The average decline in fertility among these recent cohorts relative to the cohorts preceding them by 20 years was 0.25 births. Of this decline, 0.09 births, or 37 percent of the gap, is statistically accounted for by increased childlessness in the later cohort. The remaining 0.16 births, or 63 percent of the gap, is accounted for by declines in fertility among the parous.
A similar analysis can be used to decompose differences across districts in India, where the difference to be decomposed is across districts for women born in the same set of years, with two groups of districts defined by having the lowest and highest cohort fertility rates. Unsurprisingly, given panel B of Figure 5, almost all of this difference—94 percent—is accounted for by the difference in fertility among the parous. Differing patterns of childlessness account for only 6 percent of the gap between high-fertility and low-fertility districts.
That is from a new and useful JEP survey article by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears. The main concern of the authors is whether we can ever expect a fertility rebound.
I have a headache, I should probably drink more water but I don’t want to, my glasses feel like an enemy, I can see the words on the screen clearly but everything else around the edge of my vision smears sickeningly.
I have a newsletter to write today otherwise tomorrow is screwed, which fucks up Friday, but we’re only about 10% of the way through the year, plenty of time to catch up.
Thankfully posted the below to her IG stories the other day, which got me thinking, and was going to make this whole thing a lot easier.
# A SIDE NOTE ON PROCESS
I got up at 6am, went through the morning routine, got my shit together, grabbed my phone to put some music on, and just before heading out the door opened Instagram on my laptop and saw the story posted above.
I had thoughts, so I grabbed my Sony dictaphone, and in pretty much a stream of consciousness spoke them out as I walked the 25mins to the studio. A few days worth of audio notes had built up, mostly around ideas for the next newsletter, so I finally plugged it into the computer and told the AI to deal with it.
You don’t need to read the text in the screenshot below, there’s honestly too much for too little payoff, but I thought some people may be interested in the process.
I don’t use AI to help me write these newsletters (which is probably obvious) - I even stopped using Grammerly when they started shoving too much AI into it - I liked it telling me when to add or remove commas and stick in a semi-colon; I didn’t like it suggesting I re-write whole paragraphs or asking me if I need help getting started.
I douse AI to transcribe my voice notes and update Obsidian with what I’ve asked it to update my notes with 😁
Yes, I met a friendly cat on the way home at 5:53pm on the 2nd of Feb
# SHOWING THE PROCESS
Right, back to this…
“It doesn’t help that glossy, computer-made work can now be mistaken for AI either; clean, high-fidelity digital craft has become suspect by default, making handmade a safer choice”
Just that little snippet was enough for me to have an enjoyable time riffing on various ways to explain why analogue can be easily faked, making it a no better alternative than digital craft. That you don’t need to switch from digital anyway, the part that’s missing is showing the process.
If you show the process you show the authenticity, explain the thinking, display the sketch books, make videos of the exploration.
By the time I’d arrived at my studio I had imaginarily TedTalked my way through the whole thought process.
This dictaphone is awesome, I thought, also I am very wise and my newsletter will be filled with that wisdom.
Then I read the actual article the quote came from…
…and of course Elizabeth Goodspeed has already written everything (unsurprisingly because that’s where the pull quote comes from) better, because Elizabeth Goodspeed is an actual fucking genius, while I’m only a genius while walking on my own in the dark and the rain, speaking my thoughts out to several layers of technology, or in the shower where none of the genius gets recorded at all (but because it’s so smart I’ll definitely remember it later).
I’m just heading to the shops to buy some pain-killers, brb. 💊💊
# NEARLY ALL THOSE OTHER LINKS
Photo blatantly stolen from Russell’s Kickstarter page
“that drawing guy on YouTube” is Russell Taylor, this is the Kickstarter and here’s his YouTube channel where I spotted the videos that’ve been uploaded so they can be added to the Kickstarter, I’m guessing.
Interesting is a DIY conference of short presentations about things our speakers find interesting.
It’s not work, it’s not professional, it’s not networking.
Talks are 10 minutes
You can use PPT or something else or nothing
The speakers are paid. The audience is lovely. The venue is amazing.
Would you like to speak? It can be about whatever you fancy. Something you’re deeply into or something you’d just like to explore. The best topics are ones that give our speakers joy. Our audience is not looking for insights or life hacks or to be inspired. They want to see someone talk about something they’re interested in. Our unofficial motto is ‘you’re never more than 10 minutes away from something else’.
I can’t talk at Interesting, ‘cause “It’s not work, it’s not professional, it’s not networking.” - and pretty much anything I do is actually work and very professional, ruling me out.
⚫️
Somehow all of the above makes me of this song*, which, if we ignore that the central premise is predicated on a miscommunication in the first two lines, is a banger (as the kids definitely don’t say).
⚫️
As part of website homepage tending, I started a “miniblog” https://revdancatt.com/miniblog which is just a place I can post very small updates (which isn’t twitter) mainly to amuse myself. I’ve designed it so I can only add one image per post → title, body text, image → as some sort of constraint I thought was a good idea at the time. I’m mentioning it here because I was asked if I could add an RSS/Atom feed to it, so I did, right down at the bottom of the pages (that don’t infinitely scroll).
There’s another reason for doing this which is connected to archives and archiving, but that’s for another time.
I also added RSS and Atom feeds to a bunch of other places on the website too, ‘cause I now have the code so why not.
Which led me to discover most people start the week on Monday, and are furious about this layout.
I’ve never really thought about it before; I think I’ve ended up in the minority here ‘cause to me Wednesday is the middle of the week and the rest of the days move outwards from there, making it nice and symmetrical.
Yes I know, the weekend is the weekend and not the weekends. But I’m 53 and not going to change my way of thinking now.
⚫️
Finally, according to my notes, I’m supposed to extract just the pen plotting brushwork, because it’s the one visually interesting part from the much longer Q&A video & buried a long way into it. So here it is unlisted on YouTube, and even then the brush part doesn’t start until 40 seconds into the video.
# THE END
It’s Thursday morning, I gave up on yesterday at around 2pm with a stupid headache, I’m now sat in the Riso studio trying out some ideas based on my 80s Pop Roxy project. I’m sure all those photos will turn up in the newsletter next time.
Which, according to block universe theory will be on Thursday the 19th of February.
It has, as always, been an absolute delight talking to you, even with the headache stuff, I’m really looking forwards to the part of 2026 where things start to get better, any time now!
As always, love you all, Dan 🧡
*Not in a bad way; in that all of my art is work, and my brain is swapping out the “dance” for Interesting.
So I can imagine standing on the stage and the audience going “We didn’t come here for (your work) art, we only came here for Interesting things”; or, from last year, robot dancing.
What can I say, I’m not entirely sure my brain is working right and this is all a fever dream.
This is the very beginning of an idea. I usually iterate on these things in private or with my trusted inner circle, but what the hell, things are moving fast, you’re supporting me and my work, so here’s the idea.
All us Augmented Developers are working very hard to get the genie to create source code that, once run, will deliver the desired answers to o…
The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.
Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.
Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.
Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.
Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began to inflict terror on the country.
Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.
They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.
They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.
As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.
Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”
Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”
The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.
Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.
Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro hacked the election.
There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”
Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”
On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.
Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.
The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.
Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.
Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, [Representative Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”
Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “[A]nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”
Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:
“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when [Don] Junior and Eric and their children…[are] all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”
It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”
Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.
Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.
At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.
Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.
4. How will low fertility rates affect economies? One estimate given has U.S. per capita consumption falling by over eight percent, which I consider “large,” though it seems the author (David N. Weil) does not?
Professor Walt Hunter on the merits of challenging students: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. “Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?”
Music.app: To scrobble playing in this I use the lovely Sleeve app. It’s mainly a very configurable desktop “now playing” thingy with the added ability to scrobble playing in Music, Spotify and Doppler.
Spotify: I still scrobble from this by linking Spotify to Last.fm in my Spotify application settings page (read more). It has occasionally silently stopped working so maybe I should use Sleeve for this too.
Bandcamp.com: When listening to music on the Bandcamp website in Safari I use the Web Scrobbler browser extension (also available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge). It also works with 384 other sites, including YouTube, SoundCloud, radio stations, etc., and can scrobble to several alternatives to Last.fm. But I only need it for Bandcamp to Last.fm.
iOS and iPadOS
Music.app: To scrobble from this I use the official Last.fm app (on Apple App Store) which is clunky but works:
Every so often I have to open it and “Scan” for recently-played music and then submit the data to Last.fm.
Before connecting the device to my Mac in order to sync downloaded music (yes I still do this) I have to be sure to do that Scan + Submit immediately beforehand. And then after the Mac sync has finished, Scan again and Discard all the scrobbles, because it gets out of sync with tracks that were actually played on the Mac.
Spotify: Again, I have Spotify and Last.fm linked via Spotify settings.
Bandcamp.com: Web Scrobbler also works for listening via the Bandcamp website on my phone and iPad, which feels like magic, given how locked-down and separate data feels on there.
My recent very belated discovery of the brilliant Web Scrobbler has filled an annoying gap in my scrobbling. I wish the official Bandcamp apps could Scrobble, because without there’s no point me using them.
I’ve been scrobbling my music listening for nearly 21 years now: 254,537 scrobbles from 20,716 artists.
The first time I heard about all this was when having lunch with Tom Steinberg who’d just come across this “scrobbling” thing. But I thought it was a silly word so I didn’t look it up for a while.
Always pay attention to Toms.
My all-time Top Artists chart, since February 2005.
I do wonder what my all-time charts would look like if I’d been able to do this for my entire life. Which albums and artists would be at the top from the days when I’d play the same few tapes, LPs and CDs over and over?
The Federal Aviation Administration has approved plans for Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A as SpaceX shifts Falcon 9 launches away from the historic pad.
In this episode of Space Minds, Mike Gruss sits down with a panel of experts at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center to discuss the future of the United States […]
Voyager Technologies and Max Space, a company working on expandable habitats, plan to work together to see how that technology could be used for lunar exploration.
Depending on when you read this, NASA will be weeks — perhaps days — from one of its biggest missions in years. On Jan. 17, NASA rolled out the Space Launch System rocket, with Orion spacecraft mounted on top, to the launch pad for the Artemis 2 mission. The launch will be the first time […]
China appears set for an in-flight abort test of its new-generation Mengzhou spacecraft next week in a key step for the country’s human spaceflight plans.
SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $175 million to fund DeepSky, a satellite constellation designed to gathering vast quantities of atmospheric data for artificial intelligence models. With the money provided by private equity investors Stonecourt Capital and HarbourVest Partners, Tomorrow.io plans to rapidly expand its “space infrastructure and intelligence platform, enabling unprecedented global atmospheric sensing and […]
404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled:
The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.
“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.
The FBI raided Natanson’s home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson’s, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.
Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users.
Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat actor “specifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed.
“Alvin Roth received the Nobel Prize for work in economics that has saved thousands of lives. In Moral Economics, Roth applies his open-minded, evidence-based thinking to controversial issues at the intersection of markets and morals, where his way of thinking could save even more lives.” Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World
“A surprising large part of economics is about things money can't buy, for many good and bad and complicated reasons. This wonderful book by the leading scholar in that area of economics is something else that just money could never buy. It's a labor of love, a testament from a lifetime of thought and research.” Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Nobel laureates and authors of Poor Economics
“With clarity and compassion, Al Roth explores the transactions society cannot escape—surrogacy, the purchase of body parts, the sale of sex, and a host of ‘repugnant’ relationships. What should be regulated? What should be banned? What are the limits of using price in the marketplace? Be prepared to think in new ways and gain from the insights of a great market designer.” Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate and author of Career and Family
“From the right to sell a kidney to the cost of a surrogate birth, our sense of ‘right and wrong’ shapes the economy more than we realize. Nobel laureate Alvin Roth—the world's leading ‘philosopher-economist’—unpacks the hidden moral codes that govern our most intimate transactions. This is a clear-eyed guide to understanding where the market ends, where morality begins, and how we can design a world that honors both.” Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, Nobel laureates, Stanford University
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan booster is offloaded from the company’s R/S RocketShip barge at a dock at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This will be the first Vulcan rocket to launch from the West Coast. Image: United Launch Alliance
United Launch Alliance is staging rockets at launch complexes on both the West Coast and the East Coast for the first time since November 2022.
On Tuesday, the company announced the arrival of its transport barge, called the R/S Rocket Ship, at a port at Vandenberg Space Force Base. There it offloaded the booster and upper stages for the first Vulcan rocket that will fly from California.
After loading up with flight hardware from ULA’s rocket manufacturing plant in Decatur, Alabama, in December, the vessel made its way down to Port Canaveral in Florida. After that, it then set sail for California in early January.
In a statement to Spaceflight Now, the U.S. Space Force’s System Delta 80 (SYD 80) said the first planned Vulcan mission from Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3) is the Space Development Agency’s T1TR-B (Tranche 1 Tracking Layer B) mission. A spokesperson notes thought that “the manifest is continually evolving,” so that may change.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) hoists the USSF-87 mission payload atop the Vulcan rocket in the Government Vertical Integration Facility (VIF-G) adjacent to Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This will be Vulcan’s second national security mission for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC). Image: United Launch Alliance
Meanwhile, on Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the company hoisted the payload for the USSF-87 mission onto a different Vulcan rocket inside its Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41).
“Launching atop the rocket, as the forward spacecraft, is the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman, launching to GEO with an ascending node injection to improve our ability to rapidly detect, warn, characterize and attribute disturbances to space systems in the geosynchronous environment,” ULA wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
“The Aft [space vehicle], provided by Northrop Grumman, is a propulsed ESPA (EELV Secondary Payload Adapter) flying multiple payloads launching into a direct inject GEO orbit.”
A SYD 80 spokesperson described the secondary payloads on the mission as “research, development, and training systems that USSF Guardians are using to refine tactics, techniques and procedures for precision on-orbit maneuvers.”
“They will also enhance and validate resiliency and protection in geosynchronous orbit,” a SYD 80 spokesperson said.
ULA is targeting a launch of the USSF-87 mission no earlier than Feb. 12. As is typical for a mission with payloads concerning national security, a launch time won’t be announced until closer to liftoff.
The company has been working towards reestablishing its West Coast launch capabilities since its final Atlas 5 rocket took off from SLC-3 on Nov. 10, 2022. It carried the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with a technology demonstration for NASA and ULA called the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID).
After that final flight, ULA began converting that pad from an Atlas 5 configuration to one dedicated to its Vulcan rocket. Former ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno previously said that work out west faced challenges due to supply chain constraints, but those were worked out over time.
Part of the work needed at Vandenberg was dredging the harbor to allow for the RocketShip barge to safely offload flight hardware. Also, unlike launches at SLC-41 in Florida where the rocket rolls out to the pad from the VIF, at SLC-3 ULA is using a Mobile Service Tower (MST) that will roll back away from the rocket ahead of flight.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) transport barge, the R/S RocketShip sails towards Vandenberg Space Force Base to deliver the booster and upper stage for the first Vulcan rocket to fly from California. Image: United Launch Alliance
As you’ve probably noticed, something is happening over at Anthropic. They are a spaceship that is beginning to take off.
This whole post is just spidey-sense stuff. Don’t read too much into it. Just hunches. Vibes, really.
If you run some back-of-envelope math on how hard it is to get into Anthropic, as an industry professional, and compare it to your odds of making it as a HS or college player into the National Football League, you’ll find the odds are comparable. Everyone I’ve met from Anthropic is the best of the best of the best, to an even crazier degree than Google was at its peak. (Evidence: Google hired me. I was the scrapest of the byest.)
Everyone is gravitating there, and I’ve seen this movie before, a few times.
I’ve been privileged to have some long, relatively frank conversations with nearly 40 people at Anthropic in the past four months, from cofounders and execs, to whole teams, to individuals from departments across the company: AI research, Engineering, GTM, Sales, Editorial, Product and more. And I’ve also got a fair number of friends there, from past gigs together.
Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. It’s tricky to get them to open up, even when they do chat with you.
But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me. I have developed, in my wizened old age, a curious ability to make people feel good, no matter who they are, with just a little conversation, making us both feel good in the process. (You probably have this ability too, and just don’t know how to use it yet.)
By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.
