The Helix Nebula is one of the most well-known and commonly photographed planetary nebulae because it resembles the "Eye of Sauron." It is also one of the closest bright nebulae to Earth, located approximately 655 light-years from our Solar System.
You may not know what this particular nebula looks like when reading its name, but the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some iconic images of it over the years. And almost certainly, you'll recognize a photograph of the Helix Nebula, shown below.
Like many objects in astronomy, planetary nebulae have a confusing name, since they are formed not by planets but by stars like our own Sun, though a little larger. Near the end of their lives, these stars shed large amounts of gas in an expanding shell that, however briefly in cosmological time, put on a grand show.
6. “In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive.” (NYT, why?)
On January 5th, famed AI researcher Jerry Tworek stunned world+dog by announcing his departure from OpenAI. A few days later, he hopped over to the Core Memory podcast studio for his not-so-formal exit interview.
Tworek joined OpenAI in 2019 when the research lab was a research lab and had about thirty employees. He went on to work on many of OpenAI’s most consequential products, including the company’s reasoning technology, which ushered in a new era for the entire AI field. (Yes, Tworek worked on Q* before it was Strawberry before it was o1.)
Both Kylie and I have been longtime Tworek fans. He’s smart, funny and never really sought the limelight despite his massive contributions.
In the episode, Tworek reveals that he found it hard to keep doing high-risk, pioneering work at OpenAI as the company shifted toward what Tworek describes as more conservative ways. He, in fact, thinks the large AI companies have become conservative as a whole and that there might be bigger, better ideas to be found elsewhere.
I hope that Trump’s threat to impose escalating tariffs on European countries if they don’t hand over Greenland will finally bury “TACO Trump” wishful thinking. For TACO Trump was always based on a belief that, on some level, Trump is rational: that when the disastrous consequences of his actions hit, he backs down.
But it’s now undeniable that Trump is completely irrational. No, his obsessive thirst for Greenland isn’t about national security. Under the NATO alliance, the U.S. already had liberty to do what it wanted strategically. And as withVenezuela, any mineral deposits that Greenland possesses may be too expensive to extract to be investible.
Trump himself has told us what’s going on: he’s throwing a temper tantrum over not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize — not how he put it, but that was the gist of his text to Norway’s prime minister. And there’s no reason to disbelieve him, even though Scott Bessent says that quoting Trump’s own words is a “complete canard.”
True, beating the drum about Greenland serves multiple other purposes: deflecting attention from Renee Good’s murder, the Epstein files, and his sagging poll ratings; humiliating the Europeans, who he hates for their decency and strong democracies; and getting another testosterone rush from flexing American military muscle. But it’s mostly just a tantrum.
However, we can say something about the likely effects of his attempt to coerce Europe with tariffs — namely, that it won’t work. Only in Trump’s fantasies does American possess huge economic leverage over Europe. To the extent that we have any leverage over them, it’s matched by the leverage they have over us.
Allow me to explain. The starting point for any discussion of Trump’s tariff threats should be the observation that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers and businesses, not foreigners.
That’s what economists believed before Trump started his tariff spree; the results of his tariffs show that they were right. Foreign producers have not, contrary to Trump’s predictions, absorbed the tariffs by significantly cutting the prices they were charging U.S. customers.
This is clear when one looks at data on average import prices. For example, in 2025 the average tariff on goods imported from China went from 11 percent to 37 percent, but the average price the U.S. was paying for those goods fell only slightly, less than 3 percent.
And a new study from the Kiel Institute for World Economics offers a more precise estimate based on detailed trade data: in 2025, foreigners absorbed only 4 percent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs. This means that Americans are paying 96 percent of the cost of the tariffs.
So Trump’s imposition of tariffs on European nations that have sent troops to Greenland is basically a declaration that he will punish American consumers and businesses until Europe gives him what he wants.
But won’t Europe be hurt by loss of U.S. export markets? Maybe, but not by much. The European economy is huge — almost as big, in dollar terms, as the U.S. economy — and doesn’t depend crucially on the U.S. market. It’s worth noting that very high US tariffs on China haven’t appeared to slow China’s economic growth at all.
Furthermore, if America and Europe get into a trade war, U.S. companies will be hit as hard as European companies. That’s because America sells almost as much to Europe as Europe sells to America:
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis
More precisely, U.S. producers sell about 8 dollars’ worth of goods and services to Europe for every 9 dollars’ worth of European sales to America. And even that small asymmetry is largely a statistical illusion caused by leprechaun economics: Irish subsidiaries of U.S. companies, especially pharmaceutical producers, charge their parent companies inflated prices so as to shift reported profits to Ireland, which has a lower corporate tax rate.
Now, you may be tempted to dismiss concerns about European retaliation, claiming that European leaders are weak and timid. That’s surely what Trump thinks, and it has been true in the past. But is it still true? The reason Trump is imposing tariffs on eight European countries is that they dared to send troops to Greenland to forestall a possible U.S. invasion — a pretty gutsy move.
Or look at the way Europe has completely replaced the United States in supporting Ukraine:
Beyond the fact that Europe is toughening up militarily, it has the capacity to be tough, acting in unity, in international trade. Individual European countries don’t choose their own tariff rates: The European Commission sets tariffs for the EU as a whole.
Furthermore, the EU has a procedure — the Anti-Coercion Instrument — designed to allow the rapid imposition of serious sanctions against any nation that tries to use economic pressure “to pressure the European Union or an EU Member State into making a particular choice.” This instrument, nicknamed the trade bazooka, was designed with China in mind, but it obviously applies to the United States right now, as Trump tries to use tariffs to force European nations to acquiesce in his Greenland land grab.
In fact, the legal basis for stiff European retaliation against the U.S. looks infinitely stronger than the legal basis for Trump’s tariffs. But the Supreme Court keeps emboldening Trump by repeatedly delaying a ruling on the legality of hisinvocation of emergency powers to impose most of his tariffs. At this point the Court’s cowardice is unmistakable; the justices’ robes must be drenched in flop sweat.
It’s possible, of course, that Europe will fail to use the power it has. TACO Trump is wishful thinking, but Europe has often chickened out in the past. The predicament Europeans find themselves in now is the result of their previous lack of resolve. And the next time around will only be worse.
So hopefully Europe has learned its lesson with Trump. Because if it has, Trump’s bullying won’t go the way he expects.
Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT.
Simon P. Couch notes that coding agents such as Claude Code use way more tokens in response to tasks, often burning through many thousands of tokens of many tool calls.
As a heavy Claude Code user, Simon estimates his own usage at the equivalent of 4,400 "typical queries" to an LLM, for an equivalent of around $15-$20 in daily API token spend. He figures that to be about the same as running a dishwasher once or the daily energy used by a domestic refrigerator.
Detailed and thoughtful description of an open-book and open-chatbot exam run by Ploum at École Polytechnique de Louvain for an "Open Source Strategies" class.
Students were told they could use chatbots during the exam but they had to announce their intention to do so in advance, share their prompts and take full accountability for any mistakes they made.
Only 3 out of 60 students chose to use chatbots. Ploum surveyed half of the class to help understand their motivations.
From May 2025: a blog post from TeleGeography looking back at their annual maps of submarine cables, which they’ve been putting out since at least 2013, and with a different design each year (here’s my… More
Gladys West has died at the age of 95. An African-American mathematician who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia, West “devoted herself to solving one of science’s most complex challenges: accurately modeling the shape of… More
I went to the author’s site and I saw that he makes all of his books
(Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and more) available for free at
https://inventwithpython.com/. I’d heard of his books many times before but I
didn’t realize that he made them available on his site like that!
I’m Al Sweigart, and I write books to teach beginners to code. I put them
online for free because programming is too valuable and needs to be accessible
to all.
I always think it’s so cool when authors do that, another example is Mark Dominus’s Higher Order Perl
I asked for advice about upgrading Django on Mastodon yesterday
and people shared a couple of links I want to remember for the next time I want
to upgrade. (a big part of the reason I started this TIL blog is that I have no system for saving bookmarks other than to publish them to this blog :))
The US armed services have an unusual labor market. Most soldiers, sailers, airmen and now space forcers join the military pretty much right out of high school, either directly, or in college ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps), or in one of the military academies. Two exceptions are lawyers and doctors, who can join as officers without prior military experience (i.e. they can become officers without ever having learned how to salute).
Now that computer science of various sorts is entering warfare, cyber warriors are also needed. But there's only so much you can do with contractors and consultants.
This month, the Army is introducing a new career path for officers:
"The U.S. Army has established a new career pathway for officers to
specialize in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML),
formally designating the 49B AI/ML Officer as an official area of
concentration. It advances the Army's ongoing transformation into a
data-centric and AI-enabled force.
Full implementation of the new career field will be phased. The first selection of officers will occur through the Army's Volunteer Transfer Incentive Program (VTIP) beginning January 2026. The officers will be reclassified by the end of fiscal year 2026."
#########
And here's another report that indicates that some CS experts have also been laterally recruited into the officer corps.
"In June, the Army directly commissioned several tech executives with artificial intelligence backgrounds from companies such as Meta and Palantir as lieutenant colonels as part of its Executive Innovation Corps (EIC). Those executives serve in the reserves as “senior advisors,” the Army said.
Trump’s “Board of Peace” and the Human Cost of Running Nations
Even as we struggle to fully understand Donald Trump’s rapacious need to “run” Venezuela and to threaten control of Greenland, Cuba and Colombia, we have the murky stew that is Gaza still before us.
Trump has taken many bows for bringing “the dawn of long-term peace” to the Middle East, as he insists on retelling us at every opportunity. He was named the head of the “Board of Peace” to make conflict disappear, to disarm Hamas, to bring about restoration of a life for Gazans and security for Israel.
Trump is in charge — by his own hand and by invitation of Gulf nations and Israel. So, how’s it going? If Venezuela and the other international conflicts for which Trump credits himself are to be a success, wouldn’t we see it in Gaza first? Might we get an idea of what it means for Trump to “run,” “own,” or otherwise take responsibility for whole countries by seeing things work in Gaza?
Three months or more after announcing lasting peace, we still have chaos in Gaza. Hamas fighters still have weapons and are said to be re-arming, and it has refused to return the body of a remaining dead hostage. Israel has bisected Gaza into an occupied zone, with hundreds of trucks a day bringing in food and medicine. And prospects of normality amid devastation are iffy at best. Gazan civilians remain cold, hungry and under siege from both sides.
Despite “ceasefire,” hundreds of Hamas fighters have been killed in the last two months, Israeli bombs nearly daily, and the Israeli government is extending provocative settlement land grabs in the West Bank, threatening Iran, and skirmishing in Syria and Lebanon. No other nation wants to send ground troops to disarm Hamas, and inside the Israeli government, the right-wingers are calling for renewed war.
Despite a Trump administration eagerness for progress on postwar plans, there is little to show.
The Board of Peace Appointments
This week’s news was that Trump named his supervising Board of Peace, a group meant to choose a “technocratic” Palestinian government with no one from Hamas, and its main supporting committees. The names included mostly Americans, including Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump pal Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Mario Rubio, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, representatives from Qatar and Egypt, and possibly Canadian and Argentine leaders.
Stretching credulity, the Kremlin reported that Vladimir Putin had been offered an invitation to join this Board of Peace, CNC said. In fact, Trump is offering to invite other countries to a permanent seat – if they pay a billion dollars in cash in the first year, according to a draft of the board’s charter reviewed by The New York Times.
Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian former envoy to the Middle East, was chosen as a kind of director-general, a link between the Board of Peace and a National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, which does include Palestinians. Mladenov will support the board’s oversight of all aspects of Gaza’s governance, reconstruction, and development, said The Jerusalem Post.
It is unclear who exactly will address health, social services, education, housing, agriculture and food– foundational building blocks or how an interim government would work.
There was one Israeli businessman included on one committee, but no Board of Peace seat for Israel or Gaza, and there is no one from the Palestinian Authority – a strange way to set up for a post-Hamas era with “lasting peace.”.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was angry enough to make public his displeasure with the omission and with the inclusion of Erdogan, not a supporter of Israel, or even a consultation with him. Netanyahu is dealing with ministers in his own government who want to denude Gaza of Palestinians and start Jewish settlements there.
Axios reported that Trump’s advisers have little patience for Netanyahu’s objections, quoting a senior White House official as saying, “This is our show, not his show. We managed to do things in Gaza in recent months nobody thought was possible, and we are going to continue moving.”
Appointment of the board was the official start of “Phase 2,” despite fact that Phase 1 never was completed. No country wants its ground troops used to force promised disarmament of Hamas.
What’s the Real Goal?
Without progress by this Board of Peace, the Middle East wars will resume, of course.
The Board of Peace activity is being dictated by the Trump White House, which clearly cares more about creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza than a safe nation for Palestinians, whom Trump has invited to leave, and Israel’s security.
More broadly, when Trump talks about Venezuela, he talks about its oil resources as if that is the country. He does not address street violence or food and medicine shortages or the inability to make a living. Indeed, Trump continues to deport Venezuelans from America, the very Venezuelans he insists are criminals, mental patients and drug-smugglers.
Maybe we all could agree that this Trump view of countries without concern about their people is at least strange, if not dangerous.
Meanwhile, has Trump and his newfound friends in what remains of the Nicolás Maduro regime moved against drug cartels or stopped the smuggling that Trump had insisted was rampant and state-sponsored? Has the White House “running” of Venezuela included any moves against outlaw gangs and paramilitary roaming bands? For that matter, has any of the sale of seized oil from tankers leaving Venezuela helped buy food or medicines?
What Gaza tells us is that Trump’s measure of success being set for “peace” has little to do with the fate of the people who live there or even those living directly across an arbitrary and moving border. What Gaza does tell us is that “running” a country for Trump means keeping power for its own sake, but not towards achieving a goal that satisfies Palestinians, Israelis, or anyone but business developers.
Trump’s measure of success is about cash and business – again – and not democracy, security or the ability of the affected people to thrive.
World leaders are gathered at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which is taking place from January 19 to January 23. Trump is scheduled to go to the meeting in person for the first time since 2020, although now, with him still in the U.S., his social media account has been posting wildly.
Just after midnight, the account posted that Trump had “a very good telephone call with Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, concerning Greenland. I agreed to a meeting of the various parties in Davos, Switzerland. As I expressed to everyone, very plainly, Greenland is imperative for National and World Security. There can be no going back—On that, everyone agrees!” Shortly after, the account posted an AI image of world leaders sitting in front of Trump’s desk in the Oval Office with a large picture of North America entirely covered with stars and stripes to indicate American ownership—including Canada, as well as Greenland. The flag also covers Venezuela.
Then the account posted an image of Trump with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio next to him as he stands on what looks to be an arctic landscape, holding a U.S. flag waving above a sign that reads: “GREENLAND—US TERRITORY EST. 2026.”
Later on, it would post private text messages to Trump from Rutte and French president Emmanuel Macron, mocking their attempts at diplomacy, and repost a message reading: “at what point are we going to realize the enemy is within [angry emoji]. China and Russia are the bogeymen when the real threat is the U.N., NATO, and [Islam].”
And then the account posted: “No single person, or President, has done more for NATO than President Donald J. Trump. If I didn’t come along there would be no NATO right now!!! It would have been in the ash heap of History. Sad, but TRUE!!! President DJT”
But seizing Greenland was not the only thing on the mind of administration officials. The account’s posts suggest they are worried about Trump’s declining popularity. It launched an attack on Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, whom the administration is targeting for alleged mortgage fraud, just before it claimed that Trump was lowering mortgage rates. Later, the account would post a short video of Trump under which the chyron read: “I AM STANDING UP FOR AMERICAN AUTOWORKERS,” although the video was of him promising to stop all federal payments to “sanctuary cities” on February 1.
Then it bopped over to claiming that the people resisting ICE violence in Minnesota are “agitators and insurrectionists. These people are professionals! No person acts the way they act. They are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave, like lunatics, in a certain manner, just like they are doing. They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country.” The first to go, he said, should be Democratic governor Tim Walz and Democratic representative Ilhan Omar, both of whom he called corrupt. Later, the account insisted that Democratic governor of California Gavin Newsom is also corrupt.
Later, the account posted that “[t]he Department of Homeland Security and ICE must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing and taking out of the system. They are saving many innocent lives! There are thousands of vicious animals in Minnesota alone, which is why the crime stats are, Nationwide, the BEST EVER RECORDED! Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW. The people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE, instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”
Then the account turned to reposting long-debunked lies about the 2020 presidential election. It reposted claims that there was voter fraud in Nevada (there wasn’t), that Dominion Voting Machines flipped 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden (they didn’t), that China had rigged the voting for Biden (it didn’t). It appears someone is thinking about the fact that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will be testifying in public on Thursday, January 22.
In Washington today, in a long, rambling speech before reporters, Trump appeared to try to bring his social media post directly to the media. The speech was supposedly to outline the accomplishments of his administration, and he brandished a large sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip, labeled “ACCOMPLISHMENTS,” both of which he later threw on the floor.
But Trump turned from it almost immediately to insist that agents from Immigration and Customs enforcement are not arresting and detaining American citizens, although they very publicly did so on Sunday, breaking into the home of U.S. citizen ChongLy “Scott” Thao without a warrant, holding him at gunpoint, marching him outside in subfreezing weather in just sandals and underwear, driving him around for an hour or two before dropping him back at his home, and then lying that members of his family are on the registered sex offender list.
Trump denied such abuses, claiming that in Minnesota, ICE is apprehending “bad people.” To illustrate his claims, he held up one photo after another of individuals above the label “WORST OF WORST” as he mumbled about how bad they were: “many murderers, many many murderers, people that murdered.” Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who has watched and clipped Trump’s speeches for years, commented: “folks, this is some really weird sh*t. the president is not well.”
From there, Trump was off with the usual litany of complaints about former president Joe Biden, and familiar stories like this one:
“I should’ve gotten the Nobel Prize for each war, but I don’t say that. I saved millions and millions of people. And don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, ok? It’s in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They’ll say, ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige. Got all—that’s why I have such respect for Maria doing what she did. She said, ‘I don’t deserve the Nobel Prize, he does.’ When she got it, they named—they said, ‘Wow that’s amazing, I thought President Trump would get it.’”
Trump also had words about Jack Smith: “Deranged Jack sick Smith. He’s a sick son of a b*tch. They gave me the worst of the worst.”
Trump’s threats against Greenland and his promise to hit Europe with high tariffs if governments there don’t support his seizure of Greenland drove the U.S. stock market sharply downward today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 870.74 points (1.76%), the S&P 500 was down 2.06%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.39%, the worst day for all three of these major indexes since October.
Yesterday Tom Fairless of the Wall Street Journal reported that, contrary to Trump’s repeated assertions, U.S. consumers and importers—not foreign countries—are the ones who have paid for Trump’s tariff war. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, echoed the findings of Yale and Harvard Business School economists, confirming that American consumers and importers have absorbed 96% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs.
Trump’s threats against Europe are an entirely different kettle of fish, for as Konrad Putzier, Chao Deng, and Sam Goldfarb of the Wall Street Journal explain, the European Union is the biggest trading partner of the U.S., its largest investor, and its closest financial ally. European leaders are discussing whether to retaliate against the U.S. using the EU’S Anti-Coercion Instrument, nicknamed “the Bazooka,” which can restrict imports and exports to any country trying to coerce an EU member and can limit U.S. investment there.
In The Atlantic on January 18, Robert Kagan wrote that “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II” and warned they “are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength” and “have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way.”
European and Asian allies have cooperated with the U.S. on both defense and trade, while the power of those alliances has prevented serious challenges to that order. Global trade has generally been free, and oceans have been safe for travel both by humans and container ships. Nuclear weapons have been limited by international agreement. “Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely,” Kagan wrote. “They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”
In Davos today, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, told the world, “We are in the midst of a rupture.” The rules-based international order is no longer an automatic route to prosperity and security, he said, as the world’s most powerful nations now use that system’s economic integration to coerce other countries.
In its place, Carney offered a different vision than the “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence that Trump and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin are trying to build.
If “middle powers” pursue a system he called “variable geometry,” he said, they can rebalance the world and help solve global problems while still building strength at home. His vision is a version of the “diplomatic variable geometry” of former U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken, but Carney’s vision decenters the U.S., noting that middle powers must work together to be at the table to avoid being on the menu. Under a system of variable geometry, countries can develop infrastructure and trade at home, strengthening their own nations, while negotiating new international agreements, as Canada has done recently with China, Qatar, India, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc made up of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
But for international affairs, variable geometry means creating international “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests,” “coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.”
“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”
We measure how frontier research frames what is normatively at stake along the efficiency and equity dimension. We develop and validate an LLM-based measurement pipeline and apply it to 27,464 full-text journal articles from 1950 to 2021. Efficiency focused framing rises through the late 1980s, then declines as equity related framing expands after 1990, especially in applied work and policy evaluations. By 2021, papers with an equity component are about as common as papers framed purely around efficiency. President transmittal letters in the Economic Report of the President show a similar post 1990 shift toward equity, providing an external benchmark.
Here is the new NBER working paper by Sebastian Galiani, Ramiro H. Gálvez, Franco Mettola La Giglia & Raul A. Sosa. I take this to be a sign of radical decline in the quality of our profession. I am all for welfare economics considering values other than efficiency. How about liberty, opportunity, and merit? Actual people, especially Americans, care about those too. The longstanding focus on equity as the relevant alternative to efficiency is one of the most blatant politicizations of economic research you will find. Most people doing it are not even aware of that, they simply take for granted that is the relevant trade-off.
Kent works with a small number of partners each quarter. Interested? Let’s talk →
We’re in the “horseless carriage” stage of coding genies. We absorb every technological innovation by first understanding it in our current frame before we begin to appreciate the fundamental changes it enables.
Horseless carriage → automobile
Wireless telegraph → radio
Electronic mail → messaging
You can’t rush this transition. You have to live with the new technology long enough to grok the second-order implications of it, the reinforcing & inhibiting loops it creates. Then you can shift into second gear (to use a nearly-obsolete metaphor) & find out what the new technology is really capable of.
Okay, so what can you do while you wait? Use the technology. Lots. And so I’ve been augmented coding. Lots.
My first goal is to get the genie to code like me, but better (this may be the wrong goal, but I certainly don’t want it coding worse than me). Along the way someone suggested adding “…like Kent Beck would” to their programming prompt, reporting that the genie’s behavior improved afterwards.
Does it? I wanted to see if I could demonstrate this effect. Fortunately I have a near-zero-cost way to perform experiments: the genie!
(I’ll reveal my secret second goal of this experiment at the end of this post.)
The Experiment: Rope
I wanted a sample project that was big enough to require interesting coding & design decisions, but small & contained enough to be validated by straightforward tests.
I chose the Rope data structure. Say you have a very long string & you’d like to delete a character in the middle of it.
