Friday Fodder #42
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Another week and another crazy AI hype cycle is here. Google had their I/O conference and released all sorts of things. New models, video models, new search modes, and real-time translation. By far, the latest VEO 3 video model is getting the most play.. the characters feel so real they’re gonna make you feel bad about being made. Google has incredible models, but it’s 2025 and they’re still using Material 3 UI design. If they’re going to win, they need to start finding some product design polish.
And speaking of design, Altman pulls another overshadowing card and announces a huge purchase the next day. Jony Ive - the legendary designer behind the iPhone, the MacBook Pro, the iPad, and the Watch - is coming to ChatGPT. OpenAI is buying his company io and building AI products together. And they have a kinda cheesy, kinda beautiful reveal video. We’re clearly supposed to believe it’s the second coming of his work with Steve Jobs. In the video, Jony says Sam is humble and.. I remain skeptical. OpenAI released Codex too, and this is clearly a run at Cursor.. and, uh, people are blown away.
And THEN, Anthropic gets in on the game and decides to release Claude 4. It’s been less than 24 hours and I’ve had a wedding so I have no idea how big of a deal this is and I’m excited about everything except the apparent prompting guardrails.
Non-AI things happened too. A young man and woman, soon to be engaged, were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum in DC by a gunman chanting “Free Palestine”. He had just bought her a ring and was getting ready to propose.
The one issue Congress decided it can agree on unanimously - as in 100-0 nobody disagrees or votes “present” - is taxes on tips. That’s the real bipartisan issue. Let Congress cook. The Press Secretary gets the hardest questions yet at a press briefing (from the kids). And prayers and best wishes for former President Biden, who has very sudden and very serious cancer. Most reasonable people agree that it’s possible to wish him and his family the best while also being very curious about how quickly prostate cancer can spread and why he didn’t have PSA screenings during his physicals. Also Jake Tapper wrote a book. Jon Stewart loves it.
Pope Leo XIV has his inaugural Mass and is greeted by a huge number of world leaders, including JD Vance and Marco Rubio. Orthodox Ecumenism has a chance. Talks with Iran happen in Rome. The Big Beautiful Bill gets through the House and there is a lot of debate about its bigness and its beautifulness, hinting that it’s neither. Trump talked to Putin. Elon does some interviews, backs away from politics, and hypes Optimus. Bitcoin re-enters price discovery and people are convinced we’re still going way up. And a big ship hit the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now on to the reading!
Timely
Economic Lessons from the Screwtape Letters - In what is now my favorite Kyla Scanlon writing, she uses the tactics of demons from C.S. Lewis’ famous book to think about the economic realities of 2025.
The Bezos Cannes-tastrophe - A scathing look at superwealthy virtue signaling and the superyachts that harbor them.
How To Live On $432 a Month In America - Everything is so expensive. Gen Z can’t buy houses because
they’re going to 8 destination bachelor parties a year and buying Coach and Vineyard Vineseverything is too expensive and it’s really hard. A reminder that yes, some things are expensive but how we live and how much we spend is still a series of choices, somewhat based on relative status.Scientific ‘peer review’ is a scam - Matt Ridley talks about the anonymous gate-keepers that review, approve, and reject journal articles to maintain respectability by rejecting heretics and debate.
Timeless
The Pings We Carry - A deep introspection at our dopamine culture told through a series of koans. Lovely.
Superintelligence Strategy: Expert Version - Eric Schmidt teamed up with Alex Wang of Scale and Dan Hendrycks of AI Safety to get in on the AI paper game. An extension of the ideas in Schmidt’s earlier AI book with Henry Kissinger, this is an updated dive into the national security implications of AI.
Shit’s Gonna Get So Fucking Weird and Terrible - I’m not sure what to say about this exactly. It’s part art piece, part commentary, and part prediction. It feels strange and terrible and truthy. Totally worth a read.
Books
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley - I brought this book on my honeymoon because I was 50 pages in and had to keep reading. It’s an easy read and an optimistic look at the whole of human history through an economic lens. Ridley succeeds in leading us through it all to where we are now with one emotion in mind: hope.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!