time I picked it up I felt like I was sneaking chocolate cake or binging some high-brow comedy. Hitchens is one of the masters of polemic in the English language and this example has a somewhat private feeling, as if he’s speaking right to you. I aspire to be contrarian at all times, so when someone so adept talks about one of my highest aims— well, it’s grand.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
🤣
The world is amazing. Cheers!