The simplest way is to shift all the (many) characters to the right over by one. This operation is O(n) where n is the length of the string. But what if we want this operation to be constant time?
What if we had an object representing a substring of the big string & another object representing the concatenation of two of our new flavor of string? Deleting a character, then, results in this:
Constant time! For each delete we allocate 3 objects. (Navigating this structure is O(the number of operations) but that’s presumably a smaller number than the unbounded size of the string & we can compress the operations periodically.)
This is the data structure I want the genie to build on my behalf.
Evolution of the Project
Phase 1: The Persona (”Code like Kent Beck”)
I started with a simple hypothesis: asking the model to “Code like Kent Beck” would produce better code or to put it in more formal science-y language the null hypothesis is that appending “code like Kent Beck” won’t make a difference.
The Result: It did, but not in the way I expected. The code style improved—variable names got better, and most importantly, the testing strategy shifted from monolithic scripts to modular, isolated unit tests (TDD style).
The Surprise: The architecture didn’t change. It implemented the Rope as a standard binary tree, ignoring the Composite pattern that I (the real Kent Beck) use.
Phase 2: Design Guidance
We hit some bumps. First, the “Control” group code was getting truncated because it was too verbose, leading to syntax errors. We fixed this by increasing the token limit—a small reminder that “more compute” (or at least more buffer) is often a simple fix. Then, to fix the design, I refined the prompt. I couldn’t just say “be me”; I had to tell it what I would do. I added explicit constraints: “Use the Composite pattern. Break behavior into small, specialized classes.”
I got the design I expected—separate classes for Substring & Concatenation, each simpler than the single class that unguided development produced. Actually I got a simpler design. When I code this one finger at a time I usually end up with a Null Object—EmptyString—and a simple wrapper around the native string. The genie figured out that could just use Substring from 0..size. Nice catch!
Phase 3: The Isolation (4-Group Experiment)
But which of the interventions made the difference? “Act like me” or “compose small classes”? We need to try the cross product:
Control: Standard assistant.
Kent Beck: Persona only.
Composite: Architectural constraints only.
Combined: Persona + Constraints.
Conclusions
The results were stark and educational. We found a clear 2x2 matrix of effects:
Personas Drive Micro-Behavior: The “Kent Beck” prompt reliably improved testing style and naming. It made the code “feel” better but didn’t change the fundamental structural decisions.
Constraints Drive Macro-Architecture: The “Composite Pattern” prompt reliably forced the class hierarchy. It produced a finer-grained design even without the persona.
The Combination Wins: The “Combined” group gave us the best of both worlds—the right architecture (Composite) with the right development habits (TDD/Unit Tests).
The Bitter Lesson Applied
I said I’d tell you my secret agenda before I was done here. I want the genie to do a better job of development, to balance features & futures. I’ve tried to get this effect through meticulous prompting, through paying excruciating attention to the changes the genie proposes, through smaller steps, larger steps, everything I could think of.
Turns out I’m not the first person to go down this path. Rich Sutton in The Bitter Lesson described how 70 years of work on AI demonstrates that leveraging computing gives better results than encoding human expertise. I’ve been trying to encode my style. I suppose I should be glad I’ve finally gotten around to making the same mistake everyone makes.
Are we doomed to clumsy coding genies that copy the same shitty code style they’ve seen in countless repos? I think not. Here’s a way to leverage computation to get a more-effective development style:
Take a large repos.
Have a million genies implement the next feature, but each genie choosing how & how much to tidy first.
Select the genies which succeed at adding the next feature at the lowest cost (time, tokens, electricity, money, whatever).
Do it again for lots of genies & lots of features in lots of repos.
We are “wasting” all that coding but not really.
calls this a Design Contest.
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Wildland fires broke out amid hot and dry conditions in south-central Chile in mid-January 2026, prompting evacuations and causing extensive damage to infrastructure. As of January 20, the spate of deadly fires had burned more than 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) in the country’s Biobío and Ñuble regions, according to Chile’s National Forestry Corporation.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of smoke billowing from multiple fires on January 18. Dozens of active fires in the area prompted the evacuation of 50,000 people and destroyed more than 300 homes, according to a January 19 report from Chile’s U.N. Resident Coordinator’s Office. Aerial and ground-based photographs showed neighborhoods in Concepción charred in the aftermath.
Gusty winds, along with temperatures that exceeded 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) in places, fanned the flames and hampered firefighting efforts, according to news reports. Chile’s president declared a state of catastrophe in the Biobío and Ñuble regions, allowing more resources to go toward battling the blazes and assisting affected communities.
Other parts of South America also faced hot and dry conditions during the 2025–2026 summer, likely priming vegetation to burn. About 650 kilometers (400 miles) south of Concepción, firefighters in Argentina battled wildfires in and around Los Alerces National Park, home to rare stands of long-lived cypress trees.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Michael: What was [Allan] Bloom like when you first met him?
Seth: He was supersensitive to people’s defects. He had antennae out, he knew exactly…
Robert: People’s weak spots?
Seth: Oh yes, it was extraordinary.
Ronna: You continued talking to Bloom often over the years, didn’t you?
Seth: Pretty often. But he was often was distracted. He got impatient if you could not say what you wanted to say in more than half a sentence.
Robert: The pressure of the sound bite.
Seth: I remember the last time he came. He was about to write the book and he asked me what I thought the Phaedrus was about. I summed it up in a sentence, and it didn’t make any impressions.
Ronna: Do you remember what the sentence was?
Seth: Something about the second speech turning into the third speech, and how this was connected to the double character of the human being. I managed to get it into one sentence, but it wasn’t something he wanted to hear.
A fun book. For all the criticisms you hear of Straussians, the few I have known I find are quite willing to speak their actual views and state of mind very clearly and directly.
As is so commonplace in the land of Trump, the United States, Greenland and really the world are on tenterhooks over an issue that is simultaneously grave and absurd. How far will President Trump go to acquire Greenland and how much is he willing to risk to do it? More specifically, if he is “risking” the future of NATO is that not so much a risk as a goal? When someone asked me recently just what Trump’s beef is with NATO and Europe and the EU more generally, I told them this: Trump sees two classes of states beside what he recognizes as the three global powers: states are either vassals or prey. Since European states aren’t vassals they are inevitably prey. But here’s an issue that I think is more destabilizing than it may appear on the surface.
I keep hearing that Trump might “invade” or “seize” Greenland. In reality I think it’s much easier than that. And a key part of the equation involves very little risk. The U.S. doesn’t need to invade Greenland. It’s civilian population is just over 50,000 people, around 20,000 of whom live in Nuuk, the territory’s capital. It has no military at all. So the U.S. could like send in maybe a hundred troops and simply declare that Greenland is now under U.S. sovereignty. They don’t really have to “do” anything. The US is the globe’s greatest military power. Greenland is in our part of the world. No one else has any significant military assets anywhere close by. European powers have sent over what I think is a few dozen troops as a sort of symbolic show of support. But they’re not going to be fighting even a token military force. The point is that the U.S. seizure of Greenland can be largely rhetorical. And then it’s kind of done if Trump says it is done. The most the U.S. would likely have to do would be to take control of the main airport in Nuuk.
From there Donald Trump would paradoxically have a vastly stronger hand, since he would likely start handing out mineral concessions to his pals to create a class of entrenched interest in U.S. rule. Is Denmark going to take it back? Would the U.S. military let Danish planes land in Nuuk? He simply doesn’t have to do much.
At approximately 2 p.m. eastern this afternoon David Kurtz and I are going to do a Substack live about the corruption of the DOJ under the second Trump administration. If you’re interested in this topic, please tune in. If you’re a subscriber to The Morning Memo, you’ll get an email notification when the conversation starts. We’ll be discussing this issue and previewing the topics David and a group of experts will be discussing at our event on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C. Join us.
Digital platforms have become key intermediaries in the movement of money across the global economy. Their influence extends beyond convenience or efficiency. By reshaping how transactions are initiated, routed, and settled, platforms actively redistribute financial flows between sectors, regions, and participants. This redistribution affects consumers, businesses, financial institutions, and regulators alike.
Understanding this process requires examining how platforms restructure access to capital, redefine transaction costs, and concentrate or disperse economic power.
From Linear Transactions to Platform-Based Circulation
Traditional financial flows followed relatively linear paths. Payments moved from consumer to merchant through banks and payment processors, often constrained by geography, operating hours, and institutional friction. Digital platforms altered this structure.
Today, platforms act as hubs that aggregate demand, mediate transactions, and control access points. Money no longer flows directly between two parties. It circulates through platform-controlled systems that determine timing, fees, visibility, and settlement conditions.
This shift has significant consequences. Platforms do not merely process transactions. They influence where money accumulates and how quickly it moves.
Platforms as Financial Gatekeepers
By centralizing access, digital platforms become financial gatekeepers. They decide which participants can enter the system, under what conditions, and at what cost. This role allows platforms to redirect financial flows toward preferred outcomes.
Fees, commissions, and revenue-sharing models alter how value is distributed. Small changes in platform policy can shift large volumes of money between users, service providers, and the platform itself.
Over time, financial gravity pulls toward platforms with scale, data, and network effects, concentrating flows that were previously dispersed.
Reduced Friction and Increased Velocity
One of the most visible effects of digital platforms is reduced transaction friction. Payments are faster, cheaper, and easier to initiate. This increases transaction velocity.
Higher velocity does not necessarily increase total wealth, but it changes its distribution. Money cycles through platforms more frequently, favoring systems designed to capture micro-fees at scale. Revenue shifts from slow, high-margin intermediaries to fast, volume-driven models.
This dynamic benefits platforms that optimize for frequency and engagement rather than for individual transaction size.
Consumer Behavior and Flow Redirection
Platforms influence not only how money moves, but where it goes. Interface design, recommendations, and default options guide spending behavior. Consumers rarely see the full range of alternatives. They see what the platform prioritizes.
As a result, financial flows concentrate around platform-approved choices. Spending becomes less exploratory and more guided. Over time, this redirects money away from independent channels toward platform-centric ecosystems.
The redistribution is subtle, but cumulative. Individual decisions appear minor, yet aggregate flows shift significantly.
Financial Inclusion and Uneven Access
Digital platforms often expand access to financial services. Users without traditional banking relationships can participate in payments, commerce, and digital markets.
At the same time, inclusion is uneven. Access depends on compliance with platform rules, technical literacy, and data profiles. Those who meet criteria gain entry to fast-moving financial networks. Those who do not remain outside or face higher costs.
Redistribution occurs not only between institutions, but between user groups, based on platform-defined eligibility.
Entertainment Platforms and High-Frequency Flows
Certain digital sectors highlight redistribution dynamics more clearly than others. Entertainment platforms, especially those built around real-time interaction, generate high-frequency financial flows.
In online gaming and gambling environments, transactions are frequent, small, and emotionally driven. Money circulates rapidly through platform systems, creating distinct flow patterns.
In analyses of how digital platforms concentrate and redirect financial activity through casino games, betting mechanics, bonus structures, and short-cycle wagering, online casino ecosystems such as those offering slots, bets, promotional bonuses, and game-based transactions at https://gamblezen-gr.com are often referenced. They illustrate how platforms capture value through transaction volume and timing rather than through traditional pricing models.
These environments show how financial flows can be intensified and localized within a single platform.
Data, Prediction, and Flow Optimization
Platforms do not passively observe financial movement. They analyze it. Transaction data feeds predictive systems that optimize pricing, incentives, and user segmentation.
This capability allows platforms to steer financial flows intentionally. Discounts, bonuses, and personalized offers are deployed to redirect spending toward specific activities or time windows.
Over time, financial flows become less random and more engineered. Platforms gain the ability to shape not just how much money moves, but when and where it moves.
Impact on Traditional Financial Institutions
As platforms assume greater control over transaction flows, traditional financial institutions adapt or lose relevance. Banks and payment providers increasingly operate as infrastructure layers beneath platforms rather than as customer-facing intermediaries.
Revenue shifts away from interest and service fees toward platform commissions and data-driven monetization. Financial power moves closer to entities that control user interfaces and behavioral data.
This redistribution challenges existing regulatory frameworks, which were designed around institution-based rather than platform-based finance.
Cross-Border Flow Reconfiguration
Digital platforms also reconfigure cross-border financial flows. Transactions that once required currency exchange, international banking, and regulatory coordination now occur seamlessly within platform systems.
This efficiency benefits users, but it complicates oversight. Money crosses borders digitally while remaining within platform-controlled environments. Jurisdictional boundaries blur.
As a result, financial flows increasingly follow platform networks rather than national financial infrastructures.
Regulatory Responses and Constraints
Regulators are responding to platform-driven redistribution with mixed approaches. Some focus on transparency and reporting. Others impose transaction limits, licensing requirements, or taxation rules.
The challenge lies in balancing innovation with oversight. Platforms move faster than regulatory systems. Financial flows can shift long before policy adapts.
In high-risk sectors such as online gambling, regulation is often more explicit. Platforms like Gamblezen Casino operate within defined compliance frameworks, reflecting attempts to contain and monitor rapid financial circulation while preserving access.
These regulatory efforts acknowledge that platform design influences financial behavior.
Concentration Versus Diffusion of Capital
A central question is whether digital platforms concentrate or diffuse capital. The answer is both.
Platforms diffuse access by lowering barriers. At the same time, they concentrate control and value capture. Financial flows widen at the edges but narrow at the center.
This dual effect reshapes economic power. Users gain convenience. Platforms gain leverage. Traditional intermediaries adjust or decline.
Understanding this balance is critical for assessing long-term economic impact.
A Structural Shift in Financial Movement
The redistribution of financial flows driven by digital platforms is not a temporary adjustment. It reflects a structural change in how money moves through the economy.
Transactions are faster, more frequent, and more mediated by systems designed around data and engagement. Financial flows follow platforms, not institutions.
As digital platforms continue to expand their role, their influence over financial circulation will deepen. The key issue is no longer whether platforms affect financial flows, but how that influence is governed and distributed.
Digital platforms have become architects of financial movement. Their design choices shape where money goes, how fast it moves, and who ultimately benefits from its circulation.
Play and risk have always been part of human behavior. Games, competition, and uncertainty appear in every culture, shaping how people learn, socialize, and make decisions. What has changed in recent decades is not the existence of risk, but its visibility, accessibility, and integration into everyday life through digital platforms.
As play and risk move from physical spaces into digital environments, they become easier to engage with and harder to contextualize. This shift makes public discussion not optional, but necessary. Understanding the culture of play and risk helps societies balance freedom, responsibility, and long-term social impact.
Play as a Social Practice
Play is often misunderstood as a purely recreational activity. In reality, it functions as a social practice through which people explore rules, boundaries, and outcomes. Games teach strategy, patience, cooperation, and acceptance of loss.
Risk is inseparable from play. Without uncertainty, play loses meaning. The possibility of winning or losing creates tension, focus, and emotional engagement. This dynamic is not inherently harmful. It is a fundamental way people interact with uncertainty in a controlled setting.
Discussing play culture allows societies to recognize its role beyond entertainment and to understand how it shapes behavior over time.
Risk as a Learning Mechanism
Risk has historically served as a learning mechanism. Small, manageable risks help individuals understand cause and effect, probability, and consequence. Through repeated exposure, people develop judgment and self-regulation.
In traditional settings, risk was constrained by physical limits and social norms. Games were played at specific times and places, often within shared community contexts. Feedback was slower, and consequences were more visible.
Digital environments alter these conditions. Risk becomes faster, more abstract, and more frequent. This does not eliminate learning, but it changes how learning occurs.
The Digital Shift in Play Culture
Digital platforms have transformed how play is experienced. Access is constant. Games are available on demand. Outcomes are immediate. The line between play and other activities becomes blurred.
This shift amplifies both positive and negative effects. On one hand, digital play increases accessibility and diversity of experiences. On the other, it removes natural pauses that once limited engagement.
When play is always available, risk becomes normalized. Society must discuss where healthy exploration ends and where harmful patterns may begin.
Normalization of Risk Through Repetition
Repeated exposure to risk reduces emotional sensitivity. What once felt intense becomes routine. This is not inherently problematic, but it can affect how people perceive uncertainty outside of play.
If risk is always framed as manageable and reversible, individuals may underestimate long-term consequences in other contexts. This is especially relevant when play involves financial elements, where losses and gains are abstracted into digital values.
Public discussion helps distinguish between acceptable normalization and loss of perspective.
Financial Play and Cultural Perception
Games involving money occupy a unique position in risk culture. They combine play, probability, and financial consequence. Historically, such games were confined to specific venues and regulated environments.
Online casino platforms have expanded access dramatically. Slots, table games, betting mechanics, and bonus systems are now integrated into digital ecosystems. In discussions about how societies interpret risk in financial play, references to online casino environments offering wagering, games of chance, and promotional bonuses, such as those available at https://spinanga-online.com, often appear as examples of how play and risk intersect in modern digital life.
These platforms illustrate how cultural perception of risk shifts when play becomes both interactive and transactional.
Responsibility and Individual Agency
One reason society must discuss play and risk is to clarify responsibility. Digital systems distribute responsibility between users, platforms, and regulators. Choices feel personal, but environments shape behavior.
Without open discussion, responsibility becomes ambiguous. Individuals may blame themselves entirely, or shift accountability entirely to systems. Neither extreme is productive.
A mature culture of risk acknowledges shared responsibility. It recognizes individual agency while examining how design, incentives, and access influence decisions.
Media Narratives and Public Understanding
Media plays a significant role in shaping how play and risk are perceived. Sensational narratives focus on extremes, either glorifying success or highlighting failure. Everyday patterns receive less attention.
This imbalance distorts public understanding. Risk becomes either heroic or dangerous, rarely contextual. Discussion helps move beyond simplified narratives toward a more nuanced view.
By examining typical behavior rather than exceptional cases, society can develop more realistic expectations and policies.
Regulation as Cultural Reflection
Regulation reflects cultural attitudes toward risk. Strict rules suggest low tolerance for uncertainty. Flexible frameworks indicate trust in individual judgment.
In areas such as online gambling, regulation often aims to balance access with protection. Casino platforms like Spinanga Casino operate within these frameworks, illustrating how institutional oversight attempts to align commercial activity with social norms around risk.
Public debate informs regulation. Without discussion, rules risk being reactive rather than reflective of shared values.
Intergenerational Differences in Risk Perception
Younger generations encounter play and risk differently. Digital natives grow up with constant access to games and probabilistic systems. Their reference points differ from those of older generations.
This gap can create misunderstanding. Behaviors that seem reckless to one group may feel normal to another. Discussion bridges these perspectives by examining context rather than judging outcomes.
Understanding generational differences helps societies adapt norms without dismissing experience.
Why Silence Is Not Neutral
Avoiding discussion does not preserve stability. It allows assumptions to solidify unchallenged. When play and risk are not openly examined, they become either stigmatized or trivialized.
Stigmatization pushes behavior underground, making harm harder to address. Trivialization ignores cumulative effects. Both outcomes weaken social resilience.
Open discussion creates space for education, prevention, and informed choice.
Toward a Balanced Cultural Framework
Discussing the culture of play and risk does not require moral panic or prohibition. It requires clarity. Societies benefit from frameworks that recognize the value of play while acknowledging its risks.
Such frameworks support informed participation rather than avoidance. They emphasize context, boundaries, and self-awareness.
In a digital world where play and risk are increasingly intertwined, public conversation becomes a tool of cultural maintenance.
A Shared Responsibility
Play and risk are not problems to eliminate. They are realities to understand. As digital platforms expand their reach, the way societies talk about these concepts shapes outcomes more than any single rule or technology.
By engaging in thoughtful discussion, society can preserve the benefits of play while managing its risks. Silence leaves the conversation to systems and incentives alone.
A culture that talks openly about play and risk is better equipped to adapt, regulate, and evolve in an environment where uncertainty is no longer occasional, but constant.
Digital entertainment no longer exists as a side category of consumer activity. It has become embedded in the mechanics of modern economies, shaping spending habits, labor demand, technological development, and regulatory approaches. Interactive platforms, online media systems, and digital gaming services now generate economic value in ways comparable to established industries.
Assessing digital entertainment today requires treating it as an economic framework built on participation, data, and transactional design rather than as a collection of cultural products.
Entertainment Integrated Into Daily Economic Behavior
Historically, entertainment spending occurred at defined moments. A consumer made a purchase, accessed the experience, and exited the market. Digital formats replaced this episodic pattern with continuity.
Users remain connected through accounts that persist over time. Content changes incrementally rather than being replaced entirely. Economic exchange happens through frequent, low-intensity interactions instead of isolated payments.
This structure transforms entertainment into a routine economic behavior. Revenue flows become smoother, forecasting improves, and platforms operate with planning horizons closer to service providers than to traditional media producers.
Platforms as Organizing Mechanisms
The economic influence of digital entertainment concentrates within platforms. These systems coordinate participation by defining access, interaction logic, pricing, and compliance in one environment.
Platforms do not simply deliver experiences. They establish the conditions under which value is created and exchanged. By embedding rules directly into user interaction, platforms maintain control while scaling across markets.
In economic terms, platforms function as organizing mechanisms that structure behavior rather than respond to it.
Evolution of Work and Skill Demand
Digital entertainment relies on a workforce that is dispersed and highly specialized. Teams operate across borders with minimal reliance on centralized physical locations.
Economic output depends on expertise in engineering, behavioral analysis, interface design, and regulatory interpretation. Creative input remains relevant, but it is integrated into systems optimized through data and iteration.
This model reinforces broader economic shifts toward remote collaboration and competition for specialized digital skills.
Attention as a Managed Resource
In digital entertainment, attention is treated as a resource to be allocated and refined. Platforms track how users engage, how patterns change, and how responses differ across segments.
Unlike traditional media, where exposure was the primary metric, digital entertainment focuses on responsiveness. Economic value arises from sustained, predictable interaction rather than from scale alone.
This approach allows platforms to maximize efficiency by focusing on user behavior instead of raw audience size.
Embedded Financial Interaction
Digital entertainment is structured around interaction, and interaction often carries economic consequences. User decisions influence access, progression, or transaction events in real time.
This is particularly evident in probability-based formats. Online casino platforms combine gameplay, wagering, bonus incentives, and payment systems into a single loop. Financial exchange is embedded within entertainment rather than positioned around it.
When examining digital entertainment models that rely on casino games, betting mechanics, promotional bonuses, and regulated transactions, environments such as those associated with https://gransino-casino.com are frequently cited. They illustrate how value generation occurs directly through participation rather than through separate monetization layers.
These systems show how entertainment and economic exchange can function as a unified process.
Regulation as a Stabilizing Factor
As digital entertainment expanded, regulatory frameworks became central to its sustainability. Rules governing payments, data protection, and financial exposure provide structure for both users and operators.