Happy But Sad
To get a proper picture of Anthropic at this moment, you have to be Claude Monet, and paint it impressionistically, a big broad stroke at a time. Each section in this post is a stroke, and this one is all about the mood.
To me it seems that almost everyone there is vibrantly happy. It has the same crackle of electricity in the air that Amazon had back in 1998. But that was back in the days before Upton Sinclair and quote “HR”, so the crackle was mostly from faulty wiring in the bar on the first floor of the building.
But at both early Amazon and Anthropic, everyone knew something amazing was about to happen that would change society forever. (And also that whatever was coming would be extremely Aladeen for society.)
At Anthropic every single person and team I met, without exception, feels kind of sweetly but sadly transcendent. They have a distinct feel of a group of people who are tasked with shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence, and while they’re excited, they all also have a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
But I am starting to suspect they feel genuinely sorry for a lot of companies. Because we’re not taking this stuff seriously enough. 2026 is going to be a year that just about breaks a lot of companies, and many don’t see it coming. Anthropic is trying to warn everyone, and it’s like yelling about an offshore earthquake to villages that haven’t seen a tidal wave in a century.
The Vibe Mind
Everyone you talk to from Anthropic will eventually mention the chaos. It is not run like any other company of this size. Every other company quickly becomes “professional” and compartmentalized and accountable and grown-up and whatnot at their size. I don’t think Anthropic has bothered with any of that crap yet.
I mean sure, yes, for their production systems, they are of course very serious and appropriately frowny-faced and have lots of world-class SREs and scaling engineers. Buuuut, you know. The tail that wags their dog is Claude in its various incarnations, and that’s the Work Generator that keeps the hive buzzingly happily along.
So when I generalize and say Anthropic is completely run by vibes, I’m sure there are exceptions at the periphery, where it makes sense to have hardened interfaces with the rest of the world, whether it’s production, or GTM, or product marketing. And the company is probably a bit more “normal” at those edges.
But at the core, they are self-evidently in the middle (or maybe beginning) of a Golden Age, which I’ll talk about in the next section. And it’s very churny and frothy there.
The employees often describe it as a hive mind run on vibes, so this isn’t me putting words in their mouths. They are observing it too. Organizations reflect their leaders, so it’s clearly being directed by leadership, and I’m sure it’s intentional. Not all the bees are the same size, and there are clearly some graph nodes spread through the hive mind that are keeping it stable.
But if you interfere with the hive mind operation, upsetting that balance, you’ll gently be pushed out to the edges, and maybe beyond. The centrifuge will spin you away to the periphery, carried by a wave of vibes.
It feels fragile, and it may have scaling ceilings we’re all unaware of. But they have kept it going so far, and I have some thoughts about how they’re managing it.
How To End a Golden Age
I’m going to share something with you here that’s orthogonal to the Hive Mind, but Anthropic is demonstrating this other property so clearly that we need a time-out to examine it together.
A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly. That’s happening at Anthropic right now.
I was at Amazon during their Golden Age, still going strong when I left in 2005. And I was at Google during their Golden Age, which lasted until April 2011. After that I watched Google ossify and become siloed and effectively incapable of cross-functional work, while Amazon continued to execute and innovate.
If you need a third Golden Age example, Microsoft had many of the greatest minds in the industry gathered together in the early 2000s, to figure out the future of software development on the CLR with C#/.NET, because they’d lost the Java lawsuit. It was the best thing that could have happened to them, and for a few years it was magical, and they produced stuff that shaped the entire industry. For a few years they were thought leaders. Many wound up fleeing to Google after it came crashing down.
I spent years wondering why and how it happened at Google. But I didn’t figure it out until I saw what is currently happening at Anthropic. That’s when it clicked.
Google had killed their innovation machine on the vine when they switched their focus to profits, which caused a shift in the ratio of work to people.
Google’s motto under their original CEO Eric Schmidt was, “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.” Schmidt’s explanation was that he was “generating luck” by encouraging innovation and taking a lot of bets, hoping some would pay off. It was something Google could afford to do, because they were rolling in money, in the new greenfield of the web.
When Larry Page took over as CEO in April 2011, his motto was: “More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows.” He felt–and rightly so–that the unfettered, unsupervised 20% work and Labs activity hadn’t produced any real hits. So Larry put big constraints on what work would get funded, and 20% work gradually died away. From that point on, the company turned “political,” lost most of their innovation engine, and the Golden Age was over.
Was it killing 20% work that caused the crash? Not directly. As a counterexample, Amazon never had 20% work. Their Golden Age of innovation and excitement lasted a pretty long time, much longer than after I left in 2005. So it wasn’t that. What did they have that Google didn’t?
One clue is something my colleague Jacob Gabrielson told me when he was a Principal Engineer at Amazon in maybe 2015-ish, when Google had become hardened like concrete. I told him that people often fought over projects at Google, and Jacob told me that it never happened at Amazon, because, as he put it, “Everyone here is always slightly oversubscribed.”
So now you see how the magic starts and ends. During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.
I realize I’m mixing units, but otherwise it gets grammatically awkward. You get the idea.
Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around.
That was the beginning of the end. As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing.
That badness is normal operating behavior for a lot of companies out there today. One person described being at Microsoft as being a molecule in a metal, with your elbows tightly locked together with everyone else’s. Ironically, all the Microsoft cookies appear to be licked now.
At Anthropic, they are smack in the middle of a Golden Age, where there is far more available work than there are people to do it, on pretty much all fronts. It’s like they’re on the surface of an expanding sphere.
So despite the chaos, and the inevitable growing pains (not dissimilar to when I was at Amazon during their Get Big Fast phase just after their IPO), there is never a reason to fight over work. There is infinite work.
And so everyone gets many chances to put their ideas in the sun, and the Hive Mind judges their merit.
The Small Version
My strong suspicion is that Anthropic is operating the way all successful companies will soon operate within a few short years, despite it being so very different from how most operate today.
My suspicion arises from a second data point. Yes. I have diangulated on the answer from two data points. I bet you didn’t know you could do that. Well I did it. If my diangulation trick doesn’t convince you, fair enough. The Hive Mind may be an anomaly unique to Anthropic. I’m just trying to extrapolate from the data points we do have.
My friends Ajit Banerjee, Ryan Snodgrass, and Milkana Brace are a little 3-person startup called SageOx. They spend their time in a little apartment in Kirkland, about a mile from me, above a coffee shop bakery, alternating between coding and sleeping, for weeks on end. They don’t bother to put their shoes on when they walk down to get coffee.
They’re all level 7 to 8 on my Dev Evolution to AI chart. I got the sense this is also true for essentially all the engineers at Anthropic, and probably half their business people too.
SageOx are the ones that told me that an external fourth contributor overseas wasted a bunch of time acting on 2-hour-old information, because everything is moving so fast. They’re also the ones that told me you need full transparency at all times, at their speeds, or nobody will ever see what you are doing and you’ll fall irretrievably behind.
So they all turn their volume way up and announce everything they’re doing at all times. “I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”
A lot of engineers like to work in relative privacy, or even secrecy. They don’t want people to see all the false starts, struggles, etc. They just want people to see the finished product. It’s why we have git squash and send dignified PRs instead of streaming every compile error to our entire team.
But my SageOx friends Ajit and Ryan actually want the entire work stream to be public, because it’s incredibly valuable for forensics: figuring out exactly how and why a teammate, human or agent, got to a particular spot. It’s valuable because merging is a continuous activity and the forensics give the models the tools and context they need to merge intelligently.
So at SageOx they all see each other’s work all the time, and act on that info. It’s like the whole team is pair programming at once. They course-correct each other in real time.
They showed me a demo yesterday, very impressive actually, and we had a big debate over whether developers would be comfortable with their entire workstream made visible to the rest of the company. SageOx records even their own conversations at all times, and the transcripts are automatically uploaded and versioned, and they have the full work history of what every human and agent has done, forever. It’s fully transparent: a necessity for a hive mind.
The consensus was, most developers would be really uncomfortable with that.
Why? Because it’s the death of the ego. Everyone can see all your mistakes and wrong turns. Everyone can see exactly how fast you work. There is nothing you can hide, nothing to hide. You have to be a happy bee.
So I gave them some advice on making work hideable, because it’s gonna take some time for devs to adjust to working in fish bowls.
Anyway, seeing SageOx do this, operating a hive mind with three people, made me immediately think of Anthropic. SageOx are not focused on profits either; they’re focused on discovery. They are trying to find PMF by inventing it, since this is a new category. They are working together as a mini-hive mind, automating their own work in a tight self-reinforcing loop.
Building for yourself is the only way to give your product a nonzero chance of success in the new world. Build something just for yourself, and make sure you love it so much that you know it’s how other people should be working.
I see far too many AI-native startup founders today trying to guess what people might want, and building things that will never succeed. They build for enterprises, little agent workbenches that provide personas and helpers and RAG-like stuff, or they’ll build orchestrators for “normie developers” trying to make agents safe. And it’s all just… ugh. Wrong side of the Bitter Lesson.
They’re not building for themselves, so they can’t see it.
The Settlers of Catan inventor Teuber famously built new games for his own family to playtest for years, before they finally found the formula for Catan through many iterations. I like to think of them sitting around and testing out new variations of games as being very similar to how modern AI devs are building software.
The Campfire Model
Rather than a bunch of traditional departmental silos, Anthropic and SageOx both look to me like they are building together around a campfire, at least in contrast with how most people are currently thinking about agentic development.
I started seeing this analogy when we were discussing evolutionary design at the Thoughtworks unconference offsite in Deer Valley, Utah this weekend, which Martin Fowler was kind enough to invite me to. Absolutely lovely event, I got to meet so many brilliant people from around the world and the industry. It was a privilege to be there.
At one of the breakouts we were discussing Spec-Driven Development, which completely mystified me. I’d heard of it, but many people were using the term to describe a spectrum of different development practices, nearly all of which felt like waterfall to me at best, and Intentional Programming v2 at worst. Few of us found any SDD model very compelling when comparing them to our own personal development practices.
Instead, at our breakout session about SDD, we realized we mostly prefer what we were calling Exploratory Development or Evolutionary Development, where rather than making a big complex spec, everyone sits around a campfire together, and builds.
The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it.
As evidence of this, Anthropic, from what I’m told, does not produce an operating plan ahead more than 90 days, and that is their outermost planning cycle. They are vibing, on the shortest cycles and fastest feedback loops imaginable for their size.
And the result, they tell me, is something like improv.
Improv at Scale
Anthropic’s Hive Mind is described by employees as “Yes, and…” style improvisational theater. Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once.
They’re making forward progress via mashups and exploration at the frontier of software development and knowledge work using AI. They’re finding their way like a floodfill search.
This reminds me of pure functional data structures, which are like append-only logs. Pure functional data structures are emerging not just at the organizational level in 2026, but also in DevOps. Ledgered, versioned, pure-functional databases like Datomic and Dolt are going to become increasingly valuable for mistake-prone agentic workflows. I’ll talk more about this in a future post.
With this accretive development model, it’s like Anthropic engineers are sculpting together with clay. It feels like there are a bunch of campfires at Anthropic, and they swarm around the fires (various in-flight products), changing their shapes as people try new variations and mashups.
Someone there told me that Claude Cowork was launched publicly 10 days after they first had the idea. When magic happens there, it happens very fast.
They are generating luck, exactly what Eric Schmidt had wanted. But they are doing it much, much faster than Googlers could, because they are all 10x to 100x as productive as engineers who are using Cursor and chat today, and roughly 1000x as productive as Googlers were back in 2005. (And in 2005 we were honestly pretty badass compared to programming back in 1986 when I started; it has been nice gradually turning into a wizard over the last 40 years.)
So to me, Anthropic feels like a quivering mass implementing Multi-Armed Bandit on ideas at a super high velocity. Everyone gets their chance, since you can implement anything and people will try it out.
But the hive mind will also eject anyone who’s not acting like a happy worker bee in the swarm. You need to contribute your ideas in the right ways. It’s the death of the ego. These were the exact words of someone who’s been there since the early days.
Sound familiar?
I think it really is kind of like improv. It’s a team sport. It doesn’t work to come in guns blazing, and make it about yourself.
So we’re seeing real power in the “Yes, and…” model.
And yet, most companies arrived at where they are by learning how to say No.
This is shaping up to be a problem.
More To Come
I have plenty more thoughts on the subject, but unfortunately precious little time or space. I have a huge blog-post backlog to get through, not to mention equally huge maintainer responsibilities now. There are literally whole companies using Gas Town, it’s pretty nuts.
If I’ve convinced enough people of the hive mind as an operating model, then maybe I can write more about how you might go about turning your existing company into one.
A little bird from… somewhere, in Sales, told me that all companies are asking variations of just the same two questions. They bluster and bluff and try to act informed, but they are all terrified. When you cluster their questions, they break down into, “Will everything be OK?” and “Will we be here in five years?”
The default answer, I’m afraid, is No. If you do nothing, you’re almost certainly going to get overrun. If you have an Atom Moat, then you stand a pretty good chance of weathering the storm, if you execute well. Just a chance, mind you: It’s a moat, not a force field. But atoms are a pretty good moat. If you make beer, or work with humans, or ship stuff, say, then you’ve got a bit more time to work with, maybe, to find your feet in the AI era.
If you have a strictly online or SaaS software presence, with no atoms in your product whatsoever, just electrons, then you are, candidly, pretty screwed if you don’t pivot. I don’t think there are any recipes for pivoting yet; this is all new, and it’s all happening very fast.
But there is a yellow brick road: spending tokens. This golden shimmering trail will lead your company gradually in the right direction. Your organization is going to have to learn a bunch of new lessons, as new bottlenecks emerge when coding is no longer the bottleneck. You need to start learning those bespoke organizational lessons early. The only way to know for sure that you’re learning those lessons is if people are out there trying and making mistakes. And you can tell how much practice they’re getting from their token spend.
I don’t work for anyone, I’m not associated with any company, and I’m not selling anything. I’m not even recommending any particular course of action, other than… learn AI. Now’s the time. Just start.
Start
You have a lot of work ahead of you. Build the campfire. Turn your product into a living prototype. Consider building some hives within your company, and giving them space to innovate.
And then pivot like hell to your new PMF, whatever that may be. Good luck. It’s gonna be a crazy year. May the best… whatever… win.
p.s. come join us at the Gas Town Discord, which you can find at gastownhall.ai — see you there!
Bolivia’s new president is planning major reforms to unleash a mining and oil exploration boom, burying nearly 20 years of socialism in the Andean nation with a new policy — “capitalism for all”.
Rodrigo Paz, a pragmatic centrist former senator, said his team was working on a package of laws to boost foreign investment in natural resources that would be presented to congress for approval “in the coming days or months”.
“We need a new oil and gas law,” Paz told the Financial Times in an interview while attending an economic forum in Panama.
“Bolivia should go for 50-50 [risk-sharing with foreign investors]. I give you the space. You come in with technology and investment . . . I think it’s the basis for business in future.”
Bolivia has a fifth of the world’s reserves of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey, but with its state-owned company YLB lacking technical expertise and investment, it has struggled for years to produce commercial quantities of the battery metal and exports are currently dominated by neighbouring Chile.
Bolivia also has big reserves of silver, tin and antimony. Paz said the Bolivian people, who have a history of protesting against mining, would support fresh investment if they were shown they would benefit financially. He compared his country to its neighbours: “Peru last year had mining revenues of around $50bn. Chile had revenues with state and private companies of $65bn. And we . . . had just $6bn,” he said.
We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income measure using the 1940, 1950 and 1960 Decennial Censuses through imputations of taxes and transfers as well as certain forms of market income including perquisites (Collins and Wanamaker 2022), consistent with the full income measures developed by Burkhauser et al. (2024) for subsequent years. From 1939–1963, poverty fell by 29 percentage points, with even larger declines for Black people and all children. While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration, the pace was no faster, even when evaluating the trends relative to a consistent initial poverty rate. Furthermore, the pre-1964 decline in poverty among working age adults and children was achieved almost completely through increases in market income, during which time only 2–3 percent of working age adults were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, compared to dependency rates of 7–15 percent from 1972–2023. In contrast to progress on absolute poverty, reductions in relative poverty were more modest from 1939–1963 and even less so since then.
