Friday Fodder #41
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Welcome back to our weekly opinionated review of Earth, where we don’t need simulations because reality is strange enough.
Let’s start with MAHA. RFK toasted DeLauro over food dyes in his Senate hearing. Then some protestors stood up and Ben from Ben and Jerry’s ice cream decided he wanted to get thrown out too, which he did. I’m trying to think of another processed food with more sugar than Ben and Jerry’s. We’ve got liquid sugar, brown sugar, regular sugar, canola oil and 1,130 calories per container. You know one container is the real serving size. And yes, we’ve gotten food dyes out, but NIH continues to cut all grants for everything. So even though Trump says lower prescription prices are on the way and we have incredible breakthroughs like custom gene-editing for single individuals now, don’t expect anymore new stuff. It’s too expensive.
The Burj Khalifa was American yesterday as Trump continued his whirlwind tour through all of the trillionaire states that have oil. There were some weird welcome ceremonies. And camels. And lots of gladhanding. And AI. And also speeches that, whether you agree or not, can at least be called historic. Peace through strength apparently now dishing the first olive branch and holding out hope. But! We’ve got a few hundred billion there and a few hundred billion there and foreign policy now just means making deals and getting gifts. NVidia gets new orders. Boeing gets new orders. Novelist and ex-FBI director James Comey doesn’t like all of this and makes an innocent message on the beach. Reactions ensue, so he deletes it. All very normal. But we’ve got a trade deal with China! Or a framework for a concept of one. They’re still trying to sabotage our energy.
Google announces a new coding agent called AlphaEvolve, which is not just able to write object code but can also design faster algorithms. In fact, it made new algorithms that beat the best matrix multiplication algorithms which are.. you know.. what LLMs do a lot of. Remember all those memes that say “Do not build recursively self-improving AI”? This sounds like a big step. And then, THE VERY SAME DAY Chief Doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky releases a book called “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” Dripping in irony. Very low key.
Tesla robots start dancing. There’s a new world record for solving the Rubik’s Cube. Leo XIV decided to take over @Pontifex and has a pretty baller coat of arms, Coinbase has a minor ransomware attack but gives an awesome response and sets a bounty instead of paying up, Saylor keeps buying Bitcoin, and o3 manages to write some python code on the fly to OCR my son’s very scribbled out history notes.
Now on to the reading!
Timely
AI Arrives In The Middle East - Fantastic breakdown of the new deals with Saudi and UAE and how they’re locked in with US infrastructure.
Everything Drugs - At this point everyone’s heard of GLP1s. But have you heard of SGLT2s? Get ready, they fix everything from the heart to the kidneys.
Harvard Is Turning Away Teenage Geniuses. Palantir Is Hiring. - Mike Solana is in the Thiel sphere, so he knows all about the now aged Thiel Fellowship. But this interview with Palantir Exec Marge York is striking because of what the 18 year olds say: “I love getting my hands dirty. I love being treated like an adult. I don’t think college is the only option anymore.” The time and talent of 18-24 year olds is currently a squandered resource.
Fiverr CEO Note on AI - Another memo shared via X. Micha Kaufman does not mince words: he thinks AI is coming for most white collar jobs. Reactions range from justification for future layoffs to total agreement, like this one from Steve Yegge: “I don't think most people understand how serious this is. And of the ones who do, I'm not sure they realize how imminent it is.”
AI Will Change What It Is To Be Human - I know I’ve been hitting a bunch of Tyler Cowen lately but he’s prolific and interesting lately. An excellent duet with an Anthropic employee into what we will retain as humans and what we won’t.
Timeless
Social Inflation - We’re built as a species to run on comparative treadmills. Our lives and experiences are no different, especially when they’re so easy to share. Munger is right, the world runs on envy.
Beat The Bot: The Four Quadrants of AI‑Enabled Work - A simple little framework for thinking about what to offload to your AI and what to keep in your own brain.
Could language models change language? - I’ve never heard of this guy Sean Trott, but I had asked for a DeepResearch report on how the rise of AI might force English to either stagnate or change rapidly. And o3 found me this guy who is thinking a lot about this idea too.
Books
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield - This is perhaps the most inspiring book I’ve read. Pressfield teaches you how to overcome Resistance — an idea that anyone who has tried to tackle a project bigger than a day or two will know immediately — so that you can get something meaningful done. Highly useful as I struggle to keep slogging through some of that right now.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
🤣
The world is amazing. Cheers!