Regulation does not inherently limit innovation. In many cases, it reduces risk and enables long-term investment. From an economic standpoint, it signals that digital entertainment has transitioned from experimental activity to recognized sector.
Stable regulation allows platforms to operate within formal economic systems rather than at their margins.
Data-Driven Adaptation
Operational decisions in digital entertainment are driven by continuous data analysis. Platforms monitor user behavior to adjust mechanics, pricing, and engagement strategies.
This adaptive process improves efficiency by reallocating resources based on performance rather than expectation. Features evolve quickly, reducing sunk costs and increasing responsiveness to demand changes.
Economically, this capacity for rapid adjustment strengthens resilience during periods of uncertainty.
Influence Beyond Core Markets
The economic impact of digital entertainment extends beyond its immediate boundaries. Growth in this sector drives demand for cloud services, payment processing, cybersecurity, and digital advertising.
Technologies refined within entertainment platforms often migrate into finance, retail, and logistics. Tools designed to manage real-time interaction or detect irregular behavior find broader application.
These spillover effects expand the sector’s influence across the economy.
Consumer Spending Patterns
Digital entertainment encourages spending through repeated small transactions rather than infrequent large payments. This spreads consumption over time and reduces volatility.
For platforms, this model produces predictable revenue. For the broader economy, it supports steady demand. Spending becomes integrated into routine behavior instead of being tied to major releases.
This pattern aligns with contemporary consumer preferences for flexibility and incremental engagement.
Casino Platforms as Compact Economic Models
Within digital entertainment, casino platforms represent concentrated economic systems. They integrate user engagement, probabilistic mechanics, financial flows, and regulatory compliance within a single structure.
Gransino Casino operates within this category, demonstrating how entertainment platforms can manage participation, payment, and governance simultaneously. Their activities contribute to employment, technological development, and fiscal systems.
These platforms offer insight into how digital entertainment operates as a business environment rather than as a novelty.
Positioned Within the Modern Economy
Digital entertainment is now embedded within economic structures rather than operating alongside them. It influences how attention is monetized, how labor is organized, and how value is exchanged digitally.
As economies continue to evolve, entertainment platforms will remain integral components. Their significance lies in their ability to integrate behavior, technology, and regulation into scalable systems.
Digital entertainment reflects the structure of the modern economy itself: adaptive, interactive, and built around continuous participation.
Online platforms have become one of the most powerful forces influencing how consumers think, decide, and act. Their impact goes far beyond convenience or access. Platforms now shape habits, redefine expectations, and quietly guide economic behavior across industries ranging from retail and media to finance and digital gaming.
This transformation is not driven by persuasion alone. It is the result of structural design choices that affect how people process information, evaluate risk, and respond to incentives.
Platforms as Behavioral Systems
Online platforms function less like neutral marketplaces and more like behavioral systems. Every interface element, from navigation flow to visual hierarchy, is designed to influence action. Consumers do not simply browse or choose; they interact with environments engineered to favor certain behaviors over others.
Over time, repeated interaction with these environments changes baseline expectations. Speed becomes normal. Friction feels abnormal. Waiting or comparing extensively starts to feel inefficient rather than prudent. Behavior adapts to the system long before users become aware of the change.
Acceleration of Decision-Making
One of the most visible effects of online platforms is the compression of decision time. Platforms reduce the distance between intention and outcome. Fewer steps, saved preferences, and automated defaults all contribute to faster action.
This acceleration shifts how consumers evaluate choices. Instead of weighing multiple alternatives, users rely on platform signals such as rankings, recommendations, or highlighted options. Decision-making becomes contextual and reactive rather than analytical.
As a result, behavior is shaped more by interface structure than by careful comparison of underlying value.
Feedback Loops and Behavioral Reinforcement
Online platforms provide immediate feedback. Every action produces a response: confirmation, progress, reward, or adjustment. These responses reinforce behavior quickly and consistently.
Consumers learn which actions lead to positive outcomes within the system. Over time, behavior aligns with what the platform rewards, not necessarily with long-term goals. This conditioning effect is subtle but powerful because it operates continuously rather than occasionally.
Feedback loops transform isolated actions into stable behavioral patterns.
Personalization and Choice Narrowing
Personalization is often presented as a benefit, but it also constrains behavior. Platforms adapt content and offers based on past actions, gradually reducing exposure to alternatives.
Consumers are more likely to repeat familiar behaviors because the system makes them easier and more visible. Exploration decreases, while optimization increases. The range of perceived choice narrows, even if the platform technically offers many options.
Behavior shifts toward efficiency within the system rather than discovery outside it.
Habit Formation Through Repetition
Online platforms excel at turning repeated actions into habits. Low effort, predictable outcomes, and frequent interaction accelerate habit formation.
Consumers no longer decide whether to engage. They respond automatically to cues such as notifications or routine triggers. Interaction becomes embedded in daily patterns rather than driven by conscious choice.
This habitual engagement changes how attention is allocated. Platforms compete not only for time, but for automatic behavior.
Changing Perceptions of Value and Spending
Platforms also reshape how consumers perceive value. Frequent exposure to small transactions alters spending psychology. Individual costs feel insignificant, even when cumulative spending is substantial.
This pattern is especially visible in digital environments where entertainment, interaction, and payment are tightly linked. In ecosystems built around games, wagers, bonuses, and short outcome cycles, spending becomes part of participation rather than a separate decision.
In analyses of how platform design influences economic behavior through casino-style games, betting mechanics, and bonus-driven incentives, online environments offering structured gambling experiences such as those found at https://liraspin1.com are often referenced. They illustrate how transaction and engagement merge into a single behavioral loop.
Platform Trust and Authority
As consumers spend more time within platforms, trust shifts from individual brands to the platform itself. Familiar interfaces create a sense of reliability that extends to new products or services offered within the same system.
Consumers are more willing to experiment inside a trusted platform than to explore unfamiliar alternatives elsewhere. Platform authority replaces traditional brand loyalty. Behavior is guided by system familiarity rather than external evaluation.
This consolidation increases the platform’s influence over consumer behavior across categories.
Social Signals and Converging Behavior
Online platforms amplify social influence by making behavior visible. Ratings, reviews, popularity indicators, and activity metrics act as shortcuts for decision-making.
Consumers interpret these signals as validation. Choices increasingly align with perceived group behavior, even when personal preferences differ. Over time, behavior converges around platform-defined norms.
Individual variation decreases as social cues guide action more strongly than independent assessment.
Fragmented Attention and Micro-Interaction
Platform design encourages short, repeatable interactions. Attention is fragmented into brief cycles rather than sustained focus. Consumers adapt by scanning, reacting, and moving on.
This pattern changes how information is processed. Depth gives way to frequency. Evaluation becomes episodic. Decisions are made in moments rather than through extended consideration.
Behavior adapts to the rhythm imposed by the platform.
Continuous Optimization and Invisible Influence
Platforms constantly test and adjust their design. Small changes in layout, timing, or messaging are measured and refined based on behavioral data.
Consumers are rarely aware of these adjustments, but their behavior shifts in response. Over time, platform design converges toward configurations that maximize engagement and conversion.
Behavior and system design evolve together, reinforcing each other without explicit direction.
Regulation and Behavioral Limits
As platform influence grows, regulation becomes a boundary-setting force. Rules governing data use, transparency, and consumer protection define how far behavioral guidance can extend.
Regulation does not eliminate platform influence, but it shapes its boundaries. Within these limits, platforms continue to refine how they guide behavior through design rather than instruction.
The balance between innovation and oversight remains a defining issue.
Long-Term Behavioral Change
The cumulative impact of online platforms is normalization. Speed, convenience, personalization, and constant feedback become baseline expectations.
Consumers carry these expectations into other areas of life. Tolerance for friction decreases. Patience shortens. Behavior adapts even outside digital environments.
In sectors where probability, incentives, and rapid outcomes intersect, including digital gaming and gambling platforms such as Liraspin Casino, these behavioral shifts are particularly pronounced. The system trains users to respond quickly, evaluate risk differently, and integrate decision-making into moment-based interaction.
Structural Transformation, Not a Passing Trend
The influence of online platforms on consumer behavior is structural. It is rooted in system design, feedback mechanisms, and habit formation.
As platforms continue to organize digital life, their role in shaping behavior will expand. Understanding this influence requires analyzing how systems guide action, not just how consumers express preference.
Consumer behavior is no longer formed independently. It is continuously shaped by the platforms that structure modern interaction.
Digital platforms have become central to economic, social, and informational life. As their influence has expanded, so has scrutiny of their responsibility toward users. Governments, regulators, and civil society increasingly view platforms not only as service providers, but as actors whose design choices and governance models affect safety, fairness, and trust at scale.
Platform responsibility is no longer a theoretical concept. It is shaped by legal frameworks, enforcement practices, and cultural expectations that vary across jurisdictions. Examining international approaches helps clarify how responsibility is defined, enforced, and balanced against innovation.
The Evolution of Platform Responsibility
Early digital platforms operated under limited liability models. Responsibility was narrowly defined, often restricted to technical uptime or basic contractual obligations. As platforms grew larger and more integrated into daily life, this model became insufficient.
Modern platforms influence user behavior through algorithms, interface design, and data use. Responsibility now extends to how platforms moderate content, protect personal information, manage financial transactions, and prevent harm. This shift reflects a broader understanding that platforms actively shape user experience rather than passively hosting it.
International approaches differ, but they share a recognition that platform responsibility must evolve alongside platform power.
Regulatory Philosophies Across Regions
Different regions approach platform responsibility through distinct regulatory philosophies. These differences influence how obligations are defined and enforced.
In the European Union, responsibility is framed around user protection and systemic risk. Regulations emphasize transparency, accountability, and proactive risk mitigation. Platforms are expected to assess and address potential harms before they escalate.
In the United States, the focus has traditionally been on balancing responsibility with free expression and innovation. Liability protections remain significant, but there is growing debate around platform duties related to safety, data use, and market dominance.
In parts of Asia, platform responsibility often intersects with state oversight and social stability concerns. Requirements may emphasize compliance, content control, and rapid response to regulatory directives.
These variations reflect differing legal traditions and societal priorities.
Content Moderation and User Safety
Content moderation is one of the most visible aspects of platform responsibility. Internationally, approaches range from self-regulation to detailed statutory obligations.
Some jurisdictions require platforms to remove harmful content within defined timeframes. Others emphasize due process, requiring platforms to provide clear explanations and appeal mechanisms for moderation decisions.
The challenge lies in balancing speed, accuracy, and fairness. Overly aggressive moderation can restrict legitimate expression, while insufficient oversight can expose users to harm. Responsibility frameworks increasingly require platforms to demonstrate consistent processes rather than perfect outcomes.
Data Protection and Privacy Obligations
Data responsibility is a central component of platform accountability. Platforms collect vast amounts of personal information, often across borders.
International approaches vary in strictness. Some frameworks impose explicit consent requirements, data minimization standards, and user rights to access or delete information. Others rely more heavily on industry standards and post-hoc enforcement.
Despite differences, there is a shared expectation that platforms must treat user data as a protected asset rather than a commercial byproduct. Responsibility includes not only preventing breaches, but also limiting unnecessary collection and opaque use.
Financial Platforms and Transactional Responsibility
Responsibility becomes especially complex when platforms facilitate financial interaction. This includes marketplaces, payment services, and online gaming environments.
In these contexts, responsibility extends to transaction integrity, consumer protection, and risk management. Platforms must ensure fair operation, transparent terms, and safeguards against misuse.
Internationally, online casino platforms illustrate how responsibility frameworks are applied to high-risk digital activity. Regulations often require licensing, monitoring of user behavior, and controls around bonuses, wagering mechanics, and payment processing. In discussions of how regulated gambling platforms manage responsibility through compliance, user verification, and transactional transparency, examples such as online casino environments offering betting, games of chance, and bonus systems at https://vegas-hero.com are frequently referenced as part of broader regulatory analysis rather than promotional context.
These models show how responsibility can be embedded into platform design and oversight.
Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability
Algorithms increasingly determine what users see, how content is prioritized, and how offers are presented. Responsibility now includes accountability for these systems.
Some international frameworks require platforms to explain how recommendation systems work, at least in general terms. Others mandate risk assessments for algorithmic impact, particularly where automated decisions affect access, pricing, or visibility.
The goal is not to eliminate algorithms, but to ensure that their operation does not produce unfair or harmful outcomes without oversight.
Enforcement and Practical Challenges
Defining responsibility is only part of the issue. Enforcement remains uneven across regions. Smaller platforms may struggle to meet complex requirements, while large platforms face scrutiny over selective compliance.
Cross-border platforms add complexity. A platform operating globally must navigate conflicting obligations, such as differing content standards or data localization rules. This creates pressure for harmonization, but also highlights the difficulty of universal solutions.
International cooperation is increasing, but enforcement still reflects national priorities.
Industry Self-Regulation and Standards
Alongside formal regulation, industry-led standards play a role in shaping responsibility. Codes of conduct, certification schemes, and shared best practices provide flexible tools for addressing emerging risks.
Self-regulation can respond more quickly than legislation, but it relies on incentives and trust. Without oversight, it may lack credibility. As a result, many international approaches combine statutory requirements with recognized industry standards.
This hybrid model allows responsibility to adapt while maintaining accountability.
User Empowerment and Transparency
Modern responsibility frameworks increasingly emphasize user empowerment. Platforms are expected to provide clear information about rules, risks, and choices.
Transparency reports, user controls, and accessible complaint mechanisms are common features. Responsibility is framed not only as preventing harm, but as enabling informed participation.
This shift recognizes that users are active participants in platform ecosystems, not passive recipients of protection.
The Role of Casino Platforms in Responsibility Debates
Casino platforms often appear in discussions of platform responsibility because they combine digital interaction, financial risk, and regulatory oversight. Their operations require clear rules, monitoring, and user safeguards.
VegasHero Casino operates within this category, illustrating how platform responsibility can be formalized through licensing, compliance, and operational controls. Such platforms demonstrate how responsibility frameworks function in practice, particularly where user risk is inherent to the activity.
Their inclusion in regulatory analysis reflects their relevance to broader platform governance debates.
Converging Toward Shared Principles
Despite regional differences, international approaches to platform responsibility show signs of convergence. Core principles such as transparency, accountability, user protection, and proportionality appear across frameworks.
The challenge is implementation. Responsibility must be meaningful without becoming overly restrictive. It must protect users without freezing innovation.
As platforms continue to shape digital life, responsibility will remain a dynamic concept, negotiated between regulators, operators, and users across borders.
Understanding international approaches provides insight into how this negotiation unfolds and why platform responsibility has become one of the defining issues of the digital era.
Digitalization has altered how societies perceive, evaluate, and engage with risk. What was once mediated by physical distance, delayed outcomes, and limited information is now experienced through real-time interfaces, data-driven systems, and constant feedback. As digital tools increasingly structure economic and social life, risk has become more visible, more frequent, and often easier to access.
This shift does not mean that people are taking more risks in absolute terms. Rather, the form, timing, and perception of risk have changed. Understanding this transformation requires examining how digital systems reshape decision-making, responsibility, and tolerance for uncertainty.
Risk Before the Digital Turn
Historically, risk was associated with major decisions and clear boundaries. Financial investments, travel, career changes, or gambling required deliberate effort and often carried visible consequences. Friction acted as a natural filter. Time delays allowed reflection. Information was incomplete, but choices were limited.
Risk was episodic. It appeared at specific moments and was often framed as exceptional rather than routine. This structure reinforced caution, as each decision felt distinct and consequential.
Digitalization disrupted these conditions.
The Compression of Risk Exposure
One of the most significant changes introduced by digital systems is the compression of exposure. Decisions that once required time and effort can now be made instantly. Interfaces reduce friction, and outcomes are delivered quickly.
This compression alters perception. When risk is encountered frequently and resolved rapidly, it feels smaller, even if cumulative impact increases. The brain responds to immediacy rather than scale. As a result, people may underestimate long-term exposure while focusing on short-term outcomes.
Digital environments turn risk into a repeated interaction rather than a singular event.
Data, Probability, and the Illusion of Control
Digital systems present risk through data. Dashboards, percentages, scores, and probabilities give the impression that uncertainty is measurable and manageable. This visibility can increase confidence, but it can also create an illusion of control.
When risks are framed numerically, individuals may believe they understand them more fully than they do. Data reduces ambiguity but does not eliminate unpredictability. The gap between perceived and actual control widens as systems become more complex.
This dynamic is visible across sectors, from finance and health to entertainment and gaming.
Micro-Risks and Habitual Decision-Making
Digitalization has introduced the concept of micro-risk. These are small, low-friction decisions that carry uncertainty but minimal immediate consequence. Clicking, subscribing, investing small amounts, or participating in short interactive activities all involve risk at a reduced scale.
Micro-risks are easier to accept. Over time, they become habitual. Society shifts from avoiding risk to managing constant low-level uncertainty.
This normalization changes behavior. Risk is no longer exceptional. It becomes part of everyday interaction with digital systems.
Entertainment Platforms and Risk Normalization
Digital entertainment plays a key role in reshaping attitudes toward risk. Games, simulations, and interactive formats allow users to experience uncertainty without severe consequences. Wins and losses are immediate, contained, and repeatable.
In casino-style environments, this structure is especially clear. Online platforms built around slots, betting mechanics, bonus incentives, and short outcome cycles transform risk into a routine experience. In analyses of how digitalization reframes uncertainty through games of chance, wagering systems, and reward structures, online casino environments such as those offering casino games, bets, spins, and bonus features at https://frumzi.app are often referenced as examples of how risk becomes integrated into everyday digital behavior rather than treated as an exceptional act.
These systems do not remove risk. They change how it feels.
Feedback Loops and Emotional Distance
Digital platforms provide immediate feedback. Outcomes follow actions quickly, reducing emotional distance. This has a paradoxical effect.
On one hand, rapid feedback can improve learning. On the other, it can weaken emotional impact. Losses feel smaller when they are quickly followed by new opportunities. Gains feel transient rather than decisive.
This emotional smoothing alters how people assess risk. The focus shifts from consequence to continuity. The question becomes not whether to take a risk, but whether to continue interacting.
Risk Without Physical Presence
Another key change is the removal of physical context. Digital risk often lacks tangible cues. There is no physical cash exchanged, no visible environment signaling danger, no social ritual marking a decision as risky.
This abstraction reduces perceived seriousness. Actions feel reversible even when they are not. The absence of physical markers contributes to a sense that risk exists only within the screen.
As more activities move online, society becomes accustomed to engaging with uncertainty in abstract form.
Responsibility and Distributed Risk
Digital systems also redistribute responsibility. Algorithms recommend actions. Platforms frame choices. Automated processes handle execution.
As responsibility becomes shared between user and system, personal accountability can feel diluted. People may attribute outcomes to the platform, the algorithm, or external factors rather than their own decisions.
This diffusion affects how society assigns blame and credit in risky situations. Risk becomes systemic rather than individual.
Regulation and the Social Response
As attitudes toward risk evolve, regulation follows. Policymakers increasingly focus on how digital environments structure exposure to uncertainty.
In sectors involving financial or probabilistic risk, such as online gambling, regulation often emphasizes transparency, limits, and user protection. Casino platforms like Frumzi Casino operate within these frameworks, illustrating how institutional oversight attempts to balance access with responsibility in digital risk environments.
Regulation reflects a recognition that digitalization changes not only behavior, but the context in which behavior occurs.
Cultural Shifts in Risk Tolerance
Over time, repeated exposure to digital risk environments reshapes cultural norms. Societies become more comfortable with uncertainty handled through systems. Tolerance increases for small losses and variable outcomes.
At the same time, patience for delayed results decreases. People expect fast resolution and clear feedback. Risk that unfolds slowly feels less acceptable than risk that resolves quickly, even if the long-term stakes are higher.
This shift influences everything from investing to career choices.
Risk as a Designed Experience
Perhaps the most important change is that risk is increasingly designed. Interfaces, incentives, timing, and feedback all shape how uncertainty is encountered.
Risk is no longer just a condition of the world. It is an experience constructed by digital systems. This does not eliminate danger, but it changes how people engage with it.
Understanding this design dimension is essential for policymakers, platform operators, and users alike.
A Redefined Relationship With Uncertainty
Digitalization has not made society reckless, nor has it made it safer. It has made risk more frequent, more abstract, and more integrated into daily life.
People now navigate uncertainty continuously rather than episodically. Decisions are smaller, faster, and repeated. Responsibility is shared with systems. Consequences are mediated by design.
This redefinition of risk is one of the most profound social effects of digitalization. It shapes how societies plan, choose, and adapt in an environment where uncertainty is no longer an exception, but a constant condition of digital life.
Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads.
Unfortunately, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetizing consumer attention. When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Search feature in late 2024 and its browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in October 2025, it kicked off a race to capture online behavioral data to power advertising. It’s part of a yearslong turnabout by OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman once called the combination of ads and AI “unsettling” and now promises that ads can be deployed in AI apps while preserving trust. The rampant speculation among OpenAI users who believe they see paid placements in ChatGPT responses suggests they are not convinced.
As a security expert and data scientist, we see these examples as harbingers of a future where AI companies profit from manipulating their users’ behavior for the benefit of their advertisers and investors. It’s also a reminder that time to steer the direction of AI development away from private exploitation and toward public benefit is quickly running out.
The functionality of ChatGPT Search and its Atlas browser is not really new. Meta, commercial AI competitor Perplexity and even ChatGPT itself have had similar AI search features for years, and both Google and Microsoft beat OpenAI to the punch by integrating AI with their browsers. But OpenAI’s business positioning signals a shift.
We believe the ChatGPT Search and Atlas announcements are worrisome because there is really only one way to make money on search: the advertising model pioneered ruthlessly by Google.
Advertising model
Ruled a monopolist in U.S. federal court, Google has earned more than US$1.6 trillion in advertising revenue since 2001. You may think of Google as a web search company, or a streaming video company (YouTube), or an email company (Gmail), or a mobile phone company (Android, Pixel), or maybe even an AI company (Gemini). But those products are ancillary to Google’s bottom line. The advertising segment typically accounts for 80% to 90% of its total revenue. Everything else is there to collect users’ data and direct users’ attention to its advertising revenue stream.
After two decades in this monopoly position, Google’s search product is much more tuned to the company’s needs than those of its users. When Google Search first arrived decades ago, it was revelatory in its ability to instantly find useful information across the still-nascent web. In 2025, its search result pages are dominated by low-quality and often AI-generated content, spam sites that exist solely to drive traffic to Amazon sales—a tactic known as affiliate marketing—and paid ad placements, which at times are indistinguishable from organic results.
Plenty of advertisers and observers seem to think AI-powered advertising is the future of the ad business.
Highly persuasive
Paid advertising in AI search, and AI models generally, could look very different from traditional web search. It has the potential to influence your thinking, spending patterns and even personal beliefs in much more subtle ways. Because AI can engage in active dialogue, addressing your specific questions, concerns and ideas rather than just filtering static content, its potential for influence is much greater. It’s like the difference between reading a textbook and having a conversation with its author.