The iPhone is going orbital, and this time it will be allowed to hang around for a while.
On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.
"NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II," Isaacman wrote on X. "We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world."
Software stocks crashed today. It’s never possible to be sure why something like that happens — this selloff may even be irrational — but everyone seems to agree that it’s being driven by the fear that AI is rendering a bunch of software business models obsolete. Here’s Bloomberg:
In the span of two days, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of stocks, bonds and loans of companies big and small across Silicon Valley. Software stocks were at the epicenter, plunging so much that the value of those tracked in an iShares ETF has now dropped almost $1 trillion over the past seven days…
[T]his drubbing…was triggered [by] concern that AI is on the verge of supplanting the business models of a wide swathe of companies that doomsayers have long predicted were at risk…
AI startup Anthropic PBC released a new tool for legal work, like reviewing contracts…The latest developments raise the specter that AI leaders will overtake established industry players in innovation.
[I]t took a wave of disappointing earnings reports, some improvements in AI models, and the release of a seemingly innocuous add-on from AI startupAnthropic to suddenly wake up investors en masse to the threat. The result has been the biggest stock selloff driven by the fear of AI displacement that markets have seen. And no stocks are hurting more than those of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies…Few in the software and data spaces have been spared…Shares of software companies including Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Intuit Inc. and AppLovin Corp. tumbled, dragging down the technology sector and weighing on the broader stock market.
Essentially, modern software companies have a stable of human software engineers who implement some sort of task for a client — keeping track of their sales leads, or helping with tax preparation, etc. The client pays the software company a fee to maintain access to that stable of human engineers. They are experts — master craftsmen who draw on a mix of esoteric knowledge, hard-won experience, raw IQ, and access to a vast community of other experts. They are the master weavers, the master potters, the artisan blacksmiths of the modern age.
And like those predecessors 200 years ago, their skills are in the process of being rendered obsolete by automation. Just as a power loom allowed an unskilled peasant to make cloth almost as good as what a master weaver would make — and at a fraction of the price — new AI coding tools are making it possible for relatively unskilled workers to turn out vast reams of software that’s almost as good, and far cheaper, than what a master software engineer would make.
This is “vibe coding”. At first, AI served as a kind of fancy autocomplete for people who already knew how to write code. But with the release of more and more powerful tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code — which assigns an AI “agent” access to your files and lets it keep repeating its efforts until it achieves high-quality results — it’s now possible for complete novices to learn how to make functional applications in hours, simply by telling AIs what they want in English. As these tools continue to improve, the amount of detail and technical knowledge that a user will have to have in order to create a working application will approach zero; software will be conjured up rather than crafted. Executives are already talking about creating software businesses with zero software developers.
Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks.
Karpathy notes that vibe coding helped him realize how much drudgery is involved in traditional software engineering. Dina Bass noted the same thing in a recent post:
But a lot of modern coding is repetitive and time-consuming work that isn’t creative at all, he said. “Engineering isn’t always beautiful code. It’s drudgery,” [Jeff] Sandquist [of Walmart Global Tech] said. “If we can get that off people’s plates, there won’t be nostalgia for that.”
In other words, software engineering was probably less of a “creative class” job than we had allowed ourselves to believe, and more of a “routine cognitive” task — the kind that’s especially vulnerable to automation.
This does not mean there will be no work for people with expertise in software, or no role for businesses that provide software. Code created purely by vibes will usually still have weaknesses, because the humans telling the AIs what they want don’t understand enough to make proper requests. Their software will have security flaws, tech debt, etc. Humans who understand these concepts — who have a detailed, nuanced understanding of what software is supposed to do — will probably be somewhere in the loop to fix problems, maintain code bases, and provide advice to vibe coders (all using AI tools as well, of course). But what they do will simply be different from what software engineers did until just a few months ago. It will be much less of a craft, and much more like setting up and maintaining a factory full of machines.
A great deal of ink has been spilled over the question of whether AI will render human workers obsolete en masse. This question is both catastrophic and unknowable, which is why it’s such a favorite topic. But no one disputes that a new technology can render existing stocks of human capital — the reservoirs of skills and expertise that certain highly paid workers have built up painstakingly over their whole careers — obsolete overnight. It has happened before, and it is happening again now.
Whether AI will do the same to every engineering and scientific discipline is still very much up in the air. We may soon have “vibe physics theory”, “vibe electronics”, “vibe airframes”, and so on — or we may not, if AI hits technological limitations that are as poorly understood as its explosive rise. But it seems certain that although software is particularly amenable to automation by AI1, the current technological revolution is not done upending the lives of various types of technical experts.
It occurs to me that this represents something momentous — the end of an economic age. My entire life has been lived within a well-known story arc — the relentless rise, in both wealth and status, of a broad social class of technical professionals. That rainbow may now be at an end. The economic changes — not just on careers, education, and the distribution of wealth, but on the entire way our cities and national economies are organized — could be profound.
The human capital economy was the Revenge of the Nerds
“All of this wealth attracted a dragon” — The Hobbit
A potent winter storm in late January 2026 left much of North Carolina dealing with significant snow accumulations. Though the state is no stranger to snow, such widespread coverage is unusual.
This image, acquired on February 2 with the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite, reveals a nearly continuous blanket of white stretching from mountain cities in the west to beachfront towns in the east. According to the North Carolina State Climate Office, measurable snow fell in all 100 counties for the first time in more than a decade.
Snowfall in North Carolina typically requires cold air funneled in from the north to combine with moisture supplied by a low-pressure system. During the January 31 weekend event, Arctic air from earlier in the week lingered across the state as a storm approached along a near-shore track, setting the stage for widespread snow.
Snow totals exceeded a foot in some of the state’s western, mountainous regions, following several years without significant snowfall events, though some locations such as Asheville saw smaller amounts. The storm even pushed south into Greenville, South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the downtown area saw about 5 inches (13 centimeters) by the evening of January 31, according to the National Weather Service.
In the Piedmont region, the hilly central part of the state, Charlotte received nearly a foot of snow—the most since 2004—while Raleigh saw a lighter accumulation of 2.8 inches, according to the state climate center.
February 2, 2026
Even coastal parts of the state traded brown sandy beaches for a blanket of white, with more than a foot reported in parts of Carteret County. Beaufort, a mainland town in the southern Outer Banks area, experienced heavy blowing snow. Slightly inland, Greenville received 14 inches, an amount not seen since a large storm in March 1980.
Though appearing serene from space, the storm posed real hazards on the ground. Dangerous road conditions snarled traffic and caused collisions, according to local news reports, while coastal areas saw high winds and waves. Overwash on Highway 12 in the Outer Banks coated parts of the road in standing water and sand, while several homes along the shore of Hatteras Island collapsed into the sea.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked:
Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding agents Mitchell went through a period of doing the work manually, then recreating the same solution using agents as an exercise:
I literally did the work twice. I'd do the work manually, and then I'd fight an agent to produce identical results in terms of quality and function (without it being able to see my manual solution, of course).
End-of-day agents - letting agents step in when your energy runs out:
To try to find some efficiency, I next started up a new pattern: block out the last 30 minutes of every day to kick off one or more agents. My hypothesis was that perhaps I could gain some efficiency if the agent can make some positive progress in the times I can't work anyways.
Outsource the Slam Dunks - once you know an agent can likely handle a task, have it do that task while you work on something more interesting yourself.
I've had a bit of preview access to both of these models and to be honest I'm finding it hard to find a good angle to write about them - they're both really good, but so were their predecessors Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. I've been having trouble finding tasks that those previous models couldn't handle but the new ones are able to ace.
One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset.
There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been their most useful public-facing initiative since 1971 and a cornerstone of the public internet since 1997.
In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they've also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.
The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There's no reason not to continue to serve archived versions - a banner at the top of the page saying it's no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.
Up until 2020 the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site. Those are available (along with the rest of the Factbook) on the Internet Archive.
Here's a neat example of the editorial voice of the Factbook from the What's New page, dated December 10th 2020:
Years of wrangling were brought to a close this week when officials from Nepal and China announced that they have agreed on the height of Mount Everest. The mountain sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet (in western China), and its height changed slightly following an earthquake in 2015. The new height of 8,848.86 meters is just under a meter higher than the old figure of 8,848 meters. The World Factbook rounds the new measurement to 8,849 meters and this new height has been entered throughout the Factbook database.
As a former Washington Post columnist, I’ve been saddened to see the precipitous decline of a paper that was once one of the most important institutions in American journalism, one that still employs great reporters, albeit in ever-dwindling numbers. While the paper has been struggling under the increasingly malevolent leadership of its centi-billionaire owner for a while now, in the last year things have gotten truly dire, and it’s only gotten worse. At this point, the survival of one of the pillars of American journalism is in serious doubt.
On Wednesday, employees were told on a Zoom call that the paper’s staff would be cut by a third; among other things, the sports desk and books section would be closed down, international reporting would be cut back significantly, metro reporting further diminished, and the team covering climate change apparently eliminated. Social media quickly filled up with posts like this one:
Reaction was swift and angry. Former Post political reporter Ashley Parker wrote that Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis, the CEO he installed a couple of years ago, “are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special.” Marty Baron, who led the paper in its most recent golden age, posted a blistering statement in which he said that while he was grateful for the support he got from Bezos during his time editing the paper, “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
If you said that ten years from now there will no longer be a publication called “The Washington Post,” or that it will have been reduced to a zombie site like newsweek.com that performs no journalism, it would sound far from impossible. While there are many dimensions to this tragic story, what it boils down to is something quite simple: Jeff Bezos saved the Post, then decided to kill it.
The ostensible reason for these layoffs — only the latest in a series — is that Post is losing money. And that’s true. But there are two important things to know to contextualize that fact. First, Bezos could absorb those losses from now until the day he dies and barely notice it. His current net worth is $245 billion, or around a thousand times what he paid for the Post when he bought it in 2013. The paper reportedly lost $100 million in 2024, which is horrendous. But even at that unusual rate, Bezos could cover the losses for, let’s say, the next 50 years, until he is 112 years old, and spend only $5 billion, or 1/121th of his current fortune.
Or to think about it another way: Bezos just spent $75 million to purchase and market “Melania,” an apparently dreadful documentary about the most vacuous public figure on the planet. At least that was an obvious bribe that might yield future dividends; he also owns a $500 million yacht so enormous that it requires another gargantuan support yacht to trail it wherever it goes.
The second important piece of context is that Bezos is himself the reason for the Post’s awful economic position. If he were not so determined to make the paper worse in almost every way, it could be on much sounder financial footing.
What it used to be like
When I started writing for the Post in 2014, the feeling about Bezos was what I would describe as one part suspicion to three parts gratitude and optimism. Yes, he was a billionaire with some questionable business practices, but the way he treated the paper was about as good as anyone could have hoped for. He seemed to have bought it not as a money-making proposition but as a public service. He provided ample resources to hire more staff and develop new ways to report and communicate the news, and he kept his hands completely out of editorial decision-making. What more could you ask for? Sure, though officially the line was that everyone was free to report on Amazon as though it were just another company, there may have been some self-censorship. But other than that, he was a nearly perfect owner.
Nobody would have argued that finding billionaire owners would be the savior of American journalism — especially newspapers, which are in a long and steep decline — but it was working for the Post. People felt that the paper just kept getting better, particularly in its coverage of politics and government. That goes double for the opinion section, which five or ten years ago I would have said was more dynamic and interesting than that of any paper in the country, including the New York Times (and yes, I’m biased, but it’s true).
Not surprisingly, readers are fleeing. In June, we learned that print subscriptions had fallen below 100,000 for the first time in over half a century. It’s true that most people don’t bother with a print subscription anymore, but still, for a paper with national reach and a metro area population around its home town of over 6 million, that’s stunning. While the paper doesn’t publicly release subscriber data, we do know that after Bezos torpedoed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, at least 300,000 people canceled their subscriptions.
Meanwhile, much of the paper’s top talent has departed for other publications. CEO Will Lewis has been a disaster, especially for morale. Then last February, Bezos announced that henceforth the opinion section would advocate for “personal liberties and free markets,” and “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In response, opinion editor David Shipley — who had himself pushed the section to the center after he took over in 2022 — resigned in protest. Ruth Marcus, the deputy opinion editor and my direct boss for all my time at the Post, wrote a column criticizing the new focus; the column was spiked, and she quit too (you can read her account of the Post’s fall here). Shortly after, NPR reported that another 75,000 subscribers had cancelled.
Speaking truth to power
It’s hard to overstate what a spectacularly imbecilic idea it was to move the Post to the right just as Donald Trump brought his version of fascism to America. Before the liberal opinion writers were pushed out — a list that includes myself, Greg Sargent, Helaine Olen, Perry Bacon, Jennifer Rubin, E.J Dionne, Catherine Rampell, Karen Attiah, and others — the opinion section was an absolutely huge driver of traffic to the site. I’d be shocked if the utterly decimated opinion section that exists now is generating anything like the same kind of interest from readers.
It’s not like there’s an enormous hunger for editorials like the above out there, and people are just yearning for establishment-tinged apologetics for Trumpism. Anyone who likes this president is being amply served by the right’s comprehensive media machine, and the approach the Post has taken is guaranteed to keep losing it subscribers.
Here’s the irony: By getting more involved in decision-making at the Post, business genius Jeff Bezos has worsened its long-term financial outlook by destroying much of what makes the Post valuable for readers and consequently decimating its subscriber base. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they’ve cancelled their Post subscriptions.
Sometimes they say “That’s why I’m subscribing to your newsletter,” which I greatly appreciate. But a truly vibrant media system needs institutions with the resources to support the time-consuming and often expensive work of gathering news, even when it doesn’t generate immediate clicks — and as the Times has shown, it’s possible to do that and still find ways to expand your subscriber base. There are still people at the Post trying to do that vital journalism, but fewer than there were last week. I fear their numbers will continue to diminish, and before long the Post will be an empty shell.
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Up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and then home to dinner, and found it so well done, above what I did expect from my mayde Susan, now Jane is gone, that I did call her in and give her sixpence. Thence walked to the Temple, and there at my cozen Roger Pepys’s chamber met by appointment with my uncle Thomas and his son Thomas, and there I shewing them a true state of my uncle’sestate as he has left it with the debts, &c., lying upon it, we did come to some quiett talk and fair offers against an agreement on both sides, though I do offer quite to the losing of the profit of the whole estate for 8 or 10 years together, yet if we can gain peace, and set my mind at a little liberty, I shall be glad of it. I did give them a copy of this state, and we are to meet tomorrow with their answer.
So walked home, it being a very great frost still, and to my office, there late writing letters of office business, and so home to supper and to bed.
When my friend Louie was 88, he started telling women he was 90. “The chicks like it,” he said.
The “90” has gravitas. It’s the 10th decade of life, and sounds ancient. (80-year-olds are octogenarians; 90-year-olds are nonagenarians; 100-year-olds are centenarians.)
When someone asks how old I am these days and I say “90,” they do a double take. OK, I look younger, but still…
I feel 90. Looking in the mirror in the morning. Getting out of a car. Slowly losing strength, flexibility, various abilities. Forgetting names, places, events.
I think about my age every day. As I’ve written previously, it’s new territory. I’ve never been this old before, so all these daily experiences are new. How do I cope? What can I do? What makes sense as nature figures out how to take me down?
I think I can pass along some useful info here, especially to the baby boomers, who are about 10 years younger and approaching the big nine-oh. Kind of like I did with fitness books in the ‘80s and ‘90s — older guy passing along hopefully useful tips on aging to this large population group.
Maxed Out on the Fun Stuff
Alcohol, cannabis, coffee — to name a few. I’ve concluded that your (my) body has lifetime limitations. You can consume only so much of these feel-good drugs during the span of life until the body signals “Enough.”
This may only apply to me; I don’t know if it has relevance for others. Matter of fact, though, a long-time friend, my age, still smokes weed every day. Come to think of it, my friend Louie had shots of tequila well into his ‘90s.
Weed: reached my max years ago. Can’t smoke or even vape without my lungs sending out alarm signals. I now use gummies, home-made tinctures to get onto the right side of my brain.