Imagine you’re conversing with your AI agent about an upcoming vacation. Did it recommend a particular airline or hotel chain because they really are best for you, or does the company get a kickback for every mention? If you ask about a political issue, does the model bias its answer based on which political party has paid the company a fee, or based on the bias of the model’s corporate owners?
There is mounting evidence that AI models are at least as effective as people at persuading users to do things. A December 2023 meta-analysis of 121 randomized trials reported that AI models are as good as humans at shifting people’s perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. A more recent meta-analysis of eight studies similarly concluded there was “no significant overall difference in persuasive performance between (large language models) and humans.”
This influence may go well beyond shaping what products you buy or who you vote for. As with the field of search engine optimization, the incentive for humans to perform for AI models might shape the way people write and communicate with each other. How we express ourselves online is likely to be increasingly directed to win the attention of AIs and earn placement in the responses they return to users.
A different way forward
Much of this is discouraging, but there is much that can be done to change it.
First, it’s important to recognize that today’s AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, for the same reasons that search engines and social media platforms are.
The problem is not the technology itself; fast ways to find information and communicate with friends and family can be wonderful capabilities. The problem is the priorities of the corporations who own these platforms and for whose benefit they are operated. Recognize that you don’t have control over what data is fed to the AI, who it is shared with and how it is used. It’s important to keep that in mind when you connect devices and services to AI platforms, ask them questions, or consider buying or doing the things they suggest.
There is also a lot that people can demand of governments to restrain harmful corporate uses of AI. In the U.S., Congress could enshrine consumers’ rights to control their own personal data, as the EU already has. It could also create a data protection enforcement agency, as essentially every other developed nation has.
Governments worldwide could invest in Public AI—models built by public agencies offered universally for public benefit and transparently under public oversight. They could also restrict how corporations can collude to exploit people using AI, for example by barring advertisements for dangerous products such as cigarettes and requiring disclosure of paid endorsements.
Every technology company seeks to differentiate itself from competitors, particularly in an era when yesterday’s groundbreaking AI quickly becomes a commodity that will run on any kid’s phone. One differentiator is in building a trustworthy service. It remains to be seen whether companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic can sustain profitable businesses on the back of subscription AI services like the premium editions of ChatGPT, Plus and Pro, and Claude Pro. If they are going to continue convincing consumers and businesses to pay for these premium services, they will need to build trust.
That will require making real commitments to consumers on transparency, privacy, reliability and security that are followed through consistently and verifiably.
And while no one knows what the future business models for AI will be, we can be certain that consumers do not want to be exploited by AI, secretly or otherwise.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Conversation.
Australian launch vehicle and satellite manufacturer Gilmour Space Technologies has raised its largest funding round to date to scale up rocket and spacecraft production.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Jan. 15, 2026 — Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1983 to advance the global space community, today announced it will host Innovate Space: Finance […]
January 20, 2026 – Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Max Space, Slingshot Aerospace, and Muon Space. Together, these companies strengthen CSF’s advocacy efforts across space […]
A one-line change in the Dec. 18, 2025 Executive Order, Ensuring American Space Superiority, reopened a debate: should the United States charge satellite operators for basic space situational awareness (SSA) and civil space traffic coordination (STC) services? The order revised SPD-3 by removing the expectation that these services be provided “free of direct user fees,” […]
Up betimes and to the office, where all the morning. Dined at home, and Mr. Deane of Woolwich with me, talking about the abuses of the yard. Then to the office about business all the afternoon with great pleasure, seeing myself observed by every body to be the only man of business of us all, but Mr. Coventry. So till late at night, and then home to supper and bed.
While many aspects of American space history have been extensively covered, there is still something new to learn about them. Dwayne Day reviews three recent books that provide a photographic history of the early Apollo missions.
Isar Aerospace is returning to the launch pad this week to make its second orbital launch attempt. Jeff Foust reports on that company and other European startups developing launch vehicles that got financial support from a European Space Agency program.
Earlier this month India suffered a second failure of its PSLV rocket in as many flights. Ajey Lele examines the implications of the back-to-back failures of a rocket that had been the workhorse of the Indian space program.
A Florida space museum has an exhibit on Martin Caidin, a prolific author both space fact and fiction books. Dwayne Day discusses his life and career, whose works became the inspiration for a movie and TV series.
info@thespacereview.com (Matthew Mowthorpe and Markos Trichas)
Updated
Russia has embarked on a a variety of projects to disrupt or destroy foreign satellites. Matthew Mowthorpe and Markos Trichas discuss those various counterspace efforts.
This paper studies how online dating platforms have impacted marital outcomes, assortative matching, and sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates in the United States. We construct county-level measures of online dating usage using data from website-based platforms (2002-2013) and mobile app-based platforms (2017-2023). Leveraging county-level variation and an instrumental variable strategy, we show in the desktop era, a 1% increase in online dating sessions raises divorce rates by 0.50%, while in the mobile era, a 1% increase in online dating activity lowers marriage and divorce rates by 0.40% and 0.33%, respectively. We also document shifts in assortative matching. Desktop sites reduce sorting along education and employment dimensions, whereas mobile sites reduce sorting by employment, but increase sorting by race. Across both eras, we find no evidence that greater online dating usage increases average STD rates. Average effects are negative or statistically insignificant, but are positive for some subpopulations. We develop a search and matching model where technological changes impact search costs, market size, and market noise can explain our empirical findings.
That is from a new paper by Daniel Ershov, Jessica Fong, and Pinar Yildirim. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Hi, fellow Americans! Would you like our country to become an authoritarian police state? A nation where federal agents can knock on your door and search your home without a warrant? A nation where everyone has to carry around their proof of citizenship at all times, or risk being arrested by federal agents on the street and thrown intoa dungeon? A nation where peaceful protesters are at risk of being maimed or even killed in the street? A nation where the President invokes emergency powers to crush protests with troops?
Those all sound like lurid exaggerations when I type them out — the kind of thing crazy Resistance Libs would rant about on Bluesky. And yet consider the most recent news from America’s immigration crackdown:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is defending reports that people have been asked by federal agents to prove their citizenship status as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations continue in cities across America…
On Jan. 3, a Texas detainee died in ICE custody in what a medical examiner is likely to rule a homicide, according to The Washington Post; on Jan. 7, Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good was shot four times by an ICE agent while attempting to drive away from officers, and was soon pronounced dead; on Jan. 9, a 21-year-old anti-ICE protester was permanently blinded and allegedly mocked by agents after he was shot at close range by non-lethal ammunition, according to his aunt; and on Jan. 14, a Venezuelan man was shot in the leg during a struggle with ICE officers.
The truth is that some Americans probably do like this. There is no freedom gene that courses through the blood of those whose ancestors fought in the Civil War. A deep reverence for liberty does not flow from the water of the Mississippi River. There are some who quietly nod their heads and grin when they see protesters beaten savagely by government thugs, relishing the thought that “the left” is being put in its place. There are those who smile at the notion that an invasion by the anti-White hordes of the Third World is being finally turned back by our valiant Boys in Masks.
But there are fewer of these than before. The furor over the killing of Renee Good and the ICE raids in Minnesota and elsewhere has not died down and vanished into the bottomless pit of the news cycle like almost every other outrage during the long Trump Era A recent poll found that 82% of Americans have seen the video of Good’s killing, and by and large they agree with the obvious interpretation that the killing doesn’t look like self-defense. Many more Americans say the shooting was unjustified than say it was justified:
President Trump's team recently reviewed private GOP polling that showed support for his immigration policies falling. The results, reflected in public surveys, bolstered internal concern about the administration's confrontational enforcement tactics…
The private polling suggested a rupturing of the coalition of independent, moderate and minority voters who were key parts of Trump’s victory in 2024. Such voters will play a big role in determining whether Republicans keep their slim House majority in November’s midterms…
60% of independent voters and 58% of undecided voters said Trump was “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants, the poll viewed by Trump’s team found.
Joe Rogan, the nation’s most popular talk show host and a prominent Trump supporter in 2024, is among those for whom the stormtrooper tactics of the immigration crackdown have gone too far:
Nor is the ICE storm the only thing that Americans despise about the second Trump presidency. Even most Republicans are opposed to Trump’s threat to seize Greenland from America’s allies:
To many Democrats and progressives, the news that America is turning against Trump comes as a balm of reassurance amid the otherwise grim drumbeat of headlines. Resistance Liberalism was right about Trump — he was a corrupt, brutal authoritarian at the head of a fundamentally racist movement. Media bullshit can deceive some of the people some of the time, but in the end, being right about things tends to shine through.
Many Dems no doubt hope to ride the wave of dissatisfaction with Trump to victory in November, and perhaps in the 2028 presidential election as well. Polls show that Dems have surged past the GOP in terms of party identification, and that a record-high 28% of Americans label themselves ideologically “liberal”. Gen Z is ideologically more progressive than Millennials on most issues.
Perhaps the American people, bamboozled by right-wing media narratives, simply had to discover the error of their 2024 choice the hard way, and Democrats simply need to sit and wait for the masses to come home.
Look more closely, though, and you can see that neither Trump, nor Trumpism, nor the Republican party is collapsing, the way support for George W. Bush’s presidency collapsed at the end of his second term. The Resistance Libs were completely right about Trump, but they still haven’t managed to come up with a compelling alternative, either ideologically or in terms of a plan for governance. And this is probably putting a ceiling on support for the Democrats.
The evidence shows why Resist Liberalism is not enough
First let’s look at some numbers, and then let’s talk about some principles and ideas.
So many answers to the Fermi question have been offered that we have a veritable bestiary of solutions, each trying to explain why we have yet to encounter extraterrestrials. I like Leo Szilard’s answer the best: “They are among us, and we call them Hungarians.” That one has a pedigree that I’ll explore in a future post (and remember that Szilard was himself Hungarian). But given our paucity of data, what can we make of Fermi’s question in the light of the latest exoplanet findings? Eduardo Carmona today explores with admirable clarity a low-drama but plausible scenario. Eduardo teaches film and digital media at Loyola Marymount University and California State University Dominguez Hills. His work explores the intersection of scientific concepts and cinematic storytelling. This essay is adapted from a longer treatment that will form the conceptual basis for a science fiction film currently in development. Contact Information: Email: eduardo.carmona@lmu.edu
by Eduardo Carmona MFA
In September 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered a precious cargo from asteroid Bennu: pristine samples containing ribose, glucose, nucleobases, and amino acids—the molecular Lego blocks of life itself. Just months later, in early 2024, the Breakthrough Listen initiative reported null results from their most comprehensive search yet: 97 nearby galaxies across 1-11 GHz, with no compelling technosignatures detected.
We live in a cosmos that generously distributes life’s ingredients while maintaining an eerie radio silence. This is the modern Fermi Paradox in stark relief: building blocks everywhere, conversations nowhere.
What if both observations are telling us the same story—just from different chapters?
The Seeding Paradox
The discovery of complex organic molecules on Bennu—a pristine carbonaceous asteroid that has barely changed in 4.5 billion years—confirms what astrobiologists have long suspected: the universe is in the business of making life’s components. Ribose, the sugar backbone of RNA. Nucleobases that encode genetic information. Amino acids that fold into proteins.
These aren’t laboratory curiosities. They’re delivered at scale across the cosmos, frozen in time capsules of rock and ice, raining down on every rocky world in every stellar system. The implications are profound: prebiotic chemistry isn’t a lottery. It’s standard operating procedure for the universe.
This abundance makes the silence more puzzling. If life’s ingredients are everywhere, why isn’t life—or at least communicative life—equally ubiquitous? The Drake Equation suggests we should be drowning in signals. Yet decade after decade of increasingly sophisticated SETI searches return the same answer: nothing.
The traditional responses—they’re too far away, they use technology we can’t detect, they’re deliberately hiding—feel increasingly like special pleading. What if the answer is simpler, more systemic, and reconcilable with both observations?
Cellular Cosmic Isolation: A Synthesis
I propose what I call Cellular Cosmic Isolation (CCI)—not a single explanation but a framework that synthesizes multiple constraints into a coherent picture. Think of it as a series of filters, each one narrowing the funnel from chemical abundance to electromagnetic chatter.
The framework rests on four interlocking observations:
1. Prebiotic abundance: Chemistry is generous. Small bodies deliver life’s building blocks widely and consistently. Biospheres may be common.
2. Geological bottlenecks: Complex, communicative life requires rare conditions—specifically, worlds with coexisting continents and oceans, sustained by long-duration plate tectonics (≥500 million years). Earth’s particular geological engine may be uncommon.
3. Fleeting windows: Technological civilizations may have extraordinarily brief outward-detectable phases—measured in decades, not millennia—before transitioning to post-biological forms, self-destruction, or simply turning their attention inward.
4. Communication constraints: Physical limits (finite speed of light, signal dispersion, beaming requirements) plus coordination problems suppress even the detection of civilizations that do exist.
The result? A universe where the chemistry of life is ubiquitous, simple biospheres may be common, but detectable technospheres remain vanishingly rare and non-overlapping in spacetime. We’re not alone because life is impossible. We’re alone because the path from ribose to radio telescopes has far more gates than we imagined.
The Geological Filter: Earth’s Unlikely Engine
This is perhaps CCI’s most counterintuitive claim, yet it’s grounded in recent research. In a 2024 paper in Scientific Reports, planetary scientists Robert Stern and Taras Gerya argue that Earth’s specific combination—plate tectonics that has operated for billions of years, creating and recycling continents alongside persistent oceans—may be geologically unusual.
Why does this matter for intelligence? Because continents enable:
• Terrestrial ecosystems with high energy density and environmental diversity
• Land-ocean boundaries that create evolutionary pressure for complex sensing and locomotion
• Fire (impossible underwater), which enables metallurgy and advanced tool use
• Seasonal and altitudinal variation that rewards cognitive flexibility
Venus has no plate tectonics. Mars lost its early tectonics. Europa and Enceladus have subsurface oceans but no continents. Earth’s geological engine—stable enough to persist for billions of years, dynamic enough to continuously create new land and recycle old—may be a rare configuration.
Mathematically, this adds two probability terms to the Drake Equation: foc (the fraction of habitable worlds with coexisting oceans and continents) and fpt (the fraction with sustained plate tectonics). If each is, say, 0.1-0.2, their joint probability becomes 0.01-0.04—already a significant filter.
The Temporal Filter: Civilization’s Brief Bloom
But the most devastating filter may be temporal. Traditional SETI assumes civilizations remain detectably technological for thousands or millions of years. CCI suggests the opposite: the phase during which a civilization broadcasts electromagnetic signals into space may be extraordinarily brief—perhaps only decades to centuries.
Consider the human trajectory. We’ve been radio-loud for roughly a century. But already:
• We’re transitioning from broadcast to narrowcast (cable, fiber, satellites)
• Our strongest signals are becoming more controlled and directional
• We’re developing AI systems that may fundamentally transform human civilization within this century
What comes after? Post-biological intelligence operating at computational speeds? A civilization that turns inward, exploring virtual realities? Self-annihilation? Deliberate silence to avoid dangerous contact?
We don’t know. But if the detectable technological phase (call it Lext) averages 50-200 years rather than 10,000-1,000,000 years, the probability of temporal overlap collapses. In a galaxy 13 billion years old, two civilizations with century-long detection windows need to be synchronized to within a cosmic eyeblink.
This isn’t speculation—it’s extrapolation from our own accelerating technological trajectory. And acceleration may be a universal property of technological intelligence.
The Mathematics of Solitude
The traditional Drake Equation multiplies probabilities: star formation rate × fraction with planets × habitable planets per system × fraction developing life × fraction developing intelligence × fraction developing communication × longevity of civilization.
Where C(I) captures propagation physics—distance, dispersion, scattering, beaming geometry. Each term is a probability distribution, not a point estimate.
In 2018, Oxford researchers Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan Ćirković performed a rigorous Bayesian analysis of Drake’s Equation using probability distributions for each parameter. Their conclusion? When uncertainties are properly handled, the probability that we are alone in the observable universe is substantial—not because life is impossible, but because the error bars are enormous.
CCI takes this Bayesian framework and adds the geological and temporal constraints. The result: a posterior probability distribution that is entirely consistent with both abundant prebiotic chemistry and persistent SETI nulls. No paradox required.
What We Should See (And Why We Don’t)
CCI makes testable predictions. If the framework is correct:
1. Biosignatures before technosignatures
Upcoming missions like the Habitable Worlds Observatory should detect atmospheric biosignatures (oxygen-methane disequilibria, possible vegetation edges) before detecting techno signatures. Simple biospheres should be discoverable; technospheres should remain elusive.
2. Continued SETI nulls
Radio and optical SETI campaigns will continue to find nothing—not because we’re searching wrong, but because the detectable population is genuinely sparse and temporally fleeting.
Detection of artificial spectral edges (like photovoltaic arrays reflecting at silicon’s UV-visible cutoff) or Dyson-sphere waste heat requires hundreds of hours of observation time even for nearby stars. Their absence at practical survey depths is predicted, not puzzling.
Importantly, CCI is falsifiable. A single unambiguous, repeatable interstellar signal would invalidate the short-Lext assumption. Multiple detections of artificial spectral features would refute the geological filter. The framework lives or dies by observation.
The Cosmos as Organism
There’s an almost biological elegance to this picture. The universe manufactures prebiotic molecules in stellar nurseries and delivers them via comets and asteroids—a kind of cosmic panspermia that doesn’t require directed intelligence, just chemistry and gravity. Call it the seeding phase.
Some of those seeds land on worlds with the right geological configuration—the awakening phase—where continents and oceans coexist long enough for complex cognition to emerge. This is rarer.
A tiny fraction of those awakenings reaches technological sophistication—the communicative phase—but this phase is fleeting, measured in decades to centuries before transformation or silence. This is rarest.
And even then, physical constraints—distance, timing, beaming, the sheer improbability of coordination—suppress detection. The isolation phase.
The cosmos isn’t hostile to intelligence. It’s just structured in a way that makes electromagnetic conversation between civilizations vanishingly unlikely—not impossible, just so improbable that null results after decades of searching are exactly what we’d expect.
Each civilization, then, is like a cell in a vast organism: seeded with the same chemical building blocks, developing according to local conditions, briefly active, then transforming or falling silent before contact with other cells occurs. Cellular Cosmic Isolation.
What This Means for Us
If CCI is correct, we should recalibrate our expectations without abandoning hope. SETI is not futile—it’s hunting for an extraordinarily rare phenomenon. Every null result tightens our probabilistic constraints and guides future searches. But we should also prepare for the possibility that we are, if not alone, then at least effectively alone during our detectable window.
This shifts the weight of responsibility. If technological civilizations are rare and fleeting, then ours carries unique value—not as a recipient of cosmic wisdom from older civilizations, but as a brief, precious experiment in consciousness. The burden falls on us to use our detectable phase wisely: to either extend it, transform it into something sustainable, or at least ensure we don’t waste it.
The universe seeds life generously. It’s indifferent to whether those seeds grow into forests or fade into silence. CCI suggests that the path from chemistry to conversation is longer, stranger, and more filtered than we imagined.
But the building blocks are everywhere. The recipe is universal. And somewhere, in the vast probabilistic landscape of possibility, other cells are awakening. We just may never hear them call out before they, like us, transform into something we wouldn’t recognize as a civilization at all.
That is not a paradox. That is simply the way the cosmos works.
Further Reading
Prebiotic Chemistry:
Furukawa, Y., et al. (2025). “Detection of sugars and nucleobases in asteroid Ryugu samples.” Nature Geoscience. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission (2023) also reported similar findings from Bennu.
Bayesian Drake Analysis:
Sandberg, A., Drexler, E., & Ord, T. (2018). “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox.” arXiv:1806.02404. Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.
Geological Filters:
Stern, R., & Gerya, T. (2024). “Plate tectonics and the evolution of continental crust: A rare Earth perspective.” Scientific Reports, 14.
SETI Null Results:
Choza, C., et al. (2024). “A 1-11 GHz Search for Radio Techno signatures from the Galactic Center.” Astronomical Journal. Breakthrough Listen campaign results.
Barrett, J., et al. (2025). “An Exoplanet Transit Search for Radio Techno signatures.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
Technosignature Detection:
Lingam, M., & Loeb, A. (2017). “Natural and Artificial Spectral Edges in Exoplanets.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, 470(1), L82-L86.
Kopparapu, R., et al. (2024). “Detectability of Solar Panels as a Techno signature.” Astrophysical Journal.
Wright, J. et al (2022). “The Case for Techno signatures: Why They May Be Abundant, Long-lived, and Unambiguous.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 927(2), L30.
Technology Acceleration:
Garrett, M. (2025). “The longevity of radio-emitting civilizations and implications for SETI.” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (forthcoming). See also earlier work on technological singularities and post-biological transitions.
I’ve written before of my disdain for use of the term “roller boards” (or the compound, “rollerboard”) in describing wheeled carry-ons. I’ve been hearing this lazy bastardization more and more, usually from flight attendants: “Ladies and gentlemen, please place your roller boards into the bins handle-first.” My what? We picture a wooden plank with wheels on it, or a surfboard strapped with roller skates.
What they’re meaning to say, of course, is roll-aboard. It’s a carry-on with wheels; you roll it aboard. This shouldn’t be difficult.
Well even airlines are using the garbled version now, as the photo above shows.
I have been writing about the Giant Magellan Telescope for a long time. Nearly two decades ago, for example, I wrote that time was "running out" in the race to build the next great optical telescope on the ground.
At the time the proposed telescope was one of three contenders to make a giant leap in mirror size from the roughly 10-meter-diameter instruments that existed then, to approximately 30 meters. This represented a huge increase in light-gathering potential, allowing astronomers to see much further into the universe—and therefore back into time—with far greater clarity.
Since then the projects have advanced at various rates. An international consortium to build the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii ran into local protests that have bogged down development. Its future came further into question when the US National Science Foundation dropped support for the project in favor of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Meanwhile the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) has advanced on a faster schedule, and this 39.5-meter telescope could observe its first light in 2029.
As Ars reported last week, NASA's plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch.
The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies.
Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in "phase two" of NASA's commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space. At some point later this year, the space agency is expected to select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.
And maybe after this letter sent to various European ambassadors, more people will realize this (note: Shifrin is a PBS Newshour correspondent):
Again, as I’ve been saying since 2017, Trump isn’t just a self-absorbed asshole, his untreated narcissism means he is delusional–and there is no one to force him to accommodate reality. This isn’t new, but this episode is really bad, and will do long-term damage to the U.S. as well as other countries.
In August of 2021, the Biden administration held an electric vehicle summit and decided not to invite Tesla or Elon Musk. At the time, I remember thinking that Biden had just made an enemy for life, …
A recent protest in Copenhagen over Donald Trump’s threat to seize Greenland (photo by Jens Cederskjold)
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It’s time to say it: The president of the United States has lost his mind.
That is not hyperbole. I (and many others) have often referred to things Donald Trump has done or said as insane, deranged, mad, or unhinged. He has always been ignorant and petty and vindictive and cruel and bigoted. But this is different. Something has broken in his brain.
Is it dementia? Is it an adverse reaction to the medications he is taking? I have no idea. I am not a psychologist, and I am not offering any specific medical diagnosis. But I’ll say it again: The president of the United States has lost his mind. This is not just a national emergency, it is a global emergency.
Nothing is assured, but over the last few days it has become a real possibility that Trump will literally take the United States to war against our European allies. It would be bonkers for almost any reason, let alone the impossibly stupid reason for which he is doing it. He wants to seize Greenland against the will of not only the people who live there but the American people as well — because he’s obsessing about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and because it looks really big on the misleading map he saw, and because he wants to destroy NATO, and because he is desperate to show how big and powerful he is.
We can debate just how much importance each of those factors plays in the discordant cacophony clanging about his fevered mind. But this crisis is escalating, because one of one disturbed man’s increasing disconnection from reality.
This is getting out of hand
Trump seems to have first gotten the idea of acquiring Greenland from his friend Ron Lauder, the cosmetics heir, late in his first term in office. Early in this term Trump began bringing it up again; he discussed it in a speech to Congress on March 4 of last year, saying “One way or the other, we’re going to get it” as J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson chuckled behind him. He even sent Vance on an embarrassing little trip to the island, so he could be photographed gazing determinedly at snow while the locals looked on in puzzlement. But most people treated it as though it were just another of Trump’s stupid ideas, like dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes. Surely he’d forget about it and move on. Which, for a while, he did.
But now it’s back, and he’s actually serious. The people of Greenland have no interest in becoming part of the United States (in a recent poll, 85% of them rejected the idea), and Denmark has no interest in handing it over. The American people think it’s absolutely ridiculous; in this Quinnipiac poll, not only does a large majority oppose “trying to buy Greenland” — which could only happen if Denmark wanted to sell it, which they don’t — but even more strikingly, respondents oppose using military force to acquire it by a remarkable 86-9%. The idea is about as popular as Jeffrey Epstein.
Meanwhile, our European allies have said they stand with Greenland and Denmark, so Trump is punishing them with tariffs on their goods — which of course means he’s raising taxes on Americans to stick it to Europe. For their part, the Europeans are considering retaliatory tariffs, and are beginning to sound fed up:
So Trump has now resorted to the threat that he’ll take Greenland by force. Which would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, obligating all NATO countries to come to Denmark’s defense. Congrats, we’d now have World War III.
And he sent this letter to the Norwegian prime minister:
Read that and tell me that the president of the United States has not lost his mind.
As many informed analysts have pointed out, there’s nothing we can get from Greenland by taking it over that we don’t already have. We have a military base there, and under the terms of a treaty we signed with Denmark in 1951, we can put as many more as we’d like. If we want to dig through the permafrost looking for minerals, that too can be easily arranged. Moreover, as almost no one seems to care about, it’s just wrong to invade a foreign land and take it over when almost no one there wants us. Invading Greenland would be wrong for the same reasons it was wrong when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
Really it is, to me, it’s ownership. Ownership is very important.
David E. Sanger:
Why is ownership important here?
President Trump:
Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.
David E. Sanger:
So you’re going to ask them to buy it?
Katie Rogers:
Psychologically important to you or to the United States?
President Trump:
Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.
It’s like a gangster showing up at your house and saying “I need you to hand over your house to me. It’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. Or I’ll kill you.” This is not a well man.
Democrats need to start speaking the truth, NOW
Democratic leaders in Congress have convinced themselves that since Americans care a great deal about affordability, the answer to every question about anything should be “That’s a distraction from the real issue: affordability.” But right now the president of the United States, among all the other terrible things he is doing, is literally dragging the country toward a world war, and not against our enemies but against our friends.
They need to start saying this loudly and repeatedly:
Donald Trump has lost his mind. He is unstable and reckless, and his cabinet must invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office.
Many Democrats will say “But that’s not up to us. His cabinet would never do that!” They would say that because they are terrible at politics. The point isn’t that they could actually persuade the collection of simpering goons with which Trump has surrounded himself to remove him. The point is to get everyone focused on this crisis, to get the news media talking about it, to change the operative question from “Should we invade Greenland?” to “Has the president lost his mind, and if so, what should we do about it?”
We’ve all seen how Trump is a different person than he was in his first term, with all of his worst qualities intensified and exaggerated. He’s angrier, less coherent, more resentful, more distractible, more hateful, and more impulsive. Whether it was one event or the accumulated degradations of age, the unavoidable fact is that the most powerful person on earth is no longer of sound mind. We can’t avoid it any longer.
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We ate breakfast at a different place every day for the week I was in México in December. I only spent two nights in México City, due to Christmas week crowds. (I’m never going anywhere during Christmas week again: hotels are crowded, rental cars are expensive, flights are overbooked, airports crowded.)
Five out of the seven nights of my week there, I stayed at a really nice hotel in Texcoco, 15 miles northeast of México City, about $70 per night. Texcoco is a real Mexican town; I would guess it derives no income from tourists, as I don’t remember seeing a single American while I was there.
It’s got a history going back to the time of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec island city that was destroyed by the Spanish in the 1500s. Texcoco was an important city in its relation to the capitol, a crucial partner in the Aztec Triple Alliance.
On December 28th, Chilón and Carolina picked me up, and we headed out of town for a late breakfast; I had no idea where we were going.
After winding through the foothills, we got to the town of Purificación (altitude 7800 feet), and the El Pica 1 Barbacoa. We parked, and walked through a canopy of hanging plants into a large area with maybe 50-60 tables under shaded leafy canopies, many counters offering different foods, and the aromas of smoke and earth.
Some 500 pounds of lamb are cooked daily here, in traditional wood-fired pit ovens, wrapped and sealed in agave leaves, then cooked for 11 hours, braising and steaming in their own juices while consommeis collected below. Yah!
Barbacoa is “…an ancient, primitive method for cooking, steaming or roasting foods in holes or pits,” according to Wikipedia
Wood is loaded here for the underground ovens.
It’s the kind of place Anthony Bourdain would have loved.
The routine: you pick a table, and then someone in your group starts standing in lines for the food. First you start with a portion of the lamb, then blue corn tortillas (!!), salsa, cilantro, avocados and various other toppings, bring it all to the table, and assemble your tacos. Waitresses bring you drinks; I had some pulque. We all had consommé, then put together our tortillas. Man, was it good!
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I feel so privileged to go to places like this with Chilón. We have the same tastes, the same approach to adventures in life. He says “A life without adventure is no life.” We’ve explored te Los Cabos area of Baja for years: cave paintings, hot springs, arroyos with waterfalls, fossil areas, remote beaches, as well as the insanity of Cabo San Lucas.
Chilon and me with his sons Daniel and Cesar
I’ve said this before, but not only do we go on adventures en México, but his good-naturedness has people smiling and usually laughing all the time. It’s like I’m riding shotgun inside a bubble of good vibes and happiness. So wonderful in this day and age of so much darkness in America,
“Parking lot for my mother-in-law” Reminds me of the ‘50s song “Mother in Law” by Ernie K-Doe: “If she’d leave us alone, we would have a happy home”
$28 for beautiful lambskins
On the way home:
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A short post. Today doesn’t seem like a day for charts and number-crunching.
I had never heard the term “sundowning” before it happened to my own father, yet it’s a fairly common syndrome. In his last few months my father remained lucid and rational — remained himself — during daylight hours. Once the sun went down he deteriorated, becoming confused, paranoid and aggressive.
It’s terrible to watch sundowning in someone you love. But that’s a personal tragedy – not a national or global one. It’s an entirely different matter when the president of the United States is sundowning — a president surrounded by malign sycophants who tell him whatever he wants to hear and indulge his every whim, no matter how destructive.
For good reasons, it’s normally bad practice to pronounce on someone’s mental health from afar. Some of us still remember when right-wing pundits liked to call anyone critical of George W. Bush mentally ill. But after reading the letter that Trump just sent to the prime minister of Norway (Jonas Gahr Størehas confirmed that it’s genuine) there should be no doubt that we have a president who is suffering a real detachment from reality:
Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.
I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
This might not exactly be sundowning, since it’s not clear that Trump is lucid and rational at any time of the day. What is incontrovertible is that he’s deeply unwell and rapidly getting sicker.
In fact, Trump is so deeply unwell that it’s time to stop blaming him for all the terrible things he’s doing. He is what he is. Responsibility for the catastrophe overtaking America now rests with his enablers — people who have to know that he’s a sick man but continue to support his depredations.
Some of these enablers are monsters themselves. For example, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar and the architect of his violent ethnic cleansing policies, is clearly a fanatic who is using Trump to achieve his own fascist goals.
However, many of Trump’s enablers aren’t fanatics, just amoral opportunists. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, clearly understands how destructive Trump’s actions are, evidenced by the fact that he has at times tried to tone them down. But for some inexplicable reason, Bessent has decided to sell his soul to Trump.
And then there are those who revel in the reflected glory, who are such utter narcissists that they’re willing to destroy this country in return for the limelight and perks. In that camp we can find Pete Hegseth with his Pentagon makeup studio, who is purging the finest officers in the military; Kristi Noem with her Barbie-in-a-10-gallon-hat act, who positively gushes while calling a murdered mother a terrorist; and Kash Patel, who thinks its fine to fly on an FBI jet to watch his girlfriend sing while overseeing the debasement and corruption of the FBI.
And what can we say about the cowardly Republicans in Congress, who are still sustaining Trump even though many of them – perhaps most of them – are privately appalled by his behavior? It would take just eight of these people — four Republican senators and four Republican House members — to switch sides and caucus with the Democrats to end G.O.P. control of Congress and eliminate much of Trump’s power. But taking such a step would mean risking Trump’s wrath by standing up and acting like patriots, rather than knuckling down and averting their eyes as Trump descends into madness.
How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia? That’s an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what’s more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don’t try to sugarcoat and sanewash what’s happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America.
Plenty of people have mused about what a new programming language specifically designed to be used by LLMs might look like. Jordan Hubbard (co-founder of FreeBSD, with serious stints at Apple and NVIDIA) just released exactly that.
A minimal, LLM-friendly programming language with mandatory testing and unambiguous syntax.
NanoLang transpiles to C for native performance while providing a clean, modern syntax optimized for both human readability and AI code generation.
The syntax strikes me as an interesting mix between C, Lisp and Rust.
I decided to see if an LLM could produce working code in it directly, given the necessary context. I started with this MEMORY.md file, which begins:
Purpose: This file is designed specifically for Large Language Model consumption. It contains the essential knowledge needed to generate, debug, and understand NanoLang code. Pair this with spec.json for complete language coverage.
llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \
-s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMORY.md \
'Build me a mandelbrot fractal CLI tool in this language'
> /tmp/fractal.nano
I may have been too optimistic expecting a one-shot working program for a new language like this. So I ran a clone of the actual project, copied in my program and had Claude Code take a look at the failing compiler output.
... and it worked! Claude happily grepped its way through the various examples/ and built me a working program.
I've suspected for a while that LLMs and coding agents might significantly reduce the friction involved in launching a new language. This result reinforces my opinion.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.
The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.
"This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."
"The economics job market is getting buffeted by a confluence of forces. Worries about federal funding have led many major universities to reduce, or even freeze, hiring. Jobs within the federal government have dried up. The private sector, where demand for economists has been intense in recent years, has pulled back.
“It’s like a perfect storm,” said Syracuse University economist John Cawley, who heads the American Economic Association’s job market committee.
"The tough market for doctoral students finishing up their studies is hardly unique to economics. What’s different about economists is that they are intensely interested in measuring and understanding how labor markets work—and they have brought that to bear on their own profession. As a result, armed with data from the AEA and all the knowledge they gained in graduate school, doctoral students in economics have a much more precise grasp of what type of environment they are facing than their counterparts in political science, philosophy or biophysics.
...
"The economics job market has its own peculiar rhythms and hierarchies. In the fall, students who are finishing their Ph.D.s, as well as economists in postdoctoral programs, apply for jobs that typically start the following summer. But because students can apply to dozens, or even hundreds, of jobs, this creates a matching problem: How does a prospective employer know which candidates are serious?
"Economists, being economists, have tried to solve this. When a candidate applies for jobs via JOE, they are able to send up to two “signals” of interest for jobs they are particularly interested in—almost like a winking emoji on a dating app. That signaling system was put together with the help of Stanford economist Alvin Roth, who also developed systems for matching kidney donors with patients and New York City schoolchildren with schools."
Yes, it’s still record warm out West and the snowpack really is that bad (outside of central/southern Sierra) I’ll keep this part pretty short: it has been an absurdly warm winter thus far across nearly the entire American West, including most of California. One of the only exceptions has been CA’s Central Valley, where episodes […]
The great biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, gave his retirement lecture at UNC. It’s an excellent overview on the theme of the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. After encomiums, Bart starts around the 13:30 mark with about 10 minutes of amusing biography. He gets into the meat of the lecture at 24:38 which is where it is cued.
The President of the United States wrote something that I knew had to be fake.
It just had to be fake.
Right?
Alas, no. It is real. He is basically saying, “Since you refused to praise me for bringing peace to the world, I will FUCKING ATTACK YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE AND KICK YOUR ASSES LIKE JOHN RAMBO! IT’S ON, MOFOS! IT’S ON!”
Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”
International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.
This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”
“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”
In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.
In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.
Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.
This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”
The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.
And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.
Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.
Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.
Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.
He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.
Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.
Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.
Moreover, China’s expanding leadership in scientific production has not translated into a commensurate shift in global diffusion and integration. Elite research remains disproportionately focused on US topics (40% of breakthrough publications), and citations to Chinese research disproportionately come from within China rather than from other regions, even for top-tier science.
Not all rings are forged in fantasy, my precious! For astronomers, they are found in space. The ones in today’s Picture of the Week are debris discs: the leftovers of planet formation around other stars.
Even our Solar System has a debris disc, known as the Kuiper Belt, where numerous asteroids and comets encircle the Sun beyond Neptune’s orbit. It is believed that the influence of large planets like Neptune prevented the dust and pebbles in this region from clumping together and forming larger bodies. Therefore, debris discs can be seen as remnants of planetary formation, and studying those around other stars is key to understanding the birth of planetary systems.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers has obtained high-resolution images of 24 debris discs around other stars. The orange images in this Picture of the Week show the distribution of dust in these discs, and the blue ones the distribution of gas in 6 of them.
The origin of gas in debris discs is debated: it could be leftover primordial gas that was present around the star from the beginning, or gas released later on as dust grains collided with each other. The debris disc around the star HD 121617, shown here in the two images at the top-right, is very interesting in this regard. The dust ring (orange) is brighter on one side, indicating a higher concentration of dust grains there. The team found that a vortex of gas could trap dust particles there, but only if the density of gas is very high. Such a high density of gas would be more consistent with this gas being of primordial origin. Further analysis of the full sample of debris discs will tell us more about the secrets of these precious rings.
The southernmost extent of mainland Canada, along the northern shore of Lake Erie, lies at about the same latitude as Des Moines, Iowa. Though not a “breadbasket” like the grain-producing machine that is the U.S. Midwest, this part of southwestern Ontario holds its own as an agricultural powerhouse. In the Leamington area, growers cultivate vegetables and other crops within millions of square feet of greenhouse space.
Commercial greenhouse operations began to gain a foothold in this area in the 1960s and 1970s as technology advanced and regional demand for fresh vegetables increased. Since then, the industry has continued to grow, securing Leamington’s reputation as the “greenhouse capital of North America.”
The growth in greenhouse extent in the past decade alone is apparent in satellite imagery. These images, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, show how the Leamington area changed between July 2015 (left) and September 2025 (right). By 2025, many more light-colored greenhouse roofs are visible, especially to the north and west of the town.
Greenhouses occupy nearly 8 square kilometers (2,000 acres) in the Leamington area, according to the municipality, representing the largest concentration of greenhouses in North America. The facilities primarily produce vegetables such as tomatoes, seedless cucumbers, and peppers, in addition to other crops including strawberries and cannabis.
The industry has changed not only the appearance of the daytime landscape but also the nighttime sky. Supplemental LED lighting, used to sustain growing operations year-round, emits purple, orange, and yellow glows that have been spotted as far away as Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) away, according to news reports.
November 14, 2020
Light pollution around Leamington concerns some ecologists because of its proximity to Point Pelee, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) to the southeast. This dagger-shaped piece of land jutting into Lake Erie lies along migration routes for many birds, as well as monarch butterflies. These winged travelers congregate on the peninsula before or after crossing the lake, and artificial light at night can affect their ability to navigate.
Recent measures around Leamington, however, have cut down on light pollution, according to reports. A town bylaw passed in 2022 requires greenhouses using lights to install light-blocking wall and ceiling curtains and to close them at night. Researchers from the University of Guelph collected sky brightness measurements in the region between fall 2022 and spring 2023. They found that the curtains were effective when used properly, though factors like cloud cover, fog, and the Moon’s phase still had a significant impact on brightness levels.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Rob L’Ecuyer. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
This is one of my major worries for 2026 and beyond. The ethnic and tribal conflict in Ethiopia is not finished, and it killed 700,000 people not long ago. Ethiopia still covets sea access and Eritrea, which at times in the past belong to Ethiopia anyway. Israel has recognized Somaliland, with a variety of other countries, including the United States, likely to follow. For Somalia, that is akin to an act of war because it dismembers what they perceive as their country. Somalia and Ethiopia still have troubles. Ethiopia and Egypt have a major dispute over water rights, a possible casus belli.
The United States, and thus other countries too, might recognize South Yemen, in an attempt to better control Gulf access. This is not nominally Africa but it is a very real African issue as well.
Saudi and UAE are no longer close in a manner that enable them to collectively bring order to the area. More generally, political property rights are weak in the region, many borders are contested, and there is no generally acknowledged legitimate referee. UAE is seeking to play a larger role, perhaps with a good deal of hubris. Trump is Trump.
One of the relatively few AI-native products I use is
Cora.computer which summarizes my personal inbox.
It’s not perfect, but it’s done a much better job than my collection of
filters at managing the ever-growing onslaught of spam and unsolicited email
that flows in.
I’ve run into a few issues with Cora, which ended up in me following folks
at Every to report the issues, and more recently this
led me to see their work on compound engineering and specifically the compound-engineering-plugin.
Compound Engineering is two extremely well-known patterns, one moderately well-known pattern,
and one pattern that I think many practitioners have intuited but have not found a consistent
mechanism to implement. Those patterns are:
Plan is decoupling implementation from research. This is well understood, e.g. Claude’s plan mode,
although it can certainly be done better or worse by being more specific about which resources to
consult (specs, PRDs, RFCS, issues, etc)
Work is implementing a plan. This is well understood, and the core of agentic coding.
Again, this can be done better or worse, but much of that depends more on the quality of
your codebase, tests, and continuous integration harness than the agent itself
Review is asking the agent to review the changes against your best-practices,
and identify ways it could be improved. I think most practitioners have some version
of this, but standardization is low, even within a given company.
Compound is asking the agent to summarize its learnings from a given task into
a well-defined, structured format (basically a wiki) which is consulted by future iterations
of the plan pattern. This interplay between the compound and plan steps creates
the compounding mechanism.
Many practitioners are implicitly compounding, but it’s often done manually through their own
work. For example, I’d often ask the agent to update our AGENTS.md or skills based on a specific
problem encountered in a task, but it required my active attention to notice the issue and
suggest incorporation.
Taken together, these four steps are not shocking but are an extremely effective way to
convert these intuited best-practices into something specific, concrete, and largely automatic
within a company by adding a few commands (e.g. workflow:plan, workflow:review, …) and updating
your AGENTS.md to instruct the agent when and how to use those commands.
Implementing within Imprint’s frontend and backend monorepos was straightforward, taking about an hour.
Most of this was iterating on the last mile of details, for example we want our plans in .claude/plan-*.md
format to match our existing .gitignore pattern, and none of it was complex.
Most importantly, this frees up a topic that many of our engineers (including me) were trying to
find a standard approach. Now we have one, and can move on to the next problem.
If recent history is our guide, it’s a solid guess that many of the practices in compound engineering
will get absorbed into the Claude Code and Cursor harnesses over the next couple of months,
at which point using these techniques explicitly will be indistinguishable from folks who
are entirely unaware they’re using them. But we’ll see. Until then, this is a cheap, useful experiment
that you can implement in an hour.
Tom Fairless, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; here’s a News+ link too):
The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at
Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only
a small fraction of the tariff costs were being borne by foreign
producers.
By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and
November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign
exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S.
tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American
consumers and importers absorbed 96%. [...]
Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs
functioned as a consumption tax on Americans, the report said.
“There is no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to
the U.S. in the form of tariffs,” said Julian Hinz, an
economics professor at Germany’s Bielefeld University who
co-authored the study.
This is what economists expected, but it’s always important to measure actual results, no matter how obvious the conclusions seem in advance. But this one feels like we could file it next to “Sun continues to rise in east, set in west.”
From Apple’s iPhone Mirroring documentation, boldface emphasis added:
Click to tap: Click your mouse or trackpad to tap. You can also swipe and scroll in the iPhone Mirroring app, and use your keyboard to type.
Open the App Switcher: Move your pointer to the top of the iPhone Mirroring screen until the menu bar appears, then click to open the App Switcher.
Go to the Home Screen: If you’re in an app and want to return to the Home Screen, move your pointer to the top of the iPhone Mirroring screen until the menu bar appears, then click .
It certainly sounds like these instructions are for users who, sadly, have the menu bar hidden by default. But there are no or buttons in the menu bar. These buttons are in the iPhone Mirroring window title bar, which is, for all users, hidden by default:
but which presents a proper window title bar when the mouse pointer is hovering in the area where the title bar will appear:
Since I’m feeling generous, I’ll chalk this up to an absentminded mistake on the part of Apple’s documentation team. If I were feeling cynical, I would instead suspect that Apple has so lost the plot on the Mac that they now employ documentation writers and editors who do not understand the difference between the menu bar and window title bars. (It doesn’t help that the iPhone Mirroring window title bar, like so many windows in Apple’s recent Mac apps, doesn’t have a title.)
But more importantly, in practical terms — what would be the
point? Since 2011, I’ve run a small font business. Not long
after I release a font, it will be uploaded to some public
pirate-software website. I can’t control that. Like every other
kind of digital-media file, anyone who wants to pirate my fonts
can do so if sufficiently motivated.