Booze: 10 years ago, when Lesley and I travelled in Scotland, I’d have a pint, often two, of Guinness with fish and chips; plus I had maybe 10 years of whiskey after discovering single malt Scotch. Wine or beer every night with dinner (sun over yard arm at 5:30 PM). Now, I just can’t drink much at all. I miss the warmth and relaxation of wine in the early evening, and the conviviality and on-the-same-pageness of drinking in a bar, but now limit the boozing to infrequently and small amounts (and lately, Athletic non-alcohoholic hazy IPA or hard kombucha).
There was a recent article in the New York Times about how “… our body struggles more with alcohol as we age.” Loss of muscle mass, reduced liver function, dehydration, declining sleep quality as we age. Sigh…
Coffee: Morning latte and pastry in coffee shops: one of my great pleasures in life, but now I’m reduced to asking for a single rather than the customary double shot, and only drink about half of that.
As Lee Marvin (playing Chino) said in The Wild One, “…the shame of it all.”
A couple of my oldest living friends. Center is Tony Serra at his retirement party in San Francisco in August 2025. At right is John Van der Zee. The three of us were at in the Fiji house at Stanford in the mid-’50s.
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” - Satchel Paige
A Few Non-Drug Anti-depressants
Exercise / Friends / Food / Music / Immersion in cold water / Waterfalls / Hot springs / Feedback on books / Adventures / Roads previously not taken…
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The Light (or Darkness) at the End of the Tunnel
About 25 years ago, I published a book titled Getting Your Affairs in Order, by Elmo Petterle. Elmo had been the personnel manager for the Marin County PG&E and when an employee (usually a man) would pass away, he would contact the widow with respect to the family stocks, bank accounts, retirement funds, real estate, etc. He found that there was invariably confusion and that records, if any, were incomplete.
So he wrote the book, in which each person filled out all relevant information that the surviving spouse was now responsible for. It also included charts of the things that must be done immediately after a death, within 5 days, within 30 days, etc.
In editing the book, I acquired a bunch of books on dying, including some on assisted dying, such as Final Exit and the Peaceful Pill Handbook. I also concluded that when I get to the stage where the end is nigh, I’m not gonna get tortured to death by nature or medical intervention.
In the past few years, two people I was close to chose this solution. One ground up a lethal bunch of barbiturates in a coffee grinder, and put them in chocolate ice cream, which he then ate, and passed peacefully. The other told his doctor of his wishes; the doctor agreed, got approval from the hospice doctor, and, with close family members present, drank the cocktail administered by a hospice nurse, and passed serenely. Elegant.
If I had my druthers I would use sister morphine, but more realistically it might be helium. OK, enough on that subject.
Body Parts
Shoulders, knees, hips: these are the main joints of concern for old people. Then heart, blood pressure, circulation, obesity, arthritis, cholesterol, cancer, asthma, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, prostate problems. What’s it gonna be? (You don’t get to choose.)
With my Dipsea running friends (The Pelican Inn Track Club) at Smiley’s Saloon for my 90th birthday (music by the Mark Hummel Blues Band). Tomás (at right) and I have been running together for over 30 years.
Forgetfulness
Memory gets progressively worse. For me, I think it’s partly the fact that there are so many people in my life right now, and I can’t remember the names of most folks that come up to me. I’m thinking of getting a card printed up saying “I’m 90 years old and forgive me if I don’t remember your name. Best is to identify yourself whenever we meet.”
More and more often, I can’t think of the appropriate word. Like the most recent was “…transparency.” I’ll know what the word conveys, but can’t recall the word itself. Bucky Fuller said that when this happens, go on to other thoughts and the word will pop into your consciousness unbidden. Usually works.
I also have a ton of people coming up to me these days and telling me how much the Shelter books have influenced their lives — for some reason a lot of people in the 30-40-year-old category. I seem to be making more and more friends as the days go by, and it’s wonderful, but I can’t keep up with names.
Recently I started making a list of people I wanted to contact and/or hang out with, and I got up to 25 or so names. It’s a good kind of problem.
Not Answering Emails Or Texts Or DM’s Promptly
I don’t have my phone with me at all times — hey, I’m 90. I may not check my email for a few days, I still haven’t figured out how DM’s work on Instagram, so you can’t depend on me to get right back to you.
“Yes, You Already Told Me That”
Stop me if I’ve told you this tale before. I basically have no recollection of who I’ve told what.
Running the Homestead
This doesn’t have so much to do with being old as it has to do with being off-the-scale busy. Lesley and I built this house and garden over a period of almost 50 years. She’s been gone for about 2 1/2 years now, and I’m still coping with running it solo.
In a way, this busyness is a good thing. There’s so much to do that the idleness and/or lack of purpose that a lot of older people feel isn’t at work here. I bounce around from one thing to another. I walk from the house out to the studio, or from the shop to the greenhouse, and spy things to do along the way. (Then I’ll jump to doing the new thing, and forget my original mission.)
It’s pretty hectic at times, but I think it’s a good thing to keep busy. I’m never bored.
The family. Kneeling, l-r: Evan, Chelsea, Maceo, Will, Niko
What Did I Come Out Here For?
This happens to me a lot: I’m in the studio and need to get something from the house. By the time I get to the house, I forget what I came in for. So — invariably — I go back out to the studio to remember what it was I needed from the house. (This always works.)
I read recently that a 90-year-old’s brain weighs about 3 1/2 ounces less than a 40-year-old’s brain (total weight of which is about 45 ounces).
How Long Can I Keep on Driving?
Shoutout for this superb under-the-radar vehicle, a 1999 Mercedes E320, which I bought for $4000 four years ago,. It gets 22 mpg, handles great on the mountain curves, is comfortable, is the first automatic drive car I’ve ever had (which I love), and some of these models have reportedly gone a million miles. It’s 27 years old. (I’m not worthy of this car.)
My depth perception is not as good these days. There are little things about driving where I’m not as sharp as I used to be. I’m really nervous about backing up. My neighbor Carl gave up driving when he was 96. So there will inevitably be a time when I’ll have to do the same. which would really put a dent in my activities — living, as I do — an hour away from San Francisco, and having had a car since I was 17.
BUT — I believe I’ve discovered a solution:
I took a Tesla Uber a month or so ago in Marin County, and the driver had it on autopilot. He was watchful, but the car made all the decisions — changing lanes, accelerating, braking — flawlessly. The full self-driving option is between $50-100 per month.
It turns out that Waymo and other automatic pilot vehicles have a better safety record than human drivers. For one thing, robots don’t drink alcohol, nor are they in a hurry or get distracted.
So when the time comes, I’ll get an electric car. By then there ought to be a lot more choices than there are right now. There’s much I like about the Teslas (other than their owner): beautiful design (like the door handles), and if you take out the back seat you have a lot of storage space. — a six-footer can sleep in this car.
The driver told me you can buy used Tesla model 3s for around $20,000.
Balance
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” - George Bernard Shaw
Riding a skateboard (or a unicycle, for example) requires sheer balance. You’re rolling, and there’s nothing to hold on to. To practice balance, I have what’s called an Indo board in the house and I try to get on it every few days.
Each time I use it and let go of any support, I’m a little nervous. Same thing with skating. Each time I push off and get rolling, I’m a little worried: I’m on my own — nothing to hold onto, no brakes. But I push myself to do these things. Use it or lose it.
Once I’m up and balancing on the Indo board (or skateboard), I realize that there are motors and reflexes at work that I’m not conscious of. It’s kind of miraculous. I do this so that this remarkable combination of mind/body functions continues to operate. Here’s just a small part of a long explanation from AI as to what’s going on here:
“Balancing on a skateboard… is mostly handled by automatic sensorimotor loops that run below conscious awareness, with your conscious attention setting goals (“go forward,” “turn,” “don’t fall”) while fast reflexes and learned predictions do the moment‑to‑moment corrections. These loops rely on continuous sensory input (inner ear, vision, body senses) and rapid outputs to muscles via brainstem and spinal pathways.” - Perplexity AI
Where’s My Phone, My Keys, My Wallet?
This is kind of a major problem for me these days. It’s the combination of aging along with the complexity of the modern world. I misplace my phone maybe once a week, my keys the same, my wallet occasionally. I use the Apple Find My app (which gives me a map and a sound to locate the missing object). You can also use the Tile app for the same kind of electronic sleuthing. Even with these apps , I often need to get help from others (usually younger ) to find the object.
Greater Perspective
There are a few advantages to old age. One is the perspective of having been alive for so long — a faculty that only old people have. And this is doubly useful when I can reminisce with people my age. To remember when milk was delivered to the doorstep, gas was 33 cents a gallon, before TV, playing in the streets before Little League, when annual tuition at Stanford was $660, when politicians were halfway decent, driving across America in the dead of winter in a 1960 VW bus with a 40 HP motor, the “English Invasion” of the ‘60s (Beatles, Stones), the Haight Ashbury before the Diggers and the “Summer of Love” — in fact, the ‘60s in general, including the Monterey Pop Festival.
To compare these memories with what’s happening now — wow!
I figure I’ve got about 10 years left. My dad lived to be 92, my mom 103. (I chose my parents carefully.)
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I don’t normally post in the evening, but I thought I’d offer three quick notes on an … interesting day in the crypto market.
First, today’s price action shouldn’t change your view about Bitcoin’s usefulness or lack thereof. If, like me, you consider the whole thing a delusion — BTC isn’t a medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value — then you already knew that and the fact that we seem to be having a Wile E. Coyote moment isn’t information about the fundamentals. (There are no fundamentals.) If you have some story about why this aging financial innovation is actually useful — do tell — you should HODL through the panic.
Incidentally, some readers insisted that HODL stands for “hold on for dear life.” No, it doesn’t. That’s a retcon intended to make it sound more respectable. The term comes from a post on a crypto message board from an investor so panicked that he misspelled HOLD. See link in this morning’s post.
And I did something similar in the title of this post as emailed out! Sigh.
Second, the fact that BTC is now lower than it was before the 2024 election is significant in two ways. It shows the limits of political favor — all the boasts about making American a crypto superpower, all the deregulatory talk and pardons for cryptocriminals, in the end couldn’t defy gravity.
But it also means that everyone who bought Bitcoin in the belief that Trump would make Bitcoin greater than ever has lost money, in many cases a lot of money. So this is another case of ETTD: everything Trump touches dies.
Finally, this crash may have political consequences. At least some young men supported Trump because they believed that he would enhance their crypto investments, and have remained favorable because he seemed to be delivering. I don’t know how many bitterly disillusioned bros there will be now, but there will be some.
And in general the whole “Say what you like about Trump, but markets are up” mindset must be under severe strain.
This newsletter is often focused on depressing stuff: Scandals, lies of the powerful, scams that defraud the public. But today I thought I’d offer a change of pace and talk about what is happening to cryptocurrency.
OK, maybe I’m not offering a change of pace after all.
Cryptocurrencies are, roughly speaking, assets where “ownership” is defined not by legal title but by possession of a digital key — a long number — validated by the blockchain, a decentralized record-keeping system. If you know a crypto asset’s key — whether you purchased it, stole it by hacking, or kidnapped someone and tortured him until he revealed it — the asset is yours.
Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was introduced in 2009, which makes it just two years younger than the original iPhone. It was promoted by enthusiasts as the future of money, a replacement for the dollar and other official currencies. It hasn’t made any visible progress toward filling that role: Bitcoins are awkward and costly to trade, and they have never been a widely accepted means of payment anywhere, not even in El Salvador, which made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021 and devoted substantial resources to promoting it before largely giving up last year.
These days most talk about cryptocurrencies as money focuses on stablecoins, tokens that are pegged to the dollar, which are indeed used for some payments. However, the core use case even for stablecoins appears to be criminal activity. And stablecoins account for only a small fraction of the total market capitalization of all crypto assets, shown in the chart at the top of this post. Bitcoin still accounts for more than half the total value of cryptocurrencies in circulation.
This description makes it seem as if cryptocurrency is a failed innovation. I mean, aren’t 17 years of unsuccessfully trying to turn it into a working form of money enough? Yet demand for cryptocurrencies has driven their prices incredibly high, and these prices have repeatedly bounced back from huge setbacks. In 2022 a series of bankruptcies and scandals led to a crypto “winter” that wiped out two-thirds of the industry’s market cap. Yet prices stabilized and gradually began to rise again, soaring to new heights by last fall.
But now we’re in the midst of another crypto winter. Both Bitcoin and total crypto market cap are down about 40 percent from their peaks.
People in the industry are predicting that this winter will also be temporary. Because of course they are. The truth is that nobody knows. Analyzing crypto prices isn’t like, say, analyzing housing prices in the Naughties, where you could compare prices with fundamentals — because with crypto there are no fundamentals, it’s vibes all the way down.
But let me give you three reasons this crypto winter may be different, why it might be Fimbulwinter — in Norse legend, the catastrophic winter that precedes Ragnarok, the end of all things.
First, Bitcoin and to a lesser extent other cryptocurrencies have long been sustained by their cult followings, investors with a deep emotional attachment to its future. Cultists HODLed — not an acronym for anything, just a frantic misspelling of HOLD — when prices fell, and piled in to buy more. But recently crypto hoarders like Strategy and BitMine — companies that issue stock and debt and use the proceeds to buy crypto — have become major players. And I doubt that investors will have the same mystical belief in Strategy shares that they used to have in Bitcoin itself, which means that faith will no longer put a floor under prices.
Second, the best case for Bitcoin has always been the argument that it can in effect become digital gold. After all, gold, like Bitcoin, is an asset that is awkward to transfer and isn’t useful as a means of payment in the modern world. Yet gold has retained its historic role as a perceived safe haven, an asset people buy when the world looks uncertain and dangerous. If Bitcoin could take over even part of that traditional role, its value could make sense.
But over the past few months we’ve been experiencing a lot of turmoil and uncertainty, leading to widespread talk about a “debasement trade” in which investors doubt whether dollars are still the safe haven they used to be. And the verdict so far is that the future replacement for gold is … gold. Investors have piled into the yellow stuff even while dumping Bitcoin, which is acting like a speculative tech stock rather than a safe haven.
Most importantly — and ironically, given the libertarian ideology that used to be pervasive in the crypto world — crypto has become very much a political asset. In 2024 the industry invested huge sums getting Donald Trump elected and in general electing friendly politicians, and since then has spent even larger sums directly enriching Trump and his family.
These investments have paid off. Some of the payoffs have involved the president’s pardon power: In November Forbes — Forbes! — published an article titled “Trump’s crypto cronies: They sent the president money — and got off easy.”
But there was also a huge financial payoff: Crypto-friendly policies and the perception that the U.S. government would actively promote crypto assets helped fuel a huge rise in the prices of Bitcoin and other assets. The chart at the top shows that a large part of the rise in crypto values since the previous crypto winter came in a post-election surge. As I wrote last October, crypto has become a Trump trade.
Now almost all of that surge is gone. Bitcoin sold for about $69,000 just before the 2024 election; it reached a peak of almost $125,000; but just before this post went live it was under $71,000. How much of that reversal reflects Trump’s cratering approval and doubts about whether he can or will deliver the crypto-friendly policies the industry wants? It must be part of the story. And crypto is unlikely to regain the level of political influence it had a few months ago.
Should we be worried about the new crypto winter? Michal Burry, of Big Short fame, has created a stir by warning that Bitcoin’s fall could cause a “death spiral” in asset prices. But I think this is exaggerated: Crypto is still a fairly small piece of financial markets, and, without getting into too much detail, crypto hoarders like Strategy may eventually be forced to sell, but they won’t be facing immediate margin calls.
In fact, if we’re going to have a crypto crash, best to get it over with now, before the industry becomes too big — or too politically powerful — to fail.
When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for my experiment. All of this gets summarized in an extensive set of notes, with links back to where each piece of information was found. Using these notes, codex wires the experiment and makes a bunch of hyperparameter decisions I couldn’t possibly make without much more effort.
— Karel D'Oosterlinck, I spent $10,000 to automate my research at OpenAI with Codex
From greenbacks stuffed into children’s teddy bears to fortunes tucked away in the ceiling, Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.
But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.
Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.