For that reason — and independent of copyright law — my business
necessarily runs on something more akin to the honor system. I try
to make nice fonts, price my licenses fairly, and thereby make
internet strangers enthusiastic about sending me money rather than
going to pirate websites. Enough of them do. My business
continues. (Indeed, in terms of rational economic choice, I’ve
argued that software piracy doesn’t exist.)
Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the
Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel
an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be
predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for
the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land
from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership”
anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat
landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing
there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since
its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United
States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total
Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
Trump’s Venezuela operation was brazenly illegal. But it wasn’t crazy. Venezuela was not a U.S. ally. President Nicolas Maduro lost an election but stayed in power. Venezuela was producing military drones for the hostile regime in Iran, a self-declared enemy of the U.S., NATO, and Israel. Venezuela had a burgeoning alliance with China, the U.S.’s primary geopolitical rival.
What Trump is threatening with Greenland is simply bonkers. Greenland is under no threat from China or Russia because it’s part of NATO, and thus — ostensibly — under the full protection of the entire NATO alliance including and especially the United States. If China or Russia attempted to take Greenland it would trigger a world war led by the United States. Compare and contrast with Ukraine and Taiwan. Ukraine, long before Vladimir Putin invaded, was known to be under threat of Russian invasion. Taiwan has long been known to be threatened by China. These threats have been in our geopolitical discourse for decades because the threats were real (and, unfortunately, came to pass in Ukraine).
No one has ever talked about Greenland being under threat of takeover by Russia or China because there is no such threat. It’s no more realistic than Russia taking over Alaska or China taking over Hawaii. It sounds nuts because it is nuts, and the threat only exists in Trump’s disintegrating mind.
Eight of our NATO allies have made clear, through action, not mere words, their intention to defend Greenland. Trump, obviously angry that our ostensible allies won’t just roll over and accede to his madness, is now petulantly turning to his favorite word, tariffs. If that’s “the hard way”, that’s pathetic. Stand up to bullies and they usually fold.
The threat to Greenland, and thus to NATO — and thus, quite literally, to the entire world — is not that Trump authorized an illegal military operation in Venezuela, so he might do it in Greenland too. Again, what the U.S. did in Venezuela was obviously illegal, and probably stupid, but it wasn’t crazy. Breaking up NATO and starting a war with Europe would be batshit crazy. The threat is that Trump is showing us, every day, that he is crazy. Crazy people do crazy things, and crazy cult leaders surround themselves with cultists. The rest of us need to stop sane-washing this. You cannot make sense out of nonsense.
If Trump declares that the U.S. is laying claim to all of the green cheese on the moon — say, to lower the price of dairy groceries — the news media should not respond with fact-finding articles with headlines like “How Much Cheese Is on the Moon?” They should respond with headlines like “How Many Marbles Are Left in Trump’s Dementia-Addled Head?” But threatening to take Greenland by military force is nuttier than laying claim to the moon’s cheese. Laying claim to non-existent green cheese wouldn’t trigger a shooting war that blows apart the most powerful alliance in military history.
There’s a point I want to make about this issue of state power as a bulwark against corrupt efforts to overthrow the constitutional order. It’s a small point and it’s perhaps implicit in the discussion to this point. But it’s important so I want to draw it out a bit.
As separate though subordinate sovereignties, the states have a vast pool of sovereign authority, much more than a lot of state officers themselves appear to realize. A lot of that is affirmative authority and authority so deeply embedded in explicit constitutional mandates that it is difficult for even a corrupt judiciary to take from them. But it’s not only affirmative power. It’s also the power to resist and not be pinned down. That well of sovereign power creates a lot of ability to bob and weave, evade and parry against a corrupt assault from a renegade executive.
In a sense it is a version of the old saw that possession is 9/10ths of the law. States not only have a lot of sovereign power. They own a lot of the country’s power-in-depth, the on-the-ground day-to-day-life power that most people experience in their daily lives. They own it and it is difficult to pry away from them, even in the face of adverse court decisions. Those sovereign powers and the ownership of so much state machinery creates a sort of free space to parry and evade, a space to play for time, that is extremely important in a moment like this. It may prove even more important than the more affirmative powers. And it is all justified because the federal power is now in corrupt, anti-constitutional hands. The country’s republican traditions have retreated to the Free States.
When I first started making these argument about state sovereign power, I saw a rebuttal (not to me but the general argument) that states or provinces simply lacked the power to maintain republican government when it’s been lost at the federal level. But that’s not the point. It would be foolish to imagine that the U.S. could become an autocracy at the federal level and civic democratic government could maintain itself in New York or California or Minnesota. The point is that the states can be a redoubt where the opposition to Trumpism can hold out, collect its forces, build power while it works to reestablish constitutional government at the federal level. So parrying, playing for time is in many ways the whole game.
The supremacy of federal law is a powerful, powerful weapon even in the hands of a corrupt executive. The supremacy is there for a reason. It’s the basis of the federal union, what makes the United States a nation-state and not a league or a customs union. And certainly the current, largely corrupted federal judiciary will aggressively uphold that supremacy. But even when states lose in the courts they can still refuse to put state power to work for that federal executive. They can simply not do it. A mayor or a governor can simply decline to put state policing power to work for the corrupt executive’s ends. The federal government and the courts have ways of dealing with such non-compliance, but not terribly good or fast ways. The simple fact that the lines of executive power in the federal government and within the states are not connected — no tether binds them to each other — has a vast importance which has yet to be fully appreciated.
Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device captures audio, listening for sounds of distress. Outside, drones stand ready to be deployed and provide intel from above, and license plate readers from $8.5 billion surveillance behemoth Flock Safety ensure the cars entering and exiting the parking lot aren’t driven by criminals.
This isn’t a high-security government facility. It’s Beverly Hills High School.
Last April, I asked a simple question ‘Who Are the Real Experts Now?” But the situation has taken an unexpected twist. So I now have a more troubling issue to address.
There’s disturbing evidence that a growing number of experts cited in the media simply don’t exist. And they are showcased in some of the most prestigious newspapers and online platforms.
Please support my work by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month—or less).
A group of journalists recently tried to verify the existence of 50 experts featured more than a thousand times in prominent articles. But these people can’t be found in the real world. In many instances, the articles include a photo that appears to be AI-generated.
This might just be the tip of the iceberg. We may have entered a final stage in the collapse of expertise—with no path back to safety.
Up and to White Hall, and while the Duke is dressing himself I went to wait on my Lord Sandwich, whom I found not very well, and Dr. Clerke with him. He is feverish, and hath sent for Mr. Pierce to let him blood, but not being in the way he puts it off till night, but he stirs not abroad to-day. Then to the Duke, and in his closett discoursed as we use to do, and then broke up. That done, I singled out Mr. Coventry into the Matted Gallery, and there I told him the complaints I meet every day about our Treasurer’s or his people’s paying no money, but at the goldsmith’s shops, where they are forced to pay fifteen or twenty sometimes per cent. for their money, which is a most horrid shame, and that which must not be suffered. Nor is it likely that the Treasurer (at least his people) will suffer Maynell the Goldsmith to go away with 10,000l. per annum, as he do now get, by making people pay after this manner for their money.
We were interrupted by the Duke, who called Mr. Coventry aside for half an hour, walking with him in the gallery, and then in the garden, and then going away I ended my discourse with Mr. Coventry. But by the way Mr. Coventry was saying that there remained nothing now in our office to be amended but what would do of itself every day better and better, for as much as he that was slowest, Sir W. Batten, do now begin to look about him and to mind business. At which, God forgive me! I was a little moved with envy, but yet I am glad, and ought to be, though it do lessen a little my care to see that the King’s service is like to be better attended than it was heretofore.
Thence by coach to Mr. Povy’s, being invited thither by [him] came a messenger this morning from him, where really he made a most excellent and large dinner, of their variety, even to admiration, he bidding us, in a frolique, to call for what we had a mind, and he would undertake to give it us: and we did for prawns, swan, venison, after I had thought the dinner was quite done, and he did immediately produce it, which I thought great plenty, and he seems to set off his rest in this plenty and the neatness of his house, which he after dinner showed me, from room to room, so beset with delicate pictures, and above all, a piece of perspective in his closett in the low parler; his stable, where was some most delicate horses, and the very-racks painted, and mangers, with a neat leaden painted cistern, and the walls done with Dutch tiles, like my chimnies. But still, above all things, he bid me go down into his wine-cellar, where upon several shelves there stood bottles of all sorts of wine, new and old, with labells pasted upon each bottle, and in the order and plenty as I never saw books in a bookseller’s shop; and herein, I observe, he puts his highest content, and will accordingly commend all that he hath, but still they deserve to be so. Here dined with me Dr. Whore and Mr. Scawen.
Therewith him and Mr. Bland, whom we met by the way, to my Lord Chancellor’s, where the King was to meet my Lord Treasurer, &c., many great men, to settle the revenue of Tangier. I staid talking awhile there, but the King not coming I walked to my brother’s, where I met my cozen Scotts (Tom not being at home) and sent for a glass of wine for them, and having drunk we parted, and I to the Wardrobe talking with Mr. Moore about my law businesses, which I doubt will go ill for want of time for me to attend them.
So home, where I found Mrs. Lodum speaking with my wife about her kinswoman which is offered my wife to come as a woman to her.
So to the office and put things in order, and then home and to bed, it being my great comfort that every day I understand more and more the pleasure of following of business and the credit that a man gets by it, which I hope at last too will end in profit.
This day, by Dr. Clerke, I was told the occasion of my Lord Chesterfield’s going and taking his lady (my Lord Ormond’s daughter) from Court. It seems he not only hath been long jealous of the Duke of York, but did find them two talking together, though there were others in the room, and the lady by all opinions a most good, virtuous woman. He, the next day (of which the Duke was warned by somebody that saw the passion my Lord Chesterfield was in the night before), went and told the Duke how much he did apprehend himself wronged, in his picking out his lady of the whole Court to be the subject of his dishonour; which the Duke did answer with great calmness, not seeming to understand the reason of complaint, and that was all that passed but my Lord did presently pack his lady into the country in Derbyshire, near the Peake; which is become a proverb at Court, to send a man’s wife to the Devil’s arse a’ Peake, when she vexes him.
This noon I did find out Mr. Dixon at Whitehall, and discoursed with him about Mr. Wheatly’s daughter for a wife for my brother Tom, and have committed it to him to enquire the pleasure of her father and mother concerning it. I demanded 300l..
A key antenna in NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) that was damaged last fall is expected to remain offline until May, followed by extended downtime for upgrades.
Jared Isaacman made something unmistakably clear during his confirmation hearing as NASA Administrator: time is not on America’s side. The United States is no longer alone in deep space ambition, and the race to return humans to the moon is strategic, geopolitical and urgent — not just symbolic. China has declared its intent with regards […]
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force has ended an exploratory effort to add smaller, lower-cost navigation satellites to bolster the Global Positioning System, shelving a program that had been identified as a priority. The effort, known as Resilient GPS, or R-GPS, began in 2024 and funded three industry teams to develop designs and early prototypes […]
For many people living with chronic illness or long-term disability, applying for disability benefits seems like a straightforward step toward financial stability. Yet a significant number of claims are denied, even when applicants have well-documented health conditions that limit their ability to work.
These denials often reflect systemic issues within the disability determination process rather than the severity of an individual’s condition. This article sheds light on broader gaps in how disability claims are evaluated and why access to benefits remains uneven.
The Gap Between Diagnosis and Eligibility
A medical diagnosis alone is rarely enough to secure disability benefits. While applicants may have conditions such as autoimmune disorders, degenerative diseases, or serious mental health impairments, disability systems typically focus on how those conditions affect functional capacity over time.
Decision-makers rely on strict criteria that measure whether an individual can perform sustained work activities. Claims can get denied if medical records do not clearly document limitations such as reduced mobility, cognitive impairment, or the inability to maintain consistent attendance. This disconnect often surprises applicants, particularly those who assume that severity equals eligibility for benefits.
Documentation Standards Create Barriers
One of the most common reasons for denial is insufficient medical evidence. Disability examiners depend heavily on clinical notes, test results, and physician statements to assess a claim. When records are incomplete, outdated, or lack detail about day-to-day limitations, they may not meet the threshold required for approval.
This problem is further compounded by uneven access to healthcare. Individuals who cannot afford frequent specialist visits or who rely on overstretched public health systems may have gaps in their records. These gaps can be interpreted as a lack of severity, even when symptoms are ongoing and debilitating. In many cases, denials are tied less to the absence of illness and more to the way medical information is recorded and presented.
Inconsistent Evaluations Across Cases
Disability determinations are not always consistent. Different reviewers may interpret the same medical evidence differently, leading to varying outcomes for applicants with similar conditions. Factors such as workload, time constraints, and subjective judgment can influence decisions.
Without clear benchmarks, applicants may struggle to demonstrate impairment in a way that aligns with administrative expectations. This inconsistency is particularly visible in cases involving conditions that fluctuate or are difficult to measure objectively, such as
Chronic pain,
Fatigue-related disorders
Mental health conditions.
The Role of Appeals in the System
A denied claim does not always mark the end of the process. Many applicants eventually receive benefits through appeals, suggesting that initial decisions may not fully capture the realities of a person’s condition. Appeals often involve additional medical documentation, more detailed functional assessments, or clarification of earlier records.
Public reporting and legal analysis give us a lot of insight into the rationale behind denials. Some common denominators include reliance on technical documentation standards rather than holistic evaluations of health. Resources that explain common warning signs in the process, such as those highlighting insufficient medical evidence, can help folks understand where claims tend to break down.
Endnote
Disability claim denials often stem from procedural and evidentiary challenges rather than the absence of serious health conditions. Recognizing these systemic barriers is an important step toward more transparent, consistent, and equitable access to disability benefits.
Britain is seeing early signs of a long-awaited turnaround of its productivity woes, according to an alternative measure that suggests output per hour worked has risen at a pace not seen since before the financial crisis.
The Resolution Foundation said a “blistering” productivity surge has been masked by problems with official statistics and pointed to encouraging indications of a clearout of “zombie” firms that contribute little to the economy.
Productivity growth, when measured using the Office for National Statistics’ troubled Labour Force Survey, was just 1.1% in the year through the third quarter of 2025. But the figures look far better when based on employee payrolls data that are more trusted by economists, the think tank said.
“Productivity was essentially flat between the pre-pandemic peak of Q4 2019 and post-pandemic trough of Q1 2024, but it has grown by a blistering 3.4% in the six quarters after that, a rate not seen since before the financial crisis,” the Resolution Foundation said in a report published Monday. Those gains are more than the previous seven years combined, it added.
2. New Yorker interview with Amanda Seyfrieds (of Ann Lee fame). An interesting movie, by the way. 28 Years Later is also very good, though too gory for most people, myself included. Watch it if you can.
Of course, there are some who want to abolish ICE who do want completely open borders, but many simply want ICE to go away because some of us have been warning people for years (I wrote about this in 2017) that ICE would be used to harass and oppress both immigrants and U.S. citizens.
In other words, one reason to abolish ICE* (and then replace it with something like the old INS) is we can then de facto fire all of the existing personnel, many of whom are jackbooted thugs. INS was not great**, but it also was not a de facto fascist paramilitary either. Abolishing ICE is a pragmatic move for a pro-democracy movement.
But as long as pundits in respectable outlets describe “abolish ICE” as equivalent to “open borders”, we won’t have the important discussion about
*Abolish ICE, I would argue, also serves as a shorthand for curtailing the authority of CBP too. Which is also a good thing.
**There is a discussion the country needs to have about increasing the amount of allowed immigrants, the need for political asylum (we should allow more asylum seekers), and so on. The reality is that we have a restrictive immigration system, which often is not enforced as brutally as it could be due to our decades long Article I crisis. Also, it’s part of a larger discussion about the size and importance of our internal security forces. That said, ICE represents a different threat entirely.
Many, many years ago, at my childhood house in the Santa Cruz mountains, I grabbed a shovel and started to dig a hole.
Why? Unclear. I was six or seven. I’d seen what my Dad could do with a shovel, so one afternoon…. I started digging, and by the time evening approached, my Dad walked out, “So, wha’cha doing there?”
At the time of the hole intervention, I’d been at my hole digging for a couple of hours, and while that sounds like a lot of time, I was only two or three feet deep in a hole maybe the size of a picnic table. The removed dirt was tossed carelessly in every direction.
“I’m digging a hole.”
“I see that. Wha’cha planning on doing with that hole?”
No real answer at the ready. Like pulling a stick from a stream, I was mostly enthralled with the act of digging a hole. I dodged his question, “Yeah, I think I’m going to need some wooden columns here at some point. Ya’know, to hold the ceiling up when I get that far.”
Dad, “Uh huh.” The hole was three or four feet deep — barely above my knees. And it was getting dark.
I continued, “And I am worried about moisture…. ya’know? Dripping from the ceiling.”
Dad, “Yeah. I get that.” Barely to my seven-year old knees.
The digging continued for another hour. I’d discovered blisters (no gloves) and also dirt was now falling back into the hole with each shovel-full (no solid dirt extraction plan), but my Dad stood there the entire time. Question continued:
Dad: “Maybe we should get you a wheelbarrow? You could move the dirt into the ravine.” I ignored him and kept digging.
Me: “Dad, do we have a wooden chest? Where could we keep my stuff in the cave? Like a treasure chest?” Dad, “I’m sure we could figure that out.”
You think you know how this story ends, and you’re mostly correct. We covered my picnic-table-sized shallow hole with a piece of plywood to “make sure no one falls in.” My plan was to finish digging the following day, but I have no memory of that picnic-table-sized hole after that night. I’m sure I visited it the next day, but the interest had vanished.
I don’t remember this story because of the picnic-table-sized shallow hole; I remember this story because of my Dad. He walked out of the house and found his young son digging a random hole on the property. No plan, poorly equipped, but enthusiastically digging. He stood there asking questions, not judging. Supporting the dream.
Just letting me gleefully dig.
He taught me that no one knows where inspiration comes from — only that it’s fragile, invaluable, and fleeting.
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents:
This post describes what we've learned from running hundreds of concurrent agents on a single project, coordinating their work, and watching them write over a million lines of code and trillions of tokens.
They ended up running planners and sub-planners to create tasks, then having workers execute on those tasks - similar to how Claude Code uses sub-agents. Each cycle ended with a judge agent deciding if the project was completed or not.
In my predictions for 2026 the other day I said that by 2029:
I think somebody will have built a full web browser mostly using AI assistance, and it won’t even be surprising. Rolling a new web browser is one of the most complicated software projects I can imagine[...] the cheat code is the conformance suites. If there are existing tests that it’ll get so much easier.
I may have been off by three years, because Cursor chose "building a web browser from scratch" as their test case for their agent swarm approach:
To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on GitHub.
But how well did they do? Their initial announcement a couple of days ago was met with unsurprising skepticism, especially when it became apparent that their GitHub Actions CI was failing and there were no build instructions in the repo.
It looks like they addressed that within the past 24 hours. The latest README includes build instructions which I followed on macOS like this:
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
cd fastrender
git submodule update --init vendor/ecma-rs
cargo run --release --features browser_ui --bin browser
This got me a working browser window! Here are screenshots I took of google.com and my own website:
Honestly those are very impressive! You can tell they're not just wrapping an existing rendering engine because of those very obvious rendering glitches, but the pages are legible and look mostly correct.
The FastRender repo even uses Git submodules to include various WhatWG and CSS-WG specifications in the repo, which is a smart way to make sure the agents have access to the reference materials that they might need.
This is the second attempt I've seen at building a full web browser using AI-assisted coding in the past two weeks - the first was HiWave browser, a new browser engine in Rust first announced in this Reddit thread.
When I made my 2029 prediction this is more-or-less the quality of result I had in mind. I don't think we'll see projects of this nature compete with Chrome or Firefox or WebKit any time soon but I have to admit I'm very surprised to see something this capable emerge so quickly.
On 15th January Black Forest Labs, a lab formed by the creators of the original Stable Diffusion, released black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B - an Apache 2.0 licensed 4 billion parameter version of their FLUX.2 family.
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) decided to build a pure C and dependency-free implementation to run the model, with assistance from Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.5.
Something that may be interesting for the reader of this thread: this project was possible only once I started to tell Opus that it needed to take a file with all the implementation notes, and also accumulating all the things we discovered during the development process. And also, the file had clear instructions to be taken updated, and to be processed ASAP after context compaction. This kinda enabled Opus to do such a big coding task in a reasonable amount of time without loosing track. Check the file IMPLEMENTATION_NOTES.md in the GitHub repo for more info.
When Donald Trump returned to power, America’s billionaires and the leaders of its biggest corporations rushed to prostrate themselves at his feet. Some of them, especially but not only among the tech bros, did so because they themselves wanted an authoritarian regime that would stamp our wokeness. I still recall the top banker who, after Trump won, told the Financial Times that “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled… it’s a new dawn.”
Many business leaders, however, understood how dangerous Trump was — they knew he was the least qualified individual, intellectually, psychologically, and morally, ever to occupy the White House. In the aftermath of January 9th, many Fortune 500 corporations announced to great acclaim that they would stop donating to Republicans. But after a few months of Republican threats of retaliation, those companies quietly turned the spigot back on.
I am sure that they convinced themselves that the Trump of January 6 was an aberration. In their minds, with enough flattery and bribes donations, and with Treasury Secretary Bessent to quietly steer the ship, Trump could be managed the way he was during his first term. Bessent, they figured, was a sensible businessman like them. After all, Bessent had worked closely with George Soros – the bete noire of the Right -- and ultimately ran his own hedge fund. Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-trade and anti-democracy rhetoric, they reasoned, was just a show in order to get elected.
Bessent certainly understood that he was a critical actor in this supposed charade. For example, when Trump first began threatening to impose enormous tariffs on our trading partners, Bessent avowed that this was only a “bargaining tactic” in order to calm panicked markets. Moreover, believing that the extremism was a charade was made much easier by Corporate America’s expectations of future profits from the conventional right-wing parts of his agenda: tax cuts plus increased freedom to pollute and defraud consumers, along with lax financial regulation and permissive anti-trust. No more pesky Democrats to get in their way.
Even now people continue to treat TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — as if it were an established fact, although the past few weeks show that it’s just wishful thinking. On tariffs, does this look like TACO to you?
Granted, Trump sometimes appears to back down. We probably won’t be invading Greenland over the next few weeks. But this is only a temporizing tactic while he finds other means to escalate, such as imposing tariffs on countries that came to Greenland’s aid. Overall, Trump 47 is escalating, day by day.
The persistence of the TACO myth is part of the broader picture: Many people, especially in the business world, are still trying to convince themselves that they’ll do OK despite Trump’s craziness. Hey, the stock market is up, isn’t it? (It is, but US stocks, which are up 16 percent over the past year, have lagged stocks in other advanced countries, which rose 33 percent in 2025.)
Well, I have news for American business leaders: You will not do OK.
I’m not just talking about the threat Trump’s madness poses for corporate bottom lines, although that threat is larger than most people realize. For example, as Trump barrels into confrontation with Europe over Greenland, of all things — even I still have trouble believing that this is happening — I’m surprised not to see more people mention that U.S. corporations have invested around $4 trillion in Europe, investments that will definitely be at risk if this confrontation spirals out of control.
I’m also talking about the personal risks businesspeople increasingly face from a regime that demands abject, performative sycophancy.
Yesterday Scott Bessent, the purported grown-up in the room, appeared on TV, delivering a cringe-inducing defense of Trump’s apparent willingness to blow up NATO in order to gain control of Greenland (!):
Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we’re the hottest country in the world, we’re the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength.
Since the tariff-setting authority Trump is claiming only applies in a national emergency, Bessent was asked what national emergency justifies imposing tariffs in an attempt to seize Greenland. His answer: “The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.”
Who knows what Trump has on Bessent, but it’s clear that Bessent made a Faustian bargain, selling his soul in return for … something. And the terms of the bargain clearly require that he humiliate himself in public on a regular basis. He no longer acts like a respectable Wall Street insider; now he behaves like a capo helping his mob boss run a protection racket.
The degradation of Scott Bessent serves as an illustration of where anyone who thinks they can manage Trump will end up. Corporate America needs to realize that they too must make Faustian bargains if they want to stay on Trump’s good side – and that the price of those bargains will be very high. Campaign contributions won’t be enough: they must pour money into Trump’s ballroom, and/or his family’s pocket, and/or his crazy adventures in places like Venezuela or Gaza. Refraining from criticism of Trump’s policies won’t be enough. Instead they must become sycophants, enthusiastically supporting Trump’s policies — especially if those policies are deeply stupid. If they don’t go along the punishment will be personal as well as financial.
Thus Trump lashed out at Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, for blurting out the obvious truth that Venezuelan oil is “uninvestable.” Then Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, mildly suggested that undermining the Federal Reserve’s independence might be a bad idea. Dimon didn’t even mention the truly disturbing part of the story, the announcement that the Department of Justice had begun an obviously groundless criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, whose only crime was not taking Trump’s orders on interest rate policy. Sure enough, Trump not only lashed out at Dimon but threatened to sue JPMorgan for allegedly “debanking” him after Jan. 6. This comes from a president who has pardoned criminals convicted (sometimes multiple times) for defrauding consumers of billions of dollars.
The lesson for businesspeople is that Faustian bargains never end well. Take a lesson from watching Scott Bessent – appease Trump and he will demand that you debase yourself even further. It’s been astonishing how quickly corporate greed has been replaced by corporate fear: Businesses who hoped to profit from Trump now toe the line because they’re afraid of being punished.
But despite what corporate CEOs tell themselves, they do have a choice. The reality is that Trump is growing weaker by the day. Americans aren’t falling into line behind his attempted authoritarian takeover. On the contrary, their resistance is stiffening. The Trumpists can’t even cow Minneapolis into submission, let alone the rest of the country. As he flails wildly in an attempt to recapture his lost momentum, his policies keep getting crazier.
So businesspeople have a choice: Continue to abase themselves, destroying their dignity and their reputations, in an attempt to curry favor with a wannabe dictator who’s falling short, or show some spine. And that stiffening of the spine must be a collective endeavour.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, talking about how to deal with another tyrant: If you don’t hang together, you’ll all hang separately
Greenland held a referendum on 23 February 1982 and voted to leave the European Communities / European Economic Community (EEC) (about 52–53% for leaving).
I write this not to justify current American policy, which I consider a major mistake with extremely poor execution. Rather the point is that we are pushing the Greenlanders into the arms of the Danes, when over some longer haul it could be very different.
The walkout, the largest by nurses in New York City history, is driven by demands for increased staffing, better safety and preserved benefits.
The largest nurse walkout in New York City history has entered its fifth day, with no signs of ending quickly as negotiations continue. The nurses union began striking at three private hospital systems after months of unsuccessful talks surrounding health care benefits and staffing shortages.
The strike, which the nurses union said involved 15,000 nurses, illuminates a growing divide between health practitioners and hospitals as the industry faces major upheaval amid federal administrative changes.
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) has condemned hospital management, saying they failed to agree to fair contracts with striking nurses, whose broad demands include guaranteed health care benefits for nurses, improved security measures for staff and patients and better staffing ratios, which union representatives say have been unsatisfactory.
“Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian need to get serious about meeting our demands for safety,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release on Thursday. “Instead of investing millions in fighting their own nurses, hospital executives need to do the right thing and work with us to improve safety.”
The association said that the hospitals have proposed slashing nurses’ health care benefits, cuts it estimates would impact approximately 44,000 nurses.
The hospitals have denied the union’s claims and said that the nurses’ requests are unreasonable.
“We’re not asking for $220,000 a year, we’re not asking for a 40 percent increase in our pay or anything like that,” said Caroline Terris, a registered nurse who is part of the strike. “We’re asking for very basic things like safety for our patients, safe patient ratios, making sure that the patients get the care that they deserve.”
Terris, 29, has been in the health care profession for five years and works at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. During this time, she told The 19th, she had witnessed a gradual shift in the health care industry, particularly since President Donald Trump assumed office.
In November, the Department of Education excluded nursing as a professional degree through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which also suggested making major changes to student loan offerings and repayment plans.
“A very big part of that is all the professions that were claimed as non-professional were all women-led professions or female-dominant professions, and I think that that’s very interesting given the kind of social climate that they want to create in America,” she said.
The decision to reclassify nursing aligns with the general attitude that Terris says she has seen take hold.
“It has been such a huge change in everything,” she said. “And even just going on social media, you see people are like, ‘Well, they shouldn’t be professional … because they don’t do anything.’ And it’s just that energy has really changed from being heroes in 2020 to now having to fight for basic rights.”
More than 7,000 nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center went on strike in 2023 to protest understaffing at their centers, an issue that was then exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which strained hospitals around the country. In that case, the strike lasted three days.
Health care workers have now found themselves on the picket line protesting the same issues that had previously been addressed when both Montefiore Bronx and Mount Sinai hospitals first agreed to establish new staffing ratios. It’s unclear how long the affected hospitals can sustain themselves as the strike continues, particularly as the country enters flu season.
If contract negotiations fall through, nurses like Terris worry about what it will mean for other health care providers in the country.
“I really do think that if this goes more pro-management than pro-patient and pro-nursing, then we’re gonna see a really bad trickle-down effect of other hospitals not paying for their employees’ insurance, not giving them wages that compete with inflation,” Terris said. “They’re gonna be looser with their laws. Also, AI is a very big thing that is up and coming in health care, and nurses wanna be able to sit down and give their input on it so it’s actually for good and not for bad.”
The NYSNA alleges that Mount Sinai previously unlawfully disciplined 14 nurses who denounced workplace violence or spoke to their peers about contract negotiations. The association also claims that Mount Sinai terminated three labor and delivery nurses mere hours before the planned walkout, in an attempt to undermine the strike.
Mount Sinai CEO Brendan G. Carr denied the accusations, including the nurses’ cause for protest, on the hospital’s website, stating that the three employees were disciplined following complaints that they were interfering with patient care by refusing to provide medical supplies to temporary nurses, and that the hospital has not suggested reducing health benefits.
“On Monday, we saw 20 percent of our scheduled NYSNA nurses decide not to participate in NYSNA’s strike, and yesterday we saw similar numbers — hundreds of nurses joining their teams at the bedside,” Carr said in a press statement on Wednesday. “I remain grateful to our nurses who have come to work, to the traveling nurses who came to help us, to nursing leaders who have been working around the clock, and to the many other individuals who are working incredibly hard to make up for their absent colleagues.”
The hospital rejected claims that staffing levels have not improved, stating that the nursing vacancies have decreased over 80 percent. “In just the last three years we reduced our system-wide number of nursing vacancies from 514 in 2022, to just 92 today, while adding 1,000 new nursing positions over the same 3-year period,” it said.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani greets striking nurses outside NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 11, 2026. (Steve Sanchez/SIPA/AP)
Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who heavily courted labor unions during his campaign to lead New York City — released a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, about the strike. “No New Yorker should have to fear losing access to health care — and no nurse should be asked to accept less pay, fewer benefits or less dignity for doing lifesaving work,” he wrote on Sunday, ahead of the scheduled walkout. “Our nurses kept this city alive through its hardest moments. Their value is not negotiable.” He joined nurses on the picket line on the day the strikes began.
Mount Sinai declined to comment beyond public statements. NewYork-Presbyterian and Montefiore did not respond immediately to requests for comment. NewYork-Presbyterian and Mount Sinai are in negotiations with union representatives.
“Our goal is to reach a fair and reasonable agreement with union leadership that reflects our respect for the important role our nurses play,” NewYork-Presbyterian wrote on its website on Monday. “We remain hopeful that we can accomplish this soon. We want to reassure you that your safety and care remain our top priorities. We have taken the appropriate steps to continue to provide the same level of care that you, and the communities we serve, have come to expect.”
Why This Matters
This strike represents a pivotal moment for U.S. health care labor, highlighting post-pandemic staffing pressures, rising hospital costs, and growing tension between frontline workers and large health systems. Its outcome may influence negotiations nationwide as hospitals confront workforce shortages and technological change.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
When I was president of the American Economic Association, we began to think it would be prudent to have a formal code of conduct (see the link below for details). But part of that effort resulted in a disclosure questionnaire required of all those who would serve on AEA committees. As I recall, I felt that one of the questions was too broadly posed.
I've agreed to serve another term on the Committee on the Job Market, so I get to fill out the questionnaire, once again. My responses are below. You should be able to guess the question I thought was phrased too broadly.
AEA Disclosure Questionnaire
Please review and respond to the disclosure questions below, with explanations as needed. It is important that you answer truthfully. Your answers to the questions will be reviewed by the President and Secretary-Treasurer and will be shared with other members of the Executive Committee only if necessary and on a need-to-know basis.
Affirmative answers to questions would not necessarily be disqualifying but will be considered during the review. To expedite this process, I ask that you please respond to these questions at your earliest convenience.
In retrospect, I think the entire DevOps movement was a mighty, twenty year battle to achieve one thing: a single feedback loop connecting devs with prod.
On those grounds, it failed.
Not because software engineers weren’t good at their jobs, or didn’t care enough. It failed because the technology wasn’t good enough. The tools we gave them weren’t designed for this, so using them could easily double, triple, or quadruple the time it took to do their job: writing business logic.
This isn’t true everywhere. Please keep in mind that all data tools are effectively fungible if you can assume an infinite amount of time, money, and engineering skill. You can run production off an Excel spreadsheet if you have to, and some SREs have done so. That doesn’t make it a great solution, the right use of resources, or accessible to the median engineering org.
It’s a fun piece, if I do say so myself, and you should go read it. (Much stick art!)
I posted the link on LinkedIn yesterday morning. Comments, as ever, ensued.
(The internet was a mistake, Virginia.)
“Devs should own everything”
A number of commenters said things like, “devs should own everything”, “make every team responsible for their own devops work”, and my personal favorite:
“I still think the main problem is with the ownership model - the fact that devs don’t own the full system, including infra and ops.”
(Courtesy of Alex Pulver, who has graciously allowed me to quote him here by name, adding that “he stands firmly behind this 😂”.)
As it happens, I have been aggressively advocating for the model I believe my friend is describing here, where software developers are empowered (and expected) to own their code in production, for approximately the past decade. No argument!
But “devs should own the full system, including infra and ops”?
We need to talk.
I do not think ‘ops’ means what you think it means
In software—and only in software—ops has become a dirty word. Nobody wants to claim it. Operations teams got renamed to DevOps teams, SRE, infrastructure, production engineering, or more recently, platform engineering teams. Anything but ops.
Ops means Toil! Hashtag #NoOps!
Number one, this is fucking ridiculous.
What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering1 has chosen to heap upon its operational function.
Number two…what happened?
I can think of a number of contributing factors (APIs and cloud computing, soaring profit margins, etc), but I can also think of one easy, obvious, mustache-twirling villain, which would make a better story for you AND less work for me. (Root cause analysis wins again!! ✊)
Whose fault is it?
Google. It’s Google’s fault.
I know this, because I asked Google and it told me so.
(What? This is a free substack, not science.)
Here’s what I think happened. I think Google came out swinging, saying traditional operations could not scale and needed to become more like software engineering, and it was exactly the right message at exactly the right time, because cloud computing, APIs, SaaSes and so forth were just coming online and making it possible to manage systems more programmatically.
So far so good. But a crucial distinction got lost in translation, when we started defining this as developers (people who write code: good) vs operators (people who do things by hand: bad), which is what set us on the slippery slope to where we are today, where the entire business-critical function of operations engineering is widely seen as backwards and incompetent.
Dev vs Ops is a separation of concerns
The difference between “dev” and “ops” is not about whether or not you can write code. Dude, it’s 2026: everyone writes software.
The difference between dev and ops is a separation of concerns.
If your concern is building new features and products to attract customers and generate new revenue, then congrats: you’re a dev. (But you knew that.)
If your concern is building core services and protecting their ability to serve customers in the face of any and all threats (including, at the top of the list, your own developers): congratulations slash I’m sorry, but you are, in fact, in ops.
Both of these functional concerns are vital, as in “you literally can’t survive without them”, and complementary. You need product developers to be focused on building features and products, caring deeply about the experience of each user, and looking for ways to add value to the business. You need operations to provide a resilient, scalable, efficient base for those products to run on.
The hardest technical problems are found in ops
Ops is not “toil”. It does not mean “dummies who can’t program good”. Operations engineering is not easier or lesser than writing software to build products and features.
What’s darkly ironic is that, if anything, the opposite is true.
Product engineering is typically much simpler than infrastructure engineering—in part, of course, because one of the key functions of operations is to make it as easy as possible to build and ship products. Operations absorbs the toughest technical problems and provides a surface layer for product development that is simple, reliable, and easy to navigate.
Not because product engineers are dumb or lesser than (let’s not slip into that trap2 again!), but because cognitive bandwidth is the scarcest resource in any engineering org, and you want as much of that as possible going towards things that move the business materially forward, instead of wrestling with the messy underbelly.
The hardest technical challenges and the long, stubborn tail of intractable problems have always been on the infrastructure side. That’s why we work so hard to try not to have them—to solve them by partnerships, cloud computing, open source, etc. Anything is better than trying to build them again, starting over from scratch. We know the cost of new code in our bones.3
As I have said a thousand times: the closer you get to laying bits down on disk, the more conservative (and afraid) you should be.
The closer you get to user interaction, the more okay it is to get experimental, let AI take a shot, YOLO this puppy.
This is as it should be.
The cost and pain of developing software is approximately zero compared to the operational cost of maintaining it over time.
Domain level differences
The difference between dev and ops isn’t about writing code or not. But there are differences. In perspective, priorities, and (often) temperament.
The biggest difference I did not mention is that they have different relationships with resources and definitions of success.
Infrastructure is a cost center. You aren’t going to make more money if you give ten laptops to everyone in your company, and you aren’t going to make more money by over-spending on infrastructure, either. Great operations engineers and architects never forget that cost is a first class citizen of their engineering decisions.
You can, in theory, make more money by spending more on product engineering. This is what we refer to as an “investment”, although sometimes it seems to mean “engineers who forget their time costs money”.
(Sorry, that was rude.)
What about platform engineering?
“What about platform engineering?” Baby, that’s ops in dressup.
A bit less flippantly: I like my friend Abby Bangser’s quote: “platforms should encode things that are unique to your business but common to your teams”, and I like Jack Danger’s stick art, and his observation that “The only thing that naturally draws engineers to look at the middle of their system is pure blinding rage.”
What I love about the platform engineering movement is that it has brought design thinking and product development practices to the operational domain.
Yes, we should absolutely be treating our product developers like customers, and thinking critically about the interfaces we give them. Yes, there is a middle layer between infrastructure and product engineering, with patterns and footguns of its very own.
Also yes: from a functional perspective, platform engineering is still ops. (Or at least, more ops than not.)
Yes, you need an ops team. If you have hard operational problems. You should try not to have hard operational problems. (from a talk I gave back in 2015)
Does it matter what we call it?
Yeah, I kinda think it does.
All these trendy naming schemes do not change the core value of operations, which is to consolidate and efficiently serve the revenue-generating parts of the function.4 This is as true in technology as it is in sales or marketing. Running away from the term and denying your purpose muddies the water and causes confusion at the exact point whereclarity is most needed.
An engineering team needs to know if they are oriented towards efficiency or investment; you can’t optimize for both. It changes how you hire, how you build, how you think about success and measure progress. It changes not only your appetite for risk, but what counts as a risk in the first place.
They also need to know whether they are responsible for the business logic or the platform it runs on.
Why? Because no one can do everything. Telling devs to own their code is one thing. (Great.) Asking them to own their code and the entire technological iceberg beneath it is wholly another. The more surface area you ask someone to master and attend to, the less focus you can expect from them in any given place.
Do you want your revenue-generating teams generating revenue, or not?
If you can’t separate these concerns at the moment, maybe that’s something to work towards. Which is going to be hard to do, if we can’t talk about the function of operations without half the room running away and the remaining half squawking “toil!"
Naming is a form of respect
Operational rigor and excellence are not, how shall I say this…not yet something you can take for granted in the tech industry. The most striking thing about the 2025 DORA report was that the majority of companies report that AI is just adding more chaos to a system already defined by chaos. In other words, most companies are bad at ops.
To some extent, this is because the problems are hard. To a larger extent, I think it’s the cause (and result) of our wholesale abandonment of operations as a term of pride.
It’s another a fucking feedback loop. Ambitious young engineers get the message that being associated with ops is bad, so they run away from those teams. Managers and execs want to recruit great talent and make jobs sound enticing, so they adopt trendy naming schemes to make it clear this work is not ops.
If you want to do something well, historically speaking, this is not the way. The way to build excellence is to name it for what it is, build communities of practice, raise the bar, and compensate for a job well done.
I think it’s time to bring back “operations” as a term of pride. As a thing that is valued, and rewarded.
“Operations” comes with baggage, no doubt. But I just don’t think that distance and denial are an effective approach for making something better, let alone trash talking and devaluing the skill sets that you need to deliver quality services.
You don’t make operational outcomes magically better by renaming the team “DevOps” or “SRE” or anything else. You make it better by naming it and claiming it for what it is, and helping everyone understand how their role relates to your operational objectives.
Wow. Truly, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Not to get all Jungian on you all, but part of me has to wonder if “ops” represents the shadow self to software engineers, the parts of yourself that you hate and despise and are most insecure about (I am weak and bad at coding!! I might be automated out of a job!), and thus need to project onto some externalized other that can be safely loathed from a distance.
This might surprise you youngsters, but there was a time when systems folks were clearly the cool kids and developers were considered rather dim. Devs had to know data structures and algorithms, but sysadmins had to know everything. These things tend to come and go in cycles, so we may as well not shit on each other, eh?
As my friend Peter van Hardenberg (better known as internet raconteur “pvh”) likes to say, “The best code is no code at all. The second best code is code someone else writes and maintains for you. The worst code is the code you have to write and maintain yourself.” If it would fit on my knuckles, I would get this in knuckle tatts.
Would it be helpful to acknowledge that IT/ops serves an entirely different function than software engineering operations for production systems? Because it absolutely does.
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.
This is one of the worst things you can do for your own intellect, whatever you think the social benefits may be. I know some reasonable number of famous people, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their failings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the internet. I am not claiming to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the people writing about them know even less.
I am not saying everyone is an angel — sometimes you come to learn negative information that in fact is not part of the standard press reports or internet whines.
If you are going to possibly be working with someone on a concrete and important project, absolutely you should be trying to form an assessment of their moral quality and reliability. (And you are allowed to do it once per electoral race, when deciding for whom to vote.) But if not, spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people is one of the best and quickest ways to make yourself stupider. Focus on the substantive arguments for and against various policies and propositions, not the people involved. Furthermore, smart people do not seem to be immune from this form of mental deterioration. Here is my 2008 post on “pressing the button.”
A corollary of this is that if you read an internet comment that, when a substantive issue is raised, switches to judging a famous or semi-famous person, the quality of that comment is almost always low. Once you start seeing this, you cannot stop seeing it.
Addendum: If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.
Standard RAID solutions waste space when disks have different sizes. Linux
software RAID with LVM uses the full capacity of each disk and lets you grow
storage by replacing one or two disks at a time.
We start with four disks of equal size:
$ lsblk-MoNAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE SIZEvda disk 101Mvdb disk 101Mvdc disk 101Mvdd disk 101M
We create one partition on each of them:
$ sgdisk--zap-all--new=0:0:0-t0:fd00/dev/vda
$ sgdisk--zap-all--new=0:0:0-t0:fd00/dev/vdb
$ sgdisk--zap-all--new=0:0:0-t0:fd00/dev/vdc
$ sgdisk--zap-all--new=0:0:0-t0:fd00/dev/vdd
$ lsblk-MoNAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE SIZEvda disk 101M└─vda1 part 100Mvdb disk 101M└─vdb1 part 100Mvdc disk 101M└─vdc1 part 100Mvdd disk 101M└─vdd1 part 100M
We set up a RAID 5 device by assembling the four partitions:1
$ mdadm--create/dev/md0--level=raid5--bitmap=internal--raid-devices=4\> /dev/vda1/dev/vdb1/dev/vdc1/dev/vdd1
$ lsblk-MoNAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE SIZE vda disk 101M┌┈▶ └─vda1 part 100M┆ vdb disk 101M├┈▶ └─vdb1 part 100M┆ vdc disk 101M├┈▶ └─vdc1 part 100M┆ vdd disk 101M└┬▶ └─vdd1 part 100M └┈┈md0 raid5 292.5M$ cat/proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vdd1[4] vdc1[2] vdb1[1] vda1[0] 299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
We use LVM to create logical volumes on top of the RAID 5 device.