TPM is resurrecting The Franchise, a weekly newsletter that we used to send out back in the day, starting before and continuing while President Trump began spreading deranged conspiracy theories about his loss in the 2020 election. (You can sign up here!)
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election and MAGA’s various attempts to sow doubt in states’ election administration processes and spread conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud (conveniently, in locales where Democrats won or typically win elections), former TPM reporter Matt Shuham used The Franchise to meticulously track the Big Lie and all its tentacles and permutations.
With Trump’s undying fixation with the 2020 election back in the news this week — and everything else his Justice Department and White House is attempting to do to act on his fever dream to “nationalize” elections, seize voter data from states, force mid-cycle gerrymandering and, potentially, intimidate voters at the polls this fall — we figured it was an apt time to bring The Franchise back to TPM readers’ inboxes.
TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman has taken on this task. Since we first hired Khaya at TPM she has covered elections, voting rights, the conspiracy theories that festered post-2020 (and the people who perpetuated the disinfo), the ways in which election administration had to change in the wake of Trump’s attempt to subvert the vote, attacks on poll workers, the DOJ’s overreach into states’ rights to administer elections, Trump’s gerrymandering pressure campaign and more.
I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.
That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.
Our guy comes in as a White Knight. He solves every problem because money is no issue. The readers and the staff are happy and, because of that, the billionaire is happy. The press watchers at the universities are happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a for-profit operation and the buyer doesn’t want to lose money but it’s not a money-making purchase. The operation is purchased as a kind of public trust. He’s signed up as the protector and custodian of a public asset.
But billionaires turn out not to like losing money. That shouldn’t surprise us. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having much tolerance for losing money. Having limitless amounts of money doesn’t really matter. It’s more integral to their personhood. It eats at them. I’ve seen this a number of times up close. Eventually it’s too much.
What’s the solution? Innovation, efficiency, scale … often it’s refocusing on the great underserved middle of the electorate. (Where’d that last part come from? Who do you think billionaires spend their days talking to?) The consultants and tech-adjacent efficiency and innovation bros are responsible for the rest. The guys who make this case are from a never-ending — life as spontaneous generation from the inanimate soil — list of consultants who speak billionaire.
If you’ve been in the news-publishing business over the last few decades you know the type. (Last year I did a post explaining this stage of the cycle.) Check out the guys Chris Hughes brought in at The New Republic after he got antsy. They often come out of the tech world or the parts of the media world adjacent to tech. But the key is they speak billionaire, a language rife in talk of innovation, scale, synergies, efficiencies. Moving fast and breaking things and also how hard can this really be? Have you seen the newspaper folks? We can do better and it won’t be hard.
So innovations and efficiencies get a go. With Jeff Bezos, he also had to get right with Trump. There was a critical failure to anticipate the major drop-off in news interest after the 2020 election. That’s on Bezos and whoever he had running the publishing side of the operation. Because that was an entirely foreseeable set of circumstances which they apparently did not foresee, did not plan for and did not react quickly to. For our purposes, the first thing to know is that the newspaper folks never take well to the innovation gospel. And it’s important to understand that the journalists and the editors seldom have any better idea of how to make the publication work as a business. Don’t assume that they do. It’s easy to valorize them. And you should valorize them. But don’t valorize them to the degree or in the way that it makes you think they know how to make the operation work as a business. Really, it’s not their job. Hiring good and dedicated people will not, alone, get the job of making the operation work as a business done. What those people can usually understand intuitively, though, is that the innovation and efficiency-speak has almost nothing to do with how you break news or why people read anything.
Still, the boss likes what he’s hearing. And he goes with it. And here’s the critical point. A seed has been planted: he really doesn’t like the guff he’s getting from the help. And why does he need this anyway? This was never going to be a moneymaker. That was never the point. The salient point is that now the operation has been turned over to the consultants and billionaire-speakers with their talk of innovation and multi-media, multi-platform scale and the seeds have been planted for a curdled and resentful attitude toward the people who write the stories. And why do they have a union? Seriously, fuck that. The billionaire starts to get maybe a bit of a different idea of what the “problem” is with this operation.
Now we come to the pivot moment of the cycle. It turns out the innovation and scale mumbo-jumbo isn’t really working. It’s not making any new people want to read your paper and you’re seriously bumming out your readership which, somewhat like your employers, you’re beginning to feel a certain level of resentment toward. That readership was already in at least longterm decline. Now you’re actually driving people away. And the new people, to the extent they exist and aren’t bought as commodity eyeballs, aren’t remotely filling the gap. Your staff meanwhile are increasingly angry and resentful. The ones who can are already leaving. And screw them anyway, right? If they want to self-cut, let them. That just helps with the bottom line.
At some point the billionaire realizes that as awesome as efficiencies and scale and serving the underserved middle is … well, this isn’t working. Who are we fooling? The billionaire can see that if he’s self-made. Give him his due. It turns out this is hard. And this is the kicker: He’s bored. This isn’t fun.
So the answer is: fuck this whole thing. The staff sucks. The readership sucks. This is when the self-immolation cuts start. If there’s one thing a local paper needs, one thing a metro paper needs, it’s sports. If you can’t do sports, which has a mass audience, you can’t do anything. Maybe you decided in a hard-headed moment that you can’t fund an international section. The Times and the Journal will do that. Not us. It’s not crazy. When you cut your sports section, it’s because you actually don’t want the paper to exist anymore.
Why not just sell?
Well, here’s why. If you sell, it means you failed. You’re a billionaire and somehow you couldn’t manage to be the owner of a storied newspaper. If you can cover the losses, how hard can that be? And if you’re not willing to cover the losses, how hard can it be? You’re already down on the people who run it. You’ve built Amazon. The burbling resentments play a role in forestalling this option. The key is that selling the thing is a kind of admission of failure. And personal failure isn’t an option. Institutional failure? Well, shit happens. That’s just a hardheaded business decision — something the newspaper business folks weren’t badass enough look at head on and not flinch.
My best sense, inferring from the decision to shutter the sports page, is that the near term-plan is to cut the Post’s grounding in metro D.C. and try to turn it into a Pulitzer mill. Hold on to the White House and Hill teams and get awards. Anyone who knows anything about the newspaper business knows this is a joke. But Bezos hasn’t been listening to actually newspaper folks for a few years.
It’s dead and there’s no point is the thinking. It’s the billionaire white knight publishing arc. At a smaller scale, see Chris Hughes at TNR going on a generation ago now. It almost always runs this cycle.
The Trump administration used Charlie Kirk’s September assassination as an opportunity to declare war on the left, pledging to use the full force of the law to go after their ideological opponents.
That’s exactly what is now happening. As Josh Kovensky and John Light discussed on Substack Live Wednesday morning, Trump’s DOJ is making novel use of “material support for terrorism” charges against Black Lives Matter and anti-ICE protesters.
“It’s putting the cart before the horse,” Josh explains. “When you think about a criminal investigation, what you want is evidence of a crime, or evidence that a crime is being plotted, and for that to be stopped, or somebody need[ing] to be held accountable for that. The problem with NSPM-7, what’s happening now — and also with COINTELPRO, what they have in common — is that it gets that backwards. They are putting out markers for what they think will be a crime — in this case its anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity; back in the ‘60s it was membership in the communist party or the Black Panthers or certain civil rights movement organizations — and saying, Okay, we’re going to now try to disrupt them, try to go after them.”
“It’s not following the evidence that leads you towards a perpetrator. It’s saying, We know who the perpetrators are likely to be based off these ideological markers and then directing law enforcement to go after them with as much force as possible.”
Josh and John also delve into Trump’s controversial NSPM-7 memo, what “antifa” actually is, and the parallels between our current moment and “One Battle After Another.”
On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.
Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.
Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.
Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”
And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.
Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.
The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.
For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.
But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.
MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.
In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.
It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.
In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.
Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.
In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by [Black men].” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.
This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.
At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of [Black] domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.
In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.
When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.
Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.
Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.
Beyond acceding to Donald Trump’s fondest dreams, what are we possibly to make of the FBI seizing 700 ballot boxes, voter machine tapes, digital data and voter rolls reflecting 2020 votes from a Fulton Country warehouse? How could we possibly not see this as Trump-fueled revenge and a blinking warning about the kind of challenges to expect in November’s elections?
Days later, the FBI’s execution last week of a judicially signed search warrant served by armor-clad agents clearly still feels extraordinary both politically and legally, and it represents a significant escalation in Trump’s breaking of democratic norms. It certainly reflects Trump’s obsession with having been declared a loser and a warning that he will do anything to influence this year’s elections.
But what exactly is supposed to happen with these ballots and tapes? What are they supposed to show? There still is no justification for what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was doing at the search. Even if we accept that she has decided to worry about election “security,” nothing offers a reason to be present during the serving of a warrant to gather evidence.
Though even the optics of a seizure may appease Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, what is the practical outcome here? Aren’t these the same votes and ballots recounted multiple times by the state officials responsible for them? Aren’t these the very results that were the arguments in Rudy Giuliani’s loss in court of a defamation suit worth $148 million charging fraud by two election mother and daughter election workers?
Trump blamed results in Georgia for his loss to Joe Biden, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,781 more votes. Recently, he promised anew to prosecute those responsible for rigging the election. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 legal cases across the nation seeking to overturn the 2020 election results — all of which failed, even those before Trump-appointed judges.
Can Trump Find His Votes?
The warrant said the materials to be seized might be “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.” It cited stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots. Weirdly, this material already had been requested in a state-federal lawsuit, but release was held up by court order.
We don’t know what evidence or argument was presented to the judge who signed the search warrant; only the FBI presented its reasons. There is no suggestion of new evidence emerging, so the timing is off. A search warrant does not mean a crime was committed or by whom. Rather it means that there is probably cause to look at these elements.
Even a cursory look at the seizure raises a host of questions.
The first is what does the FBI hope to find that no previous investigation or recounting determined? In 2023, Giuliani conceded that while acting as a lawyer for. Trump, he made false statements by asserting that two Atlanta election workers had mishandled ballots.
Then there is the timing. This is 2026, and the voting was in 2020. Most federal and state election laws seem to have a statue of limitations clause that expires after five years. Can any “evidence” unearthed here even be submitted to a court in a criminal trial?
Who is going to review these records, if not the state and county election officials? Is the FBI going to do its own recount, or perhaps hire an outside private company whose background and political lean will be put under endless scrutiny? Who designates that they are not altered once out of the hands of election officials?
How is anyone reviewing the ballots supposed to determine “intent” as required by fraud laws?
And, of course, if Trump’s FBI and Justice Department magically “find” 11,781 votes, do we replay the last six years and re-install Donald Trump as president. Or better yet, determine that he already has served twice as president and cannot Constitutionally finish this would-be third term?
An Egotistical Warning
We’re left with the other conclusion possible here. There is no practical way for Trump to un-rig the 2020 election, but he can use his Justice Department and FBI to harass those who dare to suggest that he lost.
While such dreams may serve the infantile Trump ego, the real value is in signaling to an already wary electorate that Trump, who is not on any ballot in November, still wants an outcome that will leave him with a Republican Congress that will stand down from oversight and questioning of his administration.
To that end, he has endorsed and promoted congressional gerrymandering changes in multiple states, he is threatening to outlaw mail ballots and voter machines that are state controlled, he is choosing candidates to primary any congress member who challenges him, and he is encouraging the social media doxing or prosecution of political enemies. He is pushing for closing of polling stations in Black districts believed to favor Democrats.
And the example of ICE armies and National Guard deployments in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington show that he is willing to have the appearance of military law in place to squelch voter turn-out.
Of course, he wanted the FBI to seize ballots and tapes, even if there is no prosecution case to develop sufficiently in the months before the election. His own reputation as a constant winner and his hatred for those who stand up to him are way more important than retaining a democracy.
In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentation
was the area with the second most comments.
This is a writeup of the concrete steps I took to see how much
progress one person could make on improving the organization’s
documentation while holding myself to a high standard for making
changes that actually worked instead of optically sounding impressive.
Diagnosis
There were a handful of issues we were running into:
We migrated from Confluence to Notion in January, 2025,
which had left around a bunch of old pages that were
“obviously wrong.”
These files created a bad smell around our other docs, as folks
felt like things weren’t well maintained.
We had inconsistent approach to what we documented in Git-managed files
versus managing in Notion. This led to duplication.
Duplication meant that it felt safer to create an N+1th version,
rather than debugging why N versions already existed.
We’ve had a bunch of new folks join over the past year,
who weren’t sure if they were empowered to update documentation
or if someone else was managing any given file
We started using Notion AI as the primary mechanism for exposing content,
which meant that hierarchical organization was less important,
and that having inaccurate snippets was harmful even if they were
tucked away into a quiet corner
This was combined with a handful of interesting limitations in Notion itself:
You cannot tell if a non-wiki page is verified or not via API.
You can tell if a wiki page is verified via API, but no one uses wiki pages
You cannot retrieve all pages in a Notion Teamspace via API,
you instead have to manually take list of the top-level pages in that Teamspace,
and find the children from those pages
There is no “archive” functionality in Notion that allows you to exclude a document
from search results
There is no programmatic visibility into views or usage of a page via API except
for how recently it was edited
Policy
The policy we adopted for addressing the above diagnosis was:
Optimize for NotionAI results, not manual discovery: a significant majority of our Notion use
is now via either direct links to a specific page, or via Notion AI, not via manual discovery.
That means that things like “FAQ” pages that duplicate content and go stale are actively harmful,
whereas previously they were very valuable.
Duplication and stale content is worse than nothing: do not write your own guide to a process.
Link to it instead, or update the source document
Prefer natural documentation in version control: we’d rather link to a README in Github than
duplicate those instructions in Notion, because the README is more likely to be kept current
Everyone tidies our documentation: we’d rather be people who try to clean up a document,
even if we make a small mistake, rather than someone who leaves documentation in a poor state
Automatic beats manual every time: we’re a busy team doing a lot of things,
it’s always going to be difficult to consistently find time to manually curate content deeply,
focused curation is great, but global is unreasonable
Implementation
Then the specifics of implementing that policy were:
Create Scheduled to Archive and Archive teamspaces.
The Archive teamspace is a private teamspace, such that documents added there don’t pollute the search index.
Conversely, Scheduled to Archive is public, where anyone can add documents to its root document.
We have a weekly script that migrates everything from Scheduled to Archive to Archive.
This was the most effective mechanism we could find to implement archiving within Notion’s constraints.
Prune expired pages. Created a script which recursively builds hierarchy from a root page,
enriches each page with the last_edited_date for each child, and then prunes all pages
where it and all children were last edited more than N days ago.
Using this script on 3-4 most relevant top-level pages, we archived about 1,500 pages of expired documentation.
Compact stale hierarchies. Created a second script which identifies current pages deep in stale hierarchies,
e.g. the one updated page among 15 inaccurate docs. After finding a “buried current page”, promotes it to the grandparent page,
and move the parent page (and its stale children) to Scheduled to Archive.
This ended up as a script that found all the candidates, and then I worked through approving/rejecting
each suggestion. The biggest issue being the lack of “verification” status within the API, such that there’s
no way to bless given pages and their descendants.
Stale link finder. Created a third script which recursively works through a hierarchy and finds 404s.
It’s essential that this script does not have access to the Archive so those scripts show up as 404s,
otherwise you would have to scan through Archived to find things there. Both approaches would work,
just a bit of a matter of preference.
Ran this after the mass migrations to ensure we didn’t leave a “haunted forest” of links into
archived documents that folks can’t see, which would make the documentation still feel bad even though
much of the bad content was removed.
Manual review of key pages. After running all of the above steps, I then worked through all
new-hire documentation to ensure it was linked to top-level onboarding guide, stated clear prerequisites,
indicated the Slack channel to get help if folks ran into trouble,
and ensured that instructions did not duplicate our Git-managed READMEs, instead linking to them where
appropriate.
I did a lighter pass of this approach for our top-level engineering and technology pages,
although those were generally in a good place.
Altogether, I think this was about eight hours of my time, but required zero hours of anyone
else’s, and will have hopefully significantly improved the quality of our documentation.
There’s still a lot more to be done in specific areas, but I’m optimistic that having far fewer duplicates,
and more evidence that we’re actively maintaining the documentation, will make that easier as well.