$ pvcreate/dev/md0
Physical volume "/dev/md0" successfully created.$ vgcreatedata/dev/md0
Volume group "data" successfully created$ lvcreate-L100m-nbitsdata
Logical volume "bits" created.$ lvcreate-L100m-npiecesdata
Logical volume "pieces" created.$ mkfs.ext4-q/dev/data/bits
$ mkfs.ext4-q/dev/data/pieces
$ lsblk-MoNAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE SIZE vda disk 101M┌┈▶ └─vda1 part 100M┆ vdb disk 101M├┈▶ └─vdb1 part 100M┆ vdc disk 101M├┈▶ └─vdc1 part 100M┆ vdd disk 101M└┬▶ └─vdd1 part 100M └┈┈md0 raid5 292.5M ├─data-bits lvm 100M └─data-pieces lvm 100M$ vgs
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree data 1 2 0 wz--n- 288.00m 88.00m
This gives us the following setup:
RAID 5 setup with disks of equal capacity
We replace /dev/vda with a bigger disk. We add it back to the RAID 5 array
after copying the partitions from /dev/vdb:
We do not use the additional capacity: this setup would not survive the loss of
/dev/vda because we have no spare capacity. We need a second disk replacement,
like /dev/vdb:
$ pvcreate/dev/md1
Physical volume "/dev/md1" successfully created.$ vgextenddata/dev/md1
Volume group "data" successfully extended$ vgs
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree data 2 2 0 wz--n- 384.00m 184.00m$ lsblk-MoNAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE SIZE vda disk 201M ┌┈▶ ├─vda1 part 100M┌┈▶┆ └─vda2 part 100M┆ ┆ vdb disk 201M┆ ├┈▶ ├─vdb1 part 100M└┬▶┆ └─vdb2 part 100M └┈┆┈┈┈md1 raid1 98.9M ┆ vdc disk 101M ├┈▶ └─vdc1 part 100M ┆ vdd disk 101M └┬▶ └─vdd1 part 100M └┈┈md0 raid5 292.5M ├─data-bits lvm 100M └─data-pieces lvm 100M
$ mdadm--grow/dev/md1--raid-devices=4--add/dev/vdd2
mdadm: added /dev/vdd2$ cat/proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vdd1[4] vda1[5] vdc1[7] vdb1[6] 299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunkmd1 : active raid5 vdd2[3] vda2[0] vdc2[2] vdb2[1] 303936 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk$ pvresize/dev/md1
$ vgs
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree data 2 2 0 wz--n- 580.00m 380.00m$ lsblk-MoNAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE SIZE vda disk 201M ┌┈▶ ├─vda1 part 100M┌┈▶┆ └─vda2 part 100M┆ ┆ vdb disk 201M┆ ├┈▶ ├─vdb1 part 100M├┈▶┆ └─vdb2 part 100M┆ ┆ vdc disk 201M┆ ├┈▶ ├─vdc1 part 100M├┈▶┆ └─vdc2 part 100M┆ ┆ vdd disk 301M┆ └┬▶ ├─vdd1 part 100M└┬▶ ┆ └─vdd2 part 100M ┆ └┈┈md0 raid5 292.5M ┆ ├─data-bits lvm 100M ┆ └─data-pieces lvm 100M └┈┈┈┈┈md1 raid5 296.8M
You can continue by replacing each disk one by one using the same steps. ♾️
Write-intent bitmaps speed up recovery of the RAID array after a
power failure by marking unsynchronized regions as dirty. They have an
impact on performance, but I did not measure it myself. ↩︎
In the lsblk output, /dev/md1 appears unused because the logical
volumes do not use any space from it yet. Once you create more logical
volumes or extend them, lsblk will reflect the usage. ↩︎
Salvador is 17, and is an EV winner from Portugal. Here is the transcript. Here is the list of discussed topics:
0:00 – We’re discovering talent quicker than ever 5:14 – Being in San Francisco is more important than ever 8:01 – There is such a thing like a winning organization 11:43 – Talent and conformity on startup and big businesses 19:17 – Giving money to poor people vs talented people 22:18 – EA is fragmenting 25:44 – Longtermism and existential risks 33:24 – Religious conformity is weaker than secular conformity 36:38 – GMU Econ professors religious beliefs 39:34 – The west would be better off with more religion 43:05 – What makes you a philosopher 45:25 – CEOs are becoming more generalists 49:06 – Traveling and eating 53:25 – Technology drives the growth of government? 56:08 – Blogging and writing 58:18 – Takes on @Aella_Girl, @slatestarcodex, @Noahpinion, @mattyglesias, , @tszzl, @razibkhan, @RichardHanania, @SamoBurja, @TheZvi and more 1:02:51 – The future of Portugal 1:06:27 – New aesthetics program with @patrickc.
On March 24, 1965, a march from the campus of City of St. Jude to the Alabama state capitol building in Montgomery marked the culmination of a campaign that transformed voting rights in the United States.
The historic event included more than 25,000 civil rights activists—including more than 3,000 people who had walked from Selma—who gathered and camped at the Catholic social service complex during the final leg of the third and final Selma-to-Montgomery march. On that last night of the multi-day protest, marchers camped on a rain-soaked field at St. Jude and drank in the music of some of the day’s biggest stars, including Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Sam Cooke, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Leonard Bernstein, Odetta Holmes, Nina Simone, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter, Paul and Mary.
Early the next morning, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the procession of marchers on a five-mile route to the state capitol. Decades later, on September 16, 2025, the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of Montgomery, showing the ground the marchers covered. As documented in a series of aerial photographs, marchers departed from St. Jude in a long line, headed north toward downtown, turned east onto Dexter Avenue, passed the Baptist church where King was once a pastor, and concluded on the steps of the state capitol building (below).
March 25, 1965
From there, King gave his “How Long, Not Long” speech (also called Our God is Marching On), which many historians consider among his most consequential. On that warm, sunny day, he called out to the crowd assembled before him:
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?‘
Somebody’s asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?‘
Somebody’s asking, ‘When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?‘”
Then came his answer:
“I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.‘”
Then, a bit later, he delivered a line that would become one of his most famous and enduring:
“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.“
The Selma to Montgomery march proved to be a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, helping galvanize public support for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 later that year, a law that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photograph by the Department of Defense via the Digital Public Library of America. Story by Adam Voiland.
My birthday’s coming up, Jan 20th. Fifty-seven. As my Uncle Harold used to say in the 1980s, “Hey it’s my birthday. Keep it under fifty bucks.” I’m not sure what I thought I’d be doing right now, 30 years ago. But I wouldn’t have guessed being in the best physical shape of my life, cranking out thousands of lines of production code per day, chatting all day with brilliant friends all around the world, and generally having an absolute blast. Life has a lot of ups and downs, so it’s good to have an up year once in a while.
2026 is shaping up to be straight-up insane. There’s a lot going on, and it’s speeding up. Here’s a sketch of how my week has been. I’ll talk about five themes: Money, Time, Power, Control, and Direction.
Figure 1: A Busy Week
Part 1: Money
There is a lot of money in AI, deserved or no. And even more money is sniffing around trying to get in to AI. The world’s money is like a conscious thing, and it exerts pressure as it sloshes around. Money has a good nose, and it smells big changes in the air this year. First and foremost, it smells changes for software devs. But that’s just a precursor to all knowledge workers being changed somehow by AI. Soon. Money knows this. Money wants the fuck in.
It is now poking its head around every corner, through every nook in the AI spaces. Money got a pretty good whiff of my Gas Town fart, and now I’m being stalked as prey by money from all sides. I don’t have much money, having pissed all my AMZN and GOOG stock away on stuff I have zero regrets about, living life. And I wasn’t raised with money, so I know fuck-all about how it works.
But I know it’s trying to get me. And for now, I’ve gotta push back.
My deepest apologies to the fifteen or sixteen VCs who have reached out so far, at a rate of roughly one per day since launch.I appreciate you. I’ve given it a lot of thought. But I’m not likely to go that route. I’m sure there are nice $200B businesses to be built on both Beads and on Gas Town, but I’m aiming bigger. They both build directly toward the third movie in my software orchestration trilogy, and I need to be relentlessly focused on that, not chasing ARR. I totally get that there are amazing people out there who would give me plenty of runway, but what I’m building toward isn’t financially defensible. It’s not a moat. It’s a life raft.
And now I’ll turn very briefly to another sloshing money monster that came after me last week. To catch you up if you’re behind, and I posted about it in detail a few days ago, someone created a meme coin about Gas Town and within a week I had made $300k USD in cryptocurrency transaction fees on that coin, which traded something like 16 million dollars in volume. Very weird turn of events. But it means I must be super clear:
Disclosure: I receive creator royalties/trading fees associated with $GAS trading on BAGS, and I may benefit financially from that activity. I didn’t create $GAS and have no control over its price, supply, or liquidity. $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is not financial advice — Crypto assets are highly volatile and speculative. Do not trade based on this content.
And with that disclaimer out of the way, I must reiterate my sincere regrets to the CT/BAGS crowd, who so generously funded me to the tune of just shy of $300k last week on bags.fm. That money was hard to duck, and the funds are deeply appreciated. They will help Gas Town be a big success this year. But Gas Town itself needs my full attention; between that and Beads it’s a wonder I get anything done at all.
So I had to step back from the community. I do find it amazing how they band together, dissenting voices rolling around like a big Katamari Damacy ball, and yet they somehow collectively find the discipline to act like financial analysts for institutional investors, weighing developer dossiers, product business cases, and doing critiques like a collective of professionals. All in crypto-bro speak. But it’s the same due diligence.
But the CT community, like any highly engaged stakeholders, were going to be asking for a lot of my time. There are always strings attached.
In short, I’m avoiding tying myself to any money that makes demands on my time or direction. I’ve got too much to do, to be worrying about monetizing right now.
Part 2: Time
I had lunch again (Kirkland Cactus) with my buddies Ajit Banerjee and Ryan Snodgrass, the ones who have been chastising teammates for acting on ancient 2-hour-old information. Every week we discuss some surprising new phenomenon or principle we’ve discovered while coding with 20+ agents.
This week the surprise phenomenon was nappy time. Yeah, I don’t use the word “surprising” lightly. High-end vibe coding is fucking with our sleep cycles. All though December I had weird sleeping patterns while I was building Gas Town. I’d work late at night, and then have to take deep naps in the middle of the day. I’d just be working along and boom, I’d drop. I have a pillow and blanket on the floor next to my workstation. I’ll just dive in and be knocked out for 90 minutes, once or often twice a day.
At lunch, they surprised me by telling me that vibe coding at scale has messed up their sleep. They get blasted by the nap-strike almost daily, and are looking into installing nap pods in their shared workspace.
Before they mentioned it, I had chalked it up to jet lag. I get hit hard flying back West, and it can take me a couple weeks to get on my feet. But it has been 5 weeks since Sydney and it never stopped. I got clocked by a nap-strike on Friday. Your buffer just fills up and you’re gone. I’ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist. You wake up with a drool-soaked pillow wondering who you are, and five minutes later you’re going hard with the agents again.
This wasn’t happening last year. It wasn’t until we’d started working with a dozen or more agents at once and doing swarming of large piles of work.
Figure 2: Bezos Mode: Reviewing reports all day
Our hypothesis is that we’re operating at such a high level of decision-making that we’re exhausting some internal buffers, and need to grab some gradient-descent time before we can continue.
To me it feels like Jeff Bezos Mode. I used to work for the man, and he basically spent his day listening carefully to presentations that smart people had prepared for him. They were never presenting easy shit. You only presented hard problems to Bezos. He had to absorb new information incredibly fast all day long, come up to speed on the spot, and make decisions that didn’t conflict with each other. I call that Jeff Bezos Mode, and it’s why he was always 18 steps ahead of all of the rest of us. He was solving curated puzzles all day, and it gave him otherworldly perspective.
It must have been utterly exhausting. Even for him.
Well, all three of us spent years at Amazon, and we agree, this feels like Bezos Mode. With Opus 4.5 swarms, you flit from agent to agent, only stopping at the ones that have finished their work and have produced a report for you. These are the reports from agents that you gave hard problems to; e.g., your Gas Town Crew. Ephemeral agents like polecats can handle all the easy stuff without you needing to look, by definition. Which means that everything that you actually wind up reading from agents tends to be architecturally rich, complex, and nuanced.
And we’re finding it to be exhausting.
We’re all pretty old, though, so YMMV. I don’t remember Bezos running off to take naps. Maybe this phenomenon only hits senior citizens. But the much younger Geoffrey Huntley, who was kind enough to pre-review this blog post, shared that it was happening to him all last year, and continues to this day. “Every discovery blasts me. Wipes me out and takes a while to recover.” So maybe we’re on to something here.
I’m going to go lay down and, uh, think about the problem with my eyes closed.
Figure 3: Nap Strike
Part 3: Power
I caught up today with Jeffrey Emanuel, who just launched a Rust port of Beads (pre-Gas Town API). He confirmed what I’ve been seeing myself and hearing from others, which is that things are starting to accelerate insanely at the bleeding edges of software development.
Jeffrey, as we saw from his X posts, has bought so many Claude Pro Max $200/month plans (22 so far, or $4400/month in tokens) that he got auto-banned by Anthropic’s fraud detection. He has become inhumanly productive. Among other things, he has recently ported a large number of popular libraries to Rust. All the Charm TUI libraries, fastapi, fastmcp, sqlmodel, a bunch of other stuff. Huge, polished libraries, completely cloned. And we’re just seeing Jeffrey’s exhaust, the projects he spins off as he works towards his bigger ambitions, which he’s sketched for me.
I’d just like to remind everyone that I predicted this pay-to-play productivity boost, betting a lot of my own rep on it, in Revenge of the Junior Developer, ten months ago. I knew that the tools would support running 100+ Claude Code instances, and that the high-end spend would rival an engineer’s salary within a year. Those predictions have come true.
I’m sure there aren’t many people quite as far along as Jeffrey; on my 8-level chart he’s a level 10. But they do exist, and their ranks are growing. There are on-ramps for the less crazy users. Gas Town, Claude Flow, and Loom are all gentle introductions to working with dozens of concurrent agents. They let you grow into the idea gradually, and it scales up with you as you practice. Everyone is going to learn how this stuff works this year, or die not trying. The industry won’t be kind to the people who sleep on this.
When you reach Level 8, building your own orchestrators, Gas Town may not be enough for you. You may want to try Gas City, my upcoming orchestration-builder toolkit, which I’ll talk about below.
Software engineering has always been incredibly high-leverage relative to other craft professions. Paul Graham used to write about this back in the late 1990s and early 00s. You could always find programmers who are 10x or 100x better than the average programmer, and you don’t see such a broad distribution in most other professions.
With agentic coding, it’s about to go to 1000x or even 10000x. I’m far from the only one noticing or talking about this. The more agents you can run successfully, the further you climb up the exponential curve, because it’s recursive: agents can run agents who run agents. The trick will be to manage that without becoming the Flying Wallendas. It will happen.
2026 will be a year where you see single engineers cloning, say, the entire Java/JVM stack and core ecosystem by themselves. Or a team of 2–5 engineers being able to recreate the an entire enterprise stack for a big company, in any language they want, factored into maintainable microservices. If you can afford the tokens, and you can find the tokens, you will be able to build things like you never imagined. You just have to learn how to tame the camels.
As I predicted in RotJD, you tame them with orchestrators: the new IDEs.
Part 4: Control
Agent orchestrators are programs that use agents to run other agents.
There are, as far as I can tell, four main players in this space: Ralph Wiggum, Loom, Claude Flow, and Gas Town. More will come very soon, from all corners. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on how to tell the current group apart, as they are all very important.
This is just a snapshot of my current thinking. I haven’t used any of the other orchestrators, and as far as I know, none of us have used each other’s work. We’re all very busy. This is a best-effort first take.
First off, I’d like to reiterate my deepest respect to the creators of these orchestrators. They’re the level 9s, the ones who have already built multiple working orchestrators in order to get this far. They’re the ones who had the guts to launch when all everyone else could do is say “I’m working on one.” Thanks to Dan Shapiro for that insight, and I heartily agree, since it took a lot of guts to launch Gas Town.
Here’s how I’m thinking about them right now. They’re all changing fast so this is a snapshot.
I think Geoffrey Huntley and I have been exploring two of the key components of the Industrial Revolution happening in agentic software development: factories, and workers. In my view, Claude Code is a worker. Geoffrey has built a super-worker, and also a team of super workers with Loom, whereas I’ve built a super-factory. These are all orthogonal, complementary, and necessary.
Figure 4: Coding Agent Industrial Revolution
Claude Flow is a bit different; it also tries to be a factory, and it’s quite clever, but it’s not thinking about the problem the way I am. All three of the others have orchestration as their core primitive. Whereas for Gas Town, the work itself is the primitive. Gas Town federates work into an auditable ledger for tracking millions of work items in a blockchain. I’m solving a completely different problem. Gas Town’s orchestration facilities are a thin layer atop a work-definition stack. And in time, Gas Town will be rewritten in that stack, in a much more flexible way, allowing for all sorts of orchestration shapes.
Geoffrey Huntley and I have been chatting and plotting together lately, with more collaboration to come. One amusing thing we discovered is that we were each tackling the other’s problem last year. I was working on a super-agent (basically, quality) and he was working on swarming (quantity). We each built multiple complete implementations. And toward the end of the year, we each flipped to the opposite problem.
In my view, Geoffrey’s Ralph loops are a brilliant automation of the discovery that LLMs can self-review to convergence, which I believe Jeffrey Emanuel was also onto with his (weaker, manual) Rule of Five. I also have a weak version of this idea in Gas Town; I can show you exactly where. It’s the top row of Figure 12 in Welcome to Gas Town, “Gas Town’s Patrols,” where there is a row of workflows that are not patrols. These are vestigial remnants of my first two orchestrators, which focused on trying to get Claude to act like a thorough engineer when it has finally been assigned a task by the factory.
These weren’t fully productionized; the polecats can use them but never do, and the right thing to do is rip them out and replace them with Ralph loops. Gas Town shouldn’t be trying to solve the quality problem, since Ralph has done a much better job.
Figure 5: Gas Town’s Hidden Shitty Ralph Clone
Similarly, Gas Town has very loose coordination primitives for groups of workers tackling a task — e.g. polecats are often parts of larger convoys. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that in these situations, something like either Loom or Claude Flow is going to be the right solution to plug in. That’s not Gas Town’s focus; I had almost none of it at launch.
Gas Town’s focus is the work, the stuff you know needs to be done, independent of superintelligence. I’m a big believer in the MEOW stack, Nondeterministic Idempotence, and Beads as a Universal Data Plane. These are all critically important differentiators for Gas Town, and they will yield unexpected emergent benefits over time because of the audit trail.
Orchestrators will shift and change shape rapidly over the next few months. Everyone’s going to start building them. But I think Gas Town’s core infrastructure has a credible advantage over anyone who’s not thinking about the data trail properly.
I contend that Beads was like the discovery of oil. Right now everyone is playing with it and lighting lanterns, not realizing it’s going to turn into the global petroleum industry for data. Gas Town makes work (Beads) shoot out in geysers. It’s an actual boom town built on the oil of a digital data plane in git. Think where it will go.
I don’t think Gas Town is like any other orchestrator out there. Not remotely close. The only thing that’s probably not quite right with it yet, is the shape. Kubernetes-shaped is just one way to make an orchestrator, and there are a million other ways.
Let’s talk about how Gas Town will find exactly the right shape for you.
Part 5: Direction
Last topic. What a week, amirite?
I’ve mentioned that Dario Amodei refers to 2026 as “The Endgame.” Well, we’re here.
Gas Town has a deep stack, but its current form factor is just a sketch. All the roles are completely hardwired in the Go code. Gas Town has Go modules dedicated to the Witness, Refinery, Mayor, Deacon, Polecats, etc. So it’s part of the architecture, and hard to change at this point.
But halfway through the implementation, I realized the MEOW stack had become powerful enough to abstract away the roles themselves, allowing you to express them in a sort of DSL based on Beads, with just a little orchestration glue.
I chatted with Claude, and we decided to finish Gas Town and then turn around and immediately begin work on the SDK-builder that lets you build your own Gas Town, with your own roles, teams, coordination rules, and worker instructions. This will allow people to create, for instance, roles and patrols that handle custom business processes.
So Gas Town will soon evolve into a kit that lets you build your own town shapes. (And wire in your own sandboxes, plugins, hooks, etc. etc.) Where does Ralph fit in?
Ralph loops are effectively tasks. A Ralph loop is fundamentally concerned with finishing a task at a high level of quality. A Gas Town patrol is fundamentally concerned with recording task execution for a well-defined sequence of steps, often done in a loop. For instance, ETLs are an old-fashioned kind of patrol, where every time a database changes, someone notices and exports the data with some transformation steps. Businesses are all built on patrols, but we don’t call them that because they have not historically had humanlike intelligence. Starting in 2026, they will.
A patrol step is a task. So I feel the ideal patrol will turn out to be one that invokes a Ralph loop at each step, at least for steps that require complex processing. A good patrol agent will know when it’s needed, and use Ralph loops judiciously, even watching them to make sure they don’t go off-rails.
In addition to making patrols more reliable, I think another huge Ralph win for Gas Town will be for the polecats, which are ephemeral Claude Code instances that handle feature work, bug fixes, code reviews, and other one-shot tasks. Work is slung to polecats in the context of a Convoy for tracking, and polecats have persistent Git identities, so there’s a factory dance to it all.
Great. But, once a polecat finally spins up and takes its task, it has proven about as trustworthy as a real polecat.
Figure 6: Four ways Gas Town polecats can work
The picture above shows four different possible polecat work styles. The one we have in play today is the lower-right quadrant, which accurately depicts one sleeping, one daydreaming about playing trombone (this may be the first genuinely funny joke I’ve seen from nano banana), and various others in states of disarray.
That is how Gas Town feels right now. The polecats are unsupervised, uncoordinated, and left on their own to get to the finish line. You spend a lot of time asking the Mayor to poke them to finish up. This is a quality problem, and Ralph will solve it brilliantly. And for more complex tasks, Loom or Claude Flow could push it even further, tackling ever-larger problems.
Real-world use case: Gas Town often has a problem with giving tasks that are too large to polecats, and they can choke trying to swallow their food. They’ll run out of context and compact (a failure scenario IMO), or do a bad job, or balk. They do have the ability to escalate and kick it back to the human if the task needs splitting. But why bother with that, when you could just have a Ralph loop brute-force it? Ralph’s super-workers will turn Gas Town into a super-factory.
Gas City is what I’m calling my next iteration, where you can define your own custom roles in addition to patrols etc. I’ve got some stuff in the queue to finish up first, such as switching Beads to use the amazing Dolt database, which I’ll post about soon. But Ralph’s on the docket. And I keep adding Claude Pro Max subscriptions, so I may get to it sooner than later.
In the meantime, I’m still working on Gas Town stability, merging community PRs, and making the core Gas Town work better and better for people brave enough to try it out. Gas Town itself still has a long way to go in order to be ready for mass-market adoption. A loooong way. But we’ll get there.
And it’s a wrap! What a week.
Biggest takeaway: If you haven’t tried Beads yet, now’s the time. Gas Town is a big experiment, but Beads is mature and already getting replicated in other language ecosystems.
See you all online! Thanks again to the amazing CT community, the Gas Town contributors, the Beads contributors, and everyone who bought our Vibe Coding book!
p.s. if I’ve promised to get back to you about a podcast, interview, livestream, workshop, speaking engagement, coffee meetup, or similar, I’ll do my best. If I haven’t responded in a week give me a nudge. Shit’s crazy right now.
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks. WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your back end requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. That’s it.
Market Design
to open the App Switcher.
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