With OpenClaw you're giving AI its own machine, long-term memory, reminders, and persistent execution. The model is no longer confined to a prompt-response cycle, but able to check its own email, Basecamp notifications, and whatever else you give it access to on a running basis. It's a sneak peek at a future where everyone has a personal agent assistant, and it's fascinating.
I set up mine on a Proxmox virtual machine to be fully isolated from my personal data and logins. (But there are people out there running wild and giving OpenClaw access to everything on their own machine, despite the repeated warnings that this is more than a little risky!).
Then I tried to see just how little help it would need navigating our human-centric digital world. I didn't install any skills, any MCPs, or give it access to any APIs. Zero machine accommodations. I just started off with a simple prompt: "Sign up for Fizzy, so we have a place to collaborate. Here's the invite link."
Kef, as I named my new agent, dutifully went to Fizzy to sign up, but was immediately stumped by needing an email address. It asked me what to do, and I replied: "Just go to hey.com and sign up for a new account." So it did. In a single try. No errors, no steering, no accommodations.
After it had procured its own email address, it continued on with the task of signing up for Fizzy. And again, it completed the mission without any complications. Now we had a shared space to collaborate.
So, as a test, I asked it to create a new board for business ideas, and add five cards with short suggestions, including providing a background image sourced from the web to describe the idea. And it did. Again, zero corrections. Perfect execution.
I then invited it to Basecamp by just adding it as I would any other user. That sent off an email to Kef's new HEY account, which it quickly received, then followed the instructions, got signed up, and greeted everyone in the chat room of the AI Labs project it was invited to.
I'm thoroughly impressed. All the agent accommodations, like MCPs/CLIs/APIs, probably still have a place for a bit longer, as doing all this work cold is both a bit slow and token-intensive. But I bet this is just a temporary crutch.
And while I ran this initial experiment on Claude's Opus 4.5, I later reran most of it on the Chinese open-weight model Kimi K2.5, and it too was able to get it all right (though it was a fair bit slower when provisioned through OpenRouter).
Everything is changing so fast in the world of AI right now, but if I was going to skate to where the puck is going to be, it'd be a world where agents, like self-driving cars, don't need special equipment, like LIDAR or MCPs, to interact with the environment. The human affordances will be more than adequate.
“Virginia Oliver, a feisty, salty-tongued lobster boat skipper who fished off the New England coast wearing earrings, hot-pink lipstick and an occasional scowl for more than 80 years, until she was 103, died on Jan. 21 in Rockport, Maine. She was 105.”
My Harvard colleague Ken Rogoff, who is almost certainly undominated in the joint space of competitive chess and academic economics, reflects on the economy during his long career in a new book.
I was struck by these paragraphs comparing competitive chess to academic economics.
"As a sometime intellectual biographer myself, I note the repeated chess analogies sprinkled throughout the book, and take them more seriously than Rogoff himself does. Indeed I would suggest that his early chess career, starting in high school, is the important intellectual formation we need to have in mind as the lens for understanding the moves in his second career as an economist. I have already mentioned his self-proclaimed penchant for bucking consensus. In chess everyone knows the standard openings, so to win you need to come up with a new move (on offense) or find a way to defend against your opponent’s new move (on defense). If it works, everyone studies the game and adds it to their own chess repertoire.
"That’s apparently how he understands the academic game as well, albeit perhaps subconsciously, and he was good at playing that game as well. Tenure at Harvard is basically the academic equivalent of international grandmaster status in chess, a status he achieved in 1978 just as he was starting his academic career. In chess, tournaments are where you test your skills against your rivals. In academia, conferences and workshops play an analogous role, and we know who won by subsequent publication placement. (Not nearly as objective as checkmate!) Throughout the book, we hear repeatedly about some of these academic rivalries—versus Stiglitz, Greenspan, Dooley et al, Rey, Summers, Krugman—with brief summaries of the moves that Rogoff made in crucial games. Games with lower ranked players are relegated to footnotes..."
Pharmaceuticals have high fixed costs of R&D and low marginal costs. The first pill costs a billion dollars; the second costs 50 cents. That cost structure makes price discrimination—charging different customers different prices based on willingness to pay—common.
Price discrimination is why poorer countries get lower prices. Not because firms are charitable, but because a high price means poorer countries buy nothing, while any price above marginal cost is still profit. This type of price discrimination is good for poorer countries, good for pharma, and (indirectly) good for the United States: more profits mean more R&D and, over time, more drugs.
The political problem, however, is that Americans look abroad, see lower prices for branded drugs, and conclude that they’re being ripped off. Riding that grievance, Trump has demanded that U.S. prices be no higher than the lowest level paid in other developed countries.
One immediate effect is to help pharma in negotiations abroad: they can now credibly say, “We can’t sell to you at that discount, because you’ll export your price back into the U.S.” But two big issues follow.
First, this won’t lower U.S. prices on current drugs. Firms are already profit-maximizing in the U.S. If they manage to raise prices in France, they don’t then announce, “Great news—now we’ll charge less in America.” The potential upside of the Trump plan isn’t lower prices but higher pharma profits, which strengthens incentives to invest in R&D. If profits rise, we may get more drugs in the long run. But try telling the American voter that higher pharma profits are good.
The second issue is that the plan can backfire.
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss almost exactly this scenario: suppose policy effectively forces a single price across countries. Which price do firms choose—the low one abroad or the high one in the U.S.? Since a large share of profits comes from the U.S., they’re likely to choose the high price:
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was even more direct, saying it is time for countries such as France to pay more or go without new drugs. If forced to choose between reducing U.S. prices to France’s level or stopping supply to France, Pfizer would choose the latter, Bourla told reporters at a pharma-industry conference.
So the real question is: will other countries pay?
If France tried to force Americans to pay more to subsidize French price controls, U.S. voters would explode. Yet that’s essentially what other countries are being told but in reverse: “You must pay more so Americans can pay less.” Other countries are already stingier than the U.S., and they already bear costs for it—new drugs arrive more slowly abroad than here. Some governments may decide—foolishly, but understandably—that paying U.S.-level prices is politically impossible. If so, they won’t “harmonize upward.” They’ll follow the European way: ration, delay and go without.
In that case, nobody wins. Pharma profits fall, R&D declines, U.S. prices don’t magically drop, and patients abroad get fewer new drugs and worse care. Lose-lose-lose.
We don’t know the equilibrium, but lose-lose-lose is entirely plausible. Switzerland, for example, does not seem willing to pay more:
Yet Switzerland has shown little political willingness to pay more—threatening both the availability of medications in the country and its role as a global leader in developing therapies. Drug prices are the primary driver of the increasing cost of mandatory health coverage, and the topic generates heated debate during the annual reappraisal of insurance rates. “The Swiss cannot and must not pay for price reductions in the USA with their health insurance premiums,” says Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, Switzerland’s home affairs minister.
If many countries respond like Switzerland—and Trump’s unpopularity abroad doesn’t help—the sector ends up less profitable and innovation slows. Voters may feel less “ripped off,” but they’ll be buying that feeling with fewer drugs and sicker bodies.
Light is the fastest phenomenon in the universe, clocking in at just under 300,000 kilometers per second. The telescopes that observe that light, from radio waves to gamma rays, are built at rather slower speeds. Take, as one example, the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA began feasibility studies for the mission in the mid-1990s and […]
In the consumer electronics playbook, custom silicon is the final step in the marathon: you use off-the-shelf components to prove a product, achieve mass scale and only then invest in proprietary chips to create differentiation, improve operations, and optimize margins. In the modern satellite communications (SATCOM) ecosystem, this script has been flipped. For the industry’s […]
A Senate committee has delayed consideration of a bill intended to expedite Federal Communications Commission reviews of satellite license applications amid concerns that the proposal may be too permissive.
After helping place proliferated LEO constellations at the center of U.S. military space planning, the SmallSat Alliance is now tackling how these networks can be used together as a unified system.
Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force’s vice chief of space operations, spoke with SpaceNews’ Sandra Erwin as part of an event focused on the Space Force 2040 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center on Jan. 21. Here are six takeaways from their conversation: Planning for 2040 means more space superiority A long-range planning initiative […]
Correction: Morpheus Space is ramping up to producing 100 GO-2 propulsion systems annually. SAN FRANCISCO — Morpheus Space raised $15 million in a Series A+ funding round announced Feb. 5. “This funding is intended to accelerate our production as we focus on bringing our GO-2 Electric Propulsion System fully to market,” Morpheus CEO Kevin Lausten […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Viridian Space Corp. signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The five-year CRADA will provide the Southern California startup with access to testing facilities and satellite-operations expertise at AFRL’s Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. “There seems to be a good collaborative opportunity for testing […]
Few modern systems are as consequential — or as exposed — as the Global Positioning System. A temporary loss of access to its positioning, navigation and timing signals would ripple through the global economy and severely impair military operations. Yet despite repeated warnings that GPS signals can be jammed, spoofed or denied — often using […]
Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today’s CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won’t make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I have a few general questions about the 1920s. Obviously, you did an enormous amount of work for this book. Putting aside the great crash and the focus of your book, what is it you learned about the 1920s more generally that most surprised you? Because you learn all this collateral information when you write a book like this, right?
SORKIN: So many things. The book turned into a bit of a love letter to New York in terms of the architecture of New York. I don’t think I appreciated just how many buildings went up in New York and how they were constructed and what happened. That fascinated me. I think the story of John Raskob, actually, who was, to me, the Elon Musk of his time, somebody who ran General Motors, became a super influential investor. He was a philosopher king that everybody listened to at every given moment.
He ultimately constructs the Empire State Building, which was probably the equivalent of SpaceX at that time. He had written a paper about creating a five-day workweek back in 1929, November, as all of this is happening. Not because he wanted people to work less and be nice to them, but because he thought there was an economic argument that if people didn’t have to work on Saturdays, more people would buy cars and gardening equipment, and do all sorts of things on the weekends, and buy different outfits and clothing. There were so many little things.
Then, I would argue, actually, his role in taking his fortune — he got involved in politics. He was a Republican turned Democrat. He spent an extraordinary amount of money to secretly try to undermine the reputation of Hoover. I would say to you, today, I actually think that part of the reason that Hoover’s reputation is so dim, even today, is a result of this very influential, wealthy individual in America who spent two years paying off journalists and running this secret campaign to do such a thing. You go back and really read the press and try to understand why some of these views were espoused.
By the way, this was before the crash. He started this campaign effectively in May of 1929, just three months after Hoover took office.
COWEN: It’s striking to me how forgotten Raskob is today. There’s a lesson in there about people who think they’re doing something today that will be remembered in a hundred years’ time. It probably won’t be, even if you’re a big, big deal.
SORKIN: It’s remarkable. He was a very big deal. He famously used to tell everybody, “Everybody ought to be rich.” He was trying to develop, back then, what would have been something akin to one of the first mutual funds, levered mutual funds, in fact, because he also wanted to democratize finance.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re back in New York. It’s the 1920s; you’re you. Other than walking around and looking at buildings, what else would you do back then? I would go to jazz concerts. What would you do?
SORKIN: Oh my goodness. You know what I would do? But I’m a journalista, so you’ll appreciate this.
COWEN: Yes.
SORKIN: I would have been obsessed with magazines. This was really the first real era of magazines and newspapers and the transmission of media, the sort of mass media in this way. I would have been fascinated by radio. I think those things, for me, would have been super exciting.
The truth is, I imagine I would have gotten caught up in the pastime of stock trading. It is true that all these brokerage houses are just emerging everywhere, and people are going to play them as if it’s a pastime. I always wonder whether prohibition played a role in why so many people were speculating because instead of drinking, what did they do? They traded.
No Olympic competitions covers more ground than the 50-kilometer cross-country ski races. The grueling event takes more than 2 hours to complete, requiring competitors to ski a distance longer than a marathon. That’s still, however, less than an eighth of the distance between the two official host cities of the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics—Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
With events spread across more than 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles) and eight cities or towns in northern Italy, these are the most geographically dispersed Games in Olympic history. The decentralized design was intentional, allowing planners to control costs and make the event more sustainable by using existing venues rather than constructing several expensive new facilities. More than 90 percent of the venues are existing or temporary facilities, including some refurbished facilities that were used in the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo Games.
About 2,900 athletes will compete across 116 events over 19 days in 13 venues in what will be the third time Italy has hosted the Games. Several of the key event venues are visible in these satellite images of the two largest host cities—Milan and Verona. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and 9 captured the images on December 8 and 9, 2025, respectively.
Olympic festivities will kick off officially on February 6 at San Siro Stadium with performances by pop star Mariah Carey, classical singer Andrea Bocelli, classical instrumentalist Lang Lang, and Italian singer-songwriter Laura Pausini. Built in 1925, San Siro is Italy’s largest stadium and the longtime home of renowned football clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan.
December 9, 2025
Milan will mostly host indoor ice events in several other venues around the city. Ice hockeywill be spread across two venues, the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena and the temporary Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena. The former, located east of the city in the green and residential Santa Giulia district, is the only new permanent venue constructed for the Games. The latter, in Milano Ice Park, is a temporary transformation of the Fiera Milano Rho exhibition center, a complex of pavilions and a convention center northwest of the city center.
Speed skating and figure skating will be in the Milano Ice Skating Arena, an 11,500-person stadium in Assago, a small town just outside of Milan. Outside of the Olympics, the multisport facility is used by a skating school and basketball team and as a venue for tennis, squash, swimming, and several other sports.
The February 22 closing ceremonies will take place in Verona, a city of about 250,000 people 150 kilometers east of Milan, in Verona Arena, an ancient Roman amphitheater that was built between the 1st and 3rd centuries. What was once used for animal hunts and gladiator battles will serve as the backdrop for musicians, dancers, and artists in a ceremony that organizers say will honor the spirit of athletics and Italy’s rich cultural heritage. The arena, with a seating capacity of about 22,000, is the third-largest surviving amphitheater in Europe and unusually well-preserved.
New events this year will include men’s and women’s ski mountaineering, skeleton mixed team relay, women’s doubles luge, freestyle skiing dual moguls, and women’s large hill ski jumping. The 2026 Olympic mascots are Tina and Milo, a brother-and-sister pair of cheerful, scarf-wearing animated stoats with names inspired by Milan and Cortina. Stoats, also called ermine, are fierce predators in the weasel family known for reportedly mesmerizing prey with energetic dances and for having fur that changes from dark brown in the summer to white in the winter. In Italy, stoats typically live in the mountains above 3,500 meters (11,500 feet).
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
A US House committee with oversight of NASA unanimously passed a "reauthorization" act for the space agency on Wednesday. The legislation must still be approved by the full House before being sent to the Senate, which may take up consideration later this month.
Congress passes such reauthorization bills every couple of years, providing the space agency with a general sense of the direction legislators want to see NASA go. They are distinct from appropriations bills, which provide actual funding for specific programs, but nonetheless play an important role in establishing space policy.
There weren't any huge surprises in the legislation, but there were some interesting amendments. Most notably among these was the Amendment No. 01, offered by the chair of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), as well as its ranking member, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and three other legislators.
The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.
The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster's prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.
You remember the last time NASA tried to launch the world's largest orange rocket, right? The space agency rolled the Space Launch System out of its hangar in March 2022. The first, second, and third attempts at a wet dress rehearsal—elaborate fueling tests—were scrubbed. The SLS rocket was slowly rolled back to its hangar for work in April before returning to the pad in June.
Date and time management libraries in many programming languages are famously bad. Python's datetime module comes to mind as one of the best (worst?) examples, and so does JavaScript's Date class. It feels like these libraries could not have been made worse on purpose, or so I thought until today, when I needed to implement some date calculations in a backup rotation script written in bash.
So, if you wanted to learn how to perform date and time arithmetic in your bash scripts, you've come to the right place. Just don't blame me for the nightmares.
The center of the universe has been born again. The most insufferable posters on our timeline, including myself, are enjoying the abundance found in San Francisco thanks to the AI boom lining the pockets of fresh college dropouts. The themed parties are bumping, the LLMs look good, the La Croix is flowing. There is much doom in this world, but not in this podcast.
On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Jayden Clark. He’s the host of Members of Technical Staff, a podcast about niche San Francisco tech culture. He’s been featured in the New Yorker,The New York Times, and Business Insider. We discuss all the important parts of life in this new version of San Francisco: themed parties, online discourse, and the permanent underclass.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.
Up early and to Mr. Moore, and thence to Mr. Lovell about my law business, and from him to Paul’s School, it being Apposition-day there. I heard some of their speeches, and they were just as schoolboys’ used to be, of the seven liberal sciences; but I think not so good as ours were in our time. Away thence and to Bow Church, to the Court of Arches, where a judge sits, and his proctors about him in their habits, and their pleadings all in Latin. Here I was sworn to give a true answer to my uncle’s libells, and so paid my fee for swearing, and back again to Paul’s School, and went up to see the head forms posed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but I think they did not answer in any so well as we did, only in geography they did pretty well: Dr. Wilkins and Outram were examiners. So down to the school, where Dr. Crumlum did me much honour by telling many what a present I had made to the school, shewing my Stephanus, in four volumes, cost me 4l. 10s. He also shewed us, upon my desire, an old edition of the the grammar of Colett’s, where his epistle to the children is very pretty; and in rehearsing the creed it is said “borne of the cleane Virgin Mary.” Thence with Mr. Elborough (he being all of my old acquaintance that I could meet with here) to a cook’s shop to dinner, but I found him a fool, as he ever was, or worse. Thence to my cozen Roger Pepys and Mr. Phillips about my law businesses, which stand very bad, and so home to the office, where after doing some business I went home, where I found our new mayde Mary, that is come in Jane’s place.
Donald Trump loves tariffs. Mainly, I believe, he loves them because they offer so much opportunity for dominance displays, allowing him to threaten other countries with economic ruin — usually via middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts — unless they bend to his whims. Economists may say that most of the damage inflicted by tariffs falls on American consumers and businesses, not foreigners, but Trump’s attachment to tariffs is doubtless strengthened by economists’ disapproval — he wants to show that he’s smarter than the so-called experts.
Furthermore, tariffs give him power without checks and balances. He can impose huge taxes on imports without having to go through annoying stuff like getting legislation through Congress.
Or can he? By any reasonable standard, most of Trump’s tariffs are plainly illegal. Two lower courts have ruled against them. The Trump administration appealed those decisions, and in early November the Supreme Court heard arguments on the case. Many businesses that have found it impossible to make long-term plans with the fate of the Trump tariffs in limbo eagerly awaited the Court’s ruling.
They’re still waiting. And I can’t see any plausible explanation for the delay other than Supreme cowardice.
Background: Most of Trump’s tariffs have been imposed by invoking a 1977 piece of legislation called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Congressional Research Service describes as giving the president “broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency.”
But we aren’t in an emergency. Trump himself keeps saying that everything is great — the economy is hot, there’s no inflation, we’re respected around the world. It’s not true, but that’s what he says. And he has been using IEEPA to impose or threaten to impose tariffs for many purposes that have nothing to do with economic policy. He imposed a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil to punish Brazil for pressing charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-like former president who tried to overturn an election loss. He threatened tariffs against European nations who stationed troops in Greenland as a precaution against a possible Trumpian attempt to seize the island from Denmark.
In the latter case Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, pressed on the nature of the emergency that would justify tariff threats, declared that “the national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.” Uh-huh.
I’m not a lawyer, but I talk to lawyers, and this isn’t a difficult case on the merits. Trump is clearly wrong on both the letter and the spirit of the law. And when the Supreme Court held its hearing, the tenor of the questions, even from conservative justices, suggested that they recognized that the administration had no case.
So why have we had three months of silence? Well, this isn’t a difficult case on the merits, but it puts the six right-wing members of the Court between a rock and hard place, not intellectually, but personally.
For a right-wing justice, ruling in the Trump administration’s favor in such an open-and-shut case would amount to admitting that you’re a pure partisan hack. And even the right-wing faction on the court is trying to maintain the fiction that it’s still a deliberative body, not a MAGA rubber stamp.
But to rule against the administration would be to hand Trump a humiliating defeat on one of his signature policy issues. It might also be very expensive. Tariffs aren’t the revenue gusher Trump and his minions like to claim: Even after the Trump hikes in tariff rates, customs receipts are small compared with other sources of revenue and have made only a modest dent in the U.S. budget deficit. But losing that revenue and, worse, having to give it back would be a financial embarrassment.
And it’s hard to see how, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump, the government can avoid paying back the money it has collected to companies like Costco, which has sued for a refund. If the Court rules that the tariffs weren’t legal, can the administration say, “No backsies” and refuse to refund money it collected illegally?
Right-wing justices don’t want to humiliate Trump, and they’re surely afraid of what will happen if they do. So they’re damned if they do the right thing, damned if they don’t.
When I’ve made this point in the past, some readers have asked why Supreme Court justices would be afraid of crossing Trump. After all, he can’t fire them, can he?
But to suggest that Supreme Court justices are insulated from pressure merely because they have job security is to misunderstand how power and influence work, especially within the modern right-wing movement.
Prominent figures on the right — and the Republican Six on the Supreme Court surely qualify for that definition — aren’t just members of a movement. They’re also part of a social scene — a scene shaped by the wealth and power of billionaires. They share in the privilege and glitter of that scene even if they aren’t outright corrupt — even if they aren’t all like Clarence Thomas, who, as ProPublica revealed, has taken multiple lavish vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.
To vote against Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, delivering him both a policy and a political blow, would be to risk being ostracized and exiled from that milieu. If you don’t think that would matter a lot, you don’t understand human nature.
And more than social estrangement might be at stake. Violent threats against judges and other public officials, especially those denounced by Trump and other MAGA figures, have soared. Are you sure that a judge perceived as having betrayed Trump — and his or her family — would be safe? More to the point, are judges themselves sure?
So the right-wing majority on the Court is surely afraid to rule on tariffs — afraid to rule for Trump, because that would destroy what’s left of their credibility, afraid to rule against, because that would anger both the MAGA elite and the MAGA base.
So they’re procrastinating, even though the longer the tariffs stay in place, the more Trump is emboldened to tweet out bizarre, destructive and illegal policies and the more economic damage is done by uncertainty.
Their paralysis is understandable. But it’s also utterly shameful.
Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025.
Voxtral Realtime - official name Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 - is the open weights (Apache-2.0) model, available as a 8.87GB download from Hugging Face.
You can try it out in this live demo - don't be put off by the "No microphone found" message, clicking "Record" should have your browser request permission and then start the demo working. I was very impressed by the demo - I talked quickly and used jargon like Django and WebAssembly and it correctly transcribed my text within moments of me uttering each sound.
The closed weight model is called voxtral-mini-latest and can be accessed via the Mistral API, using calls that look something like this:
curl -X POST "https://api.mistral.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MISTRAL_API_KEY" \
-F model="voxtral-mini-latest" \
-F file=@"Pelican talk at the library.m4a" \
-F diarize=true \
-F context_bias="Datasette" \
-F timestamp_granularities="segment"
It's priced at $0.003/minute, which is $0.18/hour.
The Mistral API console now has a speech-to-text playground for exercising the new model and it is excellent. You can upload an audio file and promptly get a diarized transcript in a pleasant interface, with options to download the result in text, SRT or JSON format.
I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it turns out publishing Go binaries to PyPI means any Go binary can be just a uvx package-name call away.
sqlite-scanner
sqlite-scanner is my new Go CLI tool for scanning a filesystem for SQLite database files.
It works by checking if the first 16 bytes of the file exactly match the SQLite magic number sequence SQLite format 3\x00. It can search one or more folders recursively, spinning up concurrent goroutines to accelerate the scan. It streams out results as it finds them in plain text, JSON or newline-delimited JSON. It can optionally display the file sizes as well.
To try it out you can download a release from the GitHub releases - and then jump through macOS hoops to execute an "unsafe" binary. Or you can clone the repo and compile it with Go. Or... you can run the binary like this:
uvx sqlite-scanner
By default this will search your current directory for SQLite databases. You can pass one or more directories as arguments:
uvx sqlite-scanner ~ /tmp
Add --json for JSON output, --size to include file sizes or --jsonl for newline-delimited JSON. Here's a demo:
uvx sqlite-scanner ~ --jsonl --size
If you haven't been uv-pilled yet you can instead install sqlite-scanner using pip install sqlite-scanner and then run sqlite-scanner.
To get a permanent copy with uv use uv tool install sqlite-scanner.
How the Python package works
The reason this is worth doing is that pip, uv and PyPI will work together to identify the correct compiled binary for your operating system and architecture.
When I run pip install sqlite-scanner or uvx sqlite-scanner on my Apple Silicon Mac laptop Python's packaging magic ensures I get that macosx_11_0_arm64.whl variant.
In addition to the bin/sqlite-scanner the most important file is sqlite_scanner/__init__.py which includes the following:
defget_binary_path():
"""Return the path to the bundled binary."""binary=os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "bin", "sqlite-scanner")
# Ensure binary is executable on Unixifsys.platform!="win32":
current_mode=os.stat(binary).st_modeifnot (current_mode&stat.S_IXUSR):
os.chmod(binary, current_mode|stat.S_IXUSR|stat.S_IXGRP|stat.S_IXOTH)
returnbinarydefmain():
"""Execute the bundled binary."""binary=get_binary_path()
ifsys.platform=="win32":
# On Windows, use subprocess to properly handle signalssys.exit(subprocess.call([binary] +sys.argv[1:]))
else:
# On Unix, exec replaces the processos.execvp(binary, [binary] +sys.argv[1:])
That main() method - also called from sqlite_scanner/__main__.py - locates the binary and executes it when the Python package itself is executed, using the sqlite-scanner = sqlite_scanner:main entry point defined in the wheel.
Which means we can use it as a dependency
Using PyPI as a distribution platform for Go binaries feels a tiny bit abusive, albeit there is plenty of precedent.
I’ll justify it by pointing out that this means we can use Go binaries as dependencies for other Python packages now.
That's genuinely useful! It means that any functionality which is available in a cross-platform Go binary can now be subsumed into a Python package. Python is really good at running subprocesses so this opens up a whole world of useful tricks that we can bake into our Python tools.
To demonstrate this, I built datasette-scan - a new Datasette plugin which depends on sqlite-scanner and then uses that Go binary to scan a folder for SQLite databases and attach them to a Datasette instance.
Here's how to use that (without even installing anything first, thanks uv) to explore any SQLite databases in your Downloads folder:
uv run --with datasette-scan datasette scan ~/Downloads
I've been exploring this pattern for other, non-Go binaries recently - here's a recent script that depends on static-ffmpeg to ensure that ffmpeg is available for the script to use.
Building Python wheels from Go packages with go-to-wheel
After trying this pattern myself a couple of times I realized it would be useful to have a tool to automate the process.
I first brainstormed with Claude to check that there was no existing tool to do this. It pointed me to maturin bin which helps distribute Rust projects using Python wheels, and pip-binary-factory which bundles all sorts of other projects, but did not identify anything that addressed the exact problem I was looking to solve.
So I had Claude Code for web build the first version, then refined the code locally on my laptop with the help of more Claude Code and a little bit of OpenAI Codex too, just to mix things up.
The full documentation is in the simonw/go-to-wheel repository. I've published that tool to PyPI so now you can run it using:
uvx go-to-wheel --help
The sqlite-scanner package you can see on PyPI was built using go-to-wheel like this:
This created a set of wheels in the dist/ folder. I tested one of them like this:
uv run --with dist/sqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl \
sqlite-scanner --version
When that spat out the correct version number I was confident everything had worked as planned, so I pushed the whole set of wheels to PyPI using twine upload like this:
uvx twine upload dist/*
I had to paste in a PyPI API token I had saved previously and that was all it took.
I expect to use this pattern a lot
sqlite-scanner is very clearly meant as a proof-of-concept for this wider pattern - Python is very much capable of recursively crawling a directory structure looking for files that start with a specific byte prefix on its own!
That said, I think there's a lot to be said for this pattern. Go is a great complement to Python - it's fast, compiles to small self-contained binaries, has excellent concurrency support and a rich ecosystem of libraries.
Go is similar to Python in that it has a strong standard library. Go is particularly good for HTTP tooling - I've built several HTTP proxies in the past using Go's excellent net/http/httputil.ReverseProxy handler.
I've also been experimenting with wazero, Go's robust and mature zero dependency WebAssembly runtime as part of my ongoing quest for the ideal sandbox for running untrusted code. Here's my latest experiment with that library.
Being able to seamlessly integrate Go binaries into Python projects without the end user having to think about Go at all - they pip install and everything Just Works - feels like a valuable addition to my toolbox.
More than a hundred map-related events are taking place today (4 February 2026) in France, plus a few elsewhere, as part of the first Jour de la Carte (Day of the Map). Une centaine d’événements… More
We study monopoly regulation under asymmetric information about costs when subsidies are infeasible. A monopolist with privately known marginal cost serves a single product market and sets a price. The regulator maximizes a weighted welfare function using unit taxes as sole policy instrument. We identify a sufficient and necessary condition for when laissez-faire is optimal. When intervention is desired, we provide simple sufficient conditions under which the optimal policy is a progressive price cap: prices below a benchmark face no tax, while higher prices are taxed at increasing and potentially prohibitive rates. This policy combines delegation at low prices with taxation at high prices, balancing access, affordability, and profitability. Our results clarify when taxes act as complements to subsidies and when they serve only as imperfect substitutes, illuminating how feasible policy instruments shape optimal regulatory design.
OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.
Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.
Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts.
At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology.
As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions.
And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.”
Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk.
But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse.
When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites.
“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ([formerly known as] Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”
In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections.
Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents.
Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government [who] has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not.
But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents.
Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day.
As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations.
As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win.
On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections.
The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself.
David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.”
Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.
He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.”
Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.
So, during the spring, I teach an intro to sports journalism class at Chapman University every Tuesday night. My first session of the semester was yesterday, which means—beforehand—I found myself roaming one of Orange County’s coolest old-school towns, basking in the warmth, sipping an iced coffee, enjoying the Orange Circle, feeling the oomph and bliss of SoCal at its finest.
That’s when I saw him.
This guy …
It was Batman. With a beard. And some quirky boots. And a suspect utility belt. But—still! Batman was in Orange, walking toward the famed Circle.
So I followed him, and (as always) following Batman always pays.
The Caped Crusader led me to an anti-ICE rally, which (unbeknownst to me) is held every Tuesday evening by Indivisible Orange. And while the turnout wasn’t enormous, in the we-have-2,000-fighters-in-our-midst way, the event felt surprisingly/importantly empowering. First, because this was Orange, a reliably red town in a reliably red district. Second, because the 50 (or so) marchers were loud, feisty, determined. And third, because, well, the honking. Soooooo much honking. Nonstop honking. Honks here, honks there, honks everywhere. Honks of support, honks of encouragement, honks of resilience.
Honks!
And when you combine the location, with the feistiness, with the noise—well, I dunno. It moved me. I spoke with Jana Anderson, one of the organizers. She felt the spirit, too …
Like many readers of this site, I am eternally looking for hope and reasons to believe democracy will survive this hellscape. And while nothing is guaranteed, there is something to be said for Tuesday nights in the Orange Circle, when people come together to dress as superheroes and stand for their beliefs.
When Batman leaves his bat cave to join the rally and when horns, muted in the past, come alive.
Focusing only on headcount reduction is like saying the only value of a car is that you don’t have to pay for a horse.
I’ve been listening to 20VC since it appeared. When I want to understand how venture capitalists are thinking, Harry Stebbings is my go-to source. He asks the questions I’d want to ask, and he’s not afraid to push back on his guests. I’ve learned a lot.
However.
In recent episodes, Harry made a claim that the path to AI profitability runs through labor replacement. “Stop paying $1M in salaries by paying $100K for this AI-based service.” Simple. Clean. Measurable.
And woefully incomplete.
Labor replacement looks at value creation through a tiny pinhole. Yes, cost reduction is one way AI creates value. But it’s not the only way, and I’m not even sure it’s the most important way. Focusing only on headcount reduction is like saying the only value of a car is that you don’t have to pay for a horse.
The NPV Framework
If we momentarily take the naive view that a company’s value equals its net present value—the sum of all future cash flows discounted to today—then there are four fundamental levers:
Smaller costs at the same time
Same costs but later
More revenue at the same time
Same revenue but sooner
Harry’s labor-replacement thesis focuses on the first lever alone. That ignores many sources of value.
And even NPV doesn’t capture the full picture. Company value also encodes optionality—how many ways exist to improve NPV in the future. A company with more options is worth more than one with the same cash flows but fewer options. (If you haven’t read my material on options and software, the short version is: flexibility has value, especially in uncertain environments. And what environment is more uncertain than one being transformed by AI?)
Let me give you examples of each strategy.
Higher Revenue (Same Timeline)
Expanded service capacity. Your support team of 10 people can now handle the inquiry volume that used to require 25. But here’s the thing—you don’t fire 15 people. You serve three times as many customers. Your addressable market just tripled without tripling your headcount. The humans are still there; they’re just handling the hard cases while AI handles the routine ones.
Personalization at scale. A human salesperson can deeply understand say 50 accounts. An AI-augmented salesperson can maintain genuine, contextual on several times that many. The genie remembers that this customer’s CFO cares about security compliance and that customer’s CTO is skeptical of vendor lock-in. Higher conversion, higher retention, higher revenue per rep.
Previously impossible features. Some product capabilities simply weren’t feasible before. Real-time translation. Intelligent search across unstructured data. Automated analysis of documents that would take humans hours. These aren’t cost savings—they’re new value propositions that customers will pay for.
Earlier Revenue (Same Amount)
Faster time to market. If your development team can ship features in two weeks that used to take six, you start earning revenue on those features four weeks earlier. That’s not a cost reduction. That’s the same revenue arriving sooner—which, thanks to the time value of money, is worth more.
Accelerated sales cycles. AI can generate proposals, customize demos, answer technical questions, and handle objections while the human salesperson is asleep. A deal that used to take 90 days now closes in 60. Same deal size, but you’re earning and compounding that revenue a month earlier.
Compressed customer onboarding. New customers who used to take three months to reach full productivity now get there in one. They start generating the usage (and the fees) that justify the relationship two months sooner. Meanwhile, your customer success team can take on the next cohort.
Costs Later (Same Amount)
This one’s subtle, but it’s real.
Deferred hiring. Your current team is handling growth that would normally require two new hires. You’ll probably still make those hires eventually—but six months from now instead of today. Those six months of salary stay in your pocket, earning interest, available for other investments.
Delayed infrastructure. Better optimization and more efficient resource usage means you can push that major infrastructure investment into next year’s budget instead of this year’s. Even if the cost is the same it arrives later.
Extended training runway. AI-assisted onboarding means new employees become productive faster with less senior-employee time. The training cost is spread out, and some of it shifts from expensive human time today to cheaper AI time tomorrow.
Optionality
Here’s where it gets interesting.
New markets become accessible. Real-time translation and localization used to require a dedicated team for each market. Now you can experiment with entering new geographies without committing the full resources. The option to expand exists where it didn’t before. Even if you never exercise that option, its existence has value.
New business models emerge. A professional services firm that couldn’t scale because every engagement required senior talent can now productize some of that expertise. A company that couldn’t offer a lower price tier because the unit economics didn’t work can now create an AI-assisted self-service option. These aren’t cost reductions—they’re entirely new ways to make money.
Faster experimentation. If you can prototype, test, and iterate three times faster, you can run three times as many experiments. Most experiments fail, of course. But the ones that succeed create options you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. The ability to try more things is itself valuable.
The Bigger Picture
I don’t want to be too hard on Harry here. The labor-replacement story is compelling because it’s legible. You can point at a budget line, point at an AI service, and do arithmetic. “We paid X, now we pay Y, the difference is Z.” Clean. Fundable.
But the other sources of value are just as real, even if they’re harder to measure. More revenue, earlier revenue, costs delayed, options created—these are all ways AI can make a company more valuable.
Software design is an exercise in human relationships. So is AI adoption. The question isn’t just “how do we do the same work with fewer people?” It’s “what can these people do now that they couldn’t do before? What becomes possible that wasn’t possible? What options do we create?”
The pinhole view sees one thing clearly. But there’s a whole landscape out there.
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These observations by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma. The comet brightened significantly during the December 2025 period when SPHEREx made the observations — about two months after the icy body had passed its closest distance to the Sun in late October.
The space telescope has the singular capability of seeing the sky in 102 colors, each representing a wavelength of infrared light that provides unique information about galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions, or other cosmic features, including the various gases and dust seen in the coma of 3I/ATLAS. The information gathered by SPHEREx helps scientists better understand what materials 3I/ATLAS contains and how the interstellar object’s pristine ices react to the Sun’s heating as the comet journeys through the solar system.
The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the U.S., and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL Project Scientist Olivier Dore. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.
I’d like to share a story from a local paper in Coldwater, Michigan dated to the 9th of April, 1945. It tells how the US Army, under General Patton–the US 3rd Army–came onto what you might call a detention center just outside the village of Ohrdruf, Germany.
The US Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A US Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes, without muttering a word, that they were to blame.
One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was “done by a few people, and you cannot blame us all.” And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said, “this was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.”
The morning after the tour, the Mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough.
I ask you to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, “how is this my fault? I have no jurisdiction over this.” Maybe he would have said, “this site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?”
But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew–as we do–that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.
I urge the council to take action to stop, or stall, or at the barest minimum to think creatively about how to exercise oversight over this proposed ICE facility. Thank you.
We already know enough. The only question is how long will it take for all of us–and the left construed broadly can’t do this alone–to stop them.
Péter Biró writes with good news about kidney exchange in Hungary.
Here's the announcement from the University of Pécs, of the first kidney exchange performed in Hungary, following the first legislation passed to legalize kidney exchange in 2014. (And more details follow from a second announcement below.)
"The first cross-donation kidney transplant performed in Hungary a few days ago can be considered a new milestone in the history of organ transplantation in Hungary. Within the framework of the living donor kidney exchange program, two women received new kidneys at the Department of Surgery of the University of Pécs Clinical Center (PTE KK), which gives them the opportunity for a better quality of life. It is particularly interesting that in both cases the organ donor was a male member of the other couple.
...
"In his speech, Dr. Péter Szakály, Head of Department of the Department of Surgery of the University of Pécs, emphasized that: The establishment of a national pool was of fundamental importance in this program, and this program will be able to operate successfully in the future as well if there are as many such couples as possible. He also added that compared to traditional kidney transplantation, living donor transplantation is always a much greater challenge (...) Transplantation with a living donor comes with increased responsibility, as it involves a healthy donor. In this case, two surgeries were performed at the same time: Ádám Varga, assistant professor, and I simultaneously removed and replaced the organs between the two pairs from the adjacent operating room.
"Since 2014, the law allows this type of transplant, but no specific surgeries have been performed so far. Recognizing this shortcoming, at the initiative of the National Hospital Administration, the four kidney transplant centers in Hungary and the Regional Kidney Transplant Committees operating there, in cooperation with the National Blood Transfusion Service, have developed a nationally uniform program in accordance with the legislation in force, which ensures equal opportunities for all patients who voluntarily enter the program. This became the living donor kidney transplant exchange program, which was launched in Hungary on June 21, 2024. The search for optimally compatible pairings between the pairs applying for the program is carried out with the help of a software developed for this purpose."
#########
And here is the emailed announcement forwarded by Peter Biro, who has been a champion of kidney exchange in Europe for many years now:
Dear EURO-KEP
Colleagues,
We are pleased to inform you that we
have reached a significant milestone within the Hungarian Kidney Paired Kidney
Exchange Program (HKEP), in line with the objectives of the EURO-KEP
initiative.
On January 20, 2026, the first
two kidney transplants were successfully performed in Hungary within the
national living donor kidney exchange program. The surgeries took place at
the University of Pécs Clinical Centre, marking the first realization of
kidney cross-over donation in the country.
We believe that this milestone,
supported by a well-structured professional and patient information campaign
lasting more than a year and a half, will contribute to increasing the number
of living donor kidney transplants and encourage more patients and voluntary
donors to join kidney exchange programs. This, in turn, will support further
kidney exchanges and improve equal access to transplantation.
Chronology and key developments of the Hungarian KEP
June
2024 – With the support and
authorization of the National Directorate General for Hospitals (OKFŐ), a nationally
unified kidney paired exchange program was launched, coordinated
by the National Blood Transfusion Service, with the participation of all
four Hungarian kidney transplant centers and regional waiting list
committees.
Since
the launch – The matching algorithm
has been run every three months; to date, six matching runs have
been completed, involving 57 donors and 44 recipients. The seventh
run is scheduled for tomorrow.
July
2025 – A key legislative
amendment entered into force, allowing:
simultaneous transplants among more than two
donor–recipient pairs in a closed chain,
transplant surgeries to be performed in different
centers, enabling patients to remain at their original listing centers
and
not only incompatible pairs can join the program, but
compatible pairs in the hope of better matching.
Following
the legal amendment, an updated and detailed printed patient
information package was distributed nationwide, with the
involvement of all dialysis units and transplant centers.
During
the optimization process, a clinically acceptable match was identified
between two married couples. In both cases, the male partner
donated a kidney to the female recipient of the other couple. The
transplant surgeries were performed on 20 January 2026 at the
Surgical Clinic of the University of Pécs Clinical Centre. In both cases,
graft function started immediately. The recipients and donors are in good
condition and both patients were discharged home on Friday.
We consider this achievement a significant
milestone in Hungarian transplantation and a meaningful contribution
to the shared European objectives of the EURO-KEP project. We remain
committed to continuing this work in the service of saving lives.
Best regards,
Dr. Sándor Mihály, Ph.D Director of transplantation
Honorary College Associate Professor
at Semmelweis University
General Secretary of the Hungarian
Transplant Society
EDTCO Past-Chair 2023-2025
Organ Coordination Office
Central Waiting List Office
National Organ and Tissue Donation
Opting-out Registry
NASA officials defended their preparations for the Artemis 2 mission after a fueling test experienced the same type of hydrogen leaks that bedeviled Artemis 1 more than three years ago.
US tech stocks fell sharply on Tuesday as fresh concerns about the impact of AI on software businesses swept across Wall Street.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.4 per cent, while the broader S&P 500 was down 0.8 per cent. Markets were dragged lower by large declines for a host of analytics groups following AI company Anthropic’s launch of productivity tools for its Claude Cowork platform that can help automate legal work.
Analytics groups Gartner and S&P Global fell 21 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively, while Intuit and Equifax both declined more than 10 per cent. Moody’s fell 9 per cent and FactSet lost 11 per cent.
A JPMorgan index tracking US software stocks fell 7 per cent, taking its loss this year to 18 per cent.
In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.
We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…
Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?
To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.
That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.
Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.
The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.
The New York metropolitan area was showing the effects of a prolonged cold spell in late January 2026. During a stretch of frigid weather, ice choked the Hudson River along Manhattan’s western shore.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of the wintry landscape around midday on January 28. The image is false-color (bands 5-4-3) to distinguish ice (light blue) from open water and snow. Vegetation appears red. Ice is abundant in the Hudson River and visible in smaller amounts in the East River, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, and waterways in New Jersey.
Temperatures in New York City dropped below freezing on January 24 and stayed there for over a week. The high on January 28, the date of the image, was 23 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 degrees Celsius). Low temperatures and harsh wind chills gripped much of eastern North America over this period amid a surge of Arctic air.
Much of the ice in the image likely floated there from farther upriver, where tidal currents are weaker and salinity is lower. These conditions allow water to freeze sooner and at higher temperatures than the faster-flowing, brackish water near the river’s mouth, shown here. A complete freeze of the Hudson around Manhattan is unlikely, experts say, although it did occur back in 1888. Still, the ice buildup was substantial enough for NYC Ferry to suspend services for several days.
Iced-up rivers can have other implications, from flooding and infrastructure damage to changes in hydrologic processes that affect water quality and aquatic habitats.
Scientists, government agencies, and emergency responders are increasingly turning to remote sensing technologies such as synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral imaging to track river ice. Improved monitoring can aid in water resource management and mitigate ice’s effects on infrastructure and ecosystems.
In addition to the river ice, other signs of winter were visible across New York. A fresh layer of snow coated the landscape following a winter storm, in which a weather station in Central Park recorded nearly 12 inches (30 centimeters) of accumulation on January 25. And the low angle of the midwinter Sun caused the tall buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan to cast long shadows.
In a neighboring borough on February 2, a shorter shadow was cast—this one by the weather-prognosticating groundhog known as Staten Island Chuck. Folklore holds that the sighting signals six more weeks of winter. When compared with data from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the New York rodent was deemed the most accurate of his peer weather “forecasters.” This year, Chuck might be right, at least in the near term: the National Weather Service forecast called for below-average temperatures to persist, with Arctic air returning to the city by the weekend.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.
I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.
This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typical industry affairs, the usual glad-handing about deal-making and pleasantries. But a lot have been deeper, reflecting on what’s special and meaningful about the community we’ve built in New York. Steven Rosenbaum’s reflection on the anniversary captures this well from someone who’s been there, and Leo Schwartz’s piece for Fortune covers the more conventional business angle.
Beyond the celebrations, though, I wanted to reflect on a number of the deeper conversations I’ve had over these last few days. These are conversations grounded in the reality of where our country and city are today, far beyond spaces where wealthy techies are going to parties and celebrating each other. The hard questions raised in these conversations are the ones that determine where this community goes in the future, and they’re the ones that every tech community is going to face in the current moment.
I know what the New York City tech community has been; there was a time when I was one of its most prominent voices. The question now is what it will be in the future. Because we are at a profound crossroads.
What community can be
Nobody better exemplifies the best of what New York tech has been than Aaron Swartz. As I’d written about recently, he was brilliant and delightfully impossible. At an incredibly young age, he led our community in the battle to push back against a pair of ill-considered bills that threatened free expression on the Internet. (These bills would have done to the web what the current administration has done to broadcast television, having a chilling effect on free speech and putting large swaths of content under government control.) As we stood outside Chuck Schumer’s office and demanded that big business take their hands off our internet, we got our first glimpse of the immense power that our community could wield. And we won, at least for a while.
My own path within the New York tech community was nowhere near as dramatic, but I was just as motivated in wanting to serve the community. When I became the first person elected to the board of the New York Tech Meetup (later the New York Tech Alliance), it was the largest member-led organization of tech industry workers in the country. By the time it reached its peak, we were over 100,000 members strong, and could sell out one of our monthly events (at a venue of over 1000 attendees) in minutes. The collective power and impact of that cohort was immense. So, when I say “community”, I mean community. I’m not talking about the contemporary usage of the word, when people call their TikTok followers a “community”. I mean people who care about each other and show up for each other so that they can achieve meaningful things.
New York tech demonstrated its values time and again, and not just in organizing around policy that served its self-interest. When the city was still reeling from 9/11, these were people who not only chose to stay in the city, or who simply talked about how New York ought to rebuild, but actually took the risk and rebuilt the economy of the city — the majority of the economic regrowth and new jobs in New York City in the quarter-century since the attacks of 9/11 have happened thanks to the technology sector.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, these were people who were amongst the first to step up to help their neighbors dig out. When our city began to open up its data, the community responded in kind by building an entire ecosystem of new tools that laid the groundwork for the tech we now take for granted when navigating around our neighborhoods. There was no reluctance to talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, and no apology in saying that tech was failing to do its job in hiring and promoting equitably, because we know how much talent is available in our city. Hackers would come to meetups to show off their startups, sure, but just as often to show off how they’d built cool new technology to help make sure our neighbors in public housing had heat in the winter. This was New York-style tech.
What’s more, the work of this community happened with remarkable solidarity; the SOPA/PIPA protests that Aaron Swartz spoke at had him standing next to some of the most powerful venture capitalists in the city. When it was time to take action, a number of the most influential tech CEOs in New York took Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. to talk to elected officials and their staffers about the importance of defending free expression online, advocating for the same issue that had been so important to the broke college kids who’d been at the rally just a few days earlier. People had actually gathered around principles. I don’t say this as a Pollyanna who thinks everything was perfect, or that things would have always stayed so idealistically aligned, but simply to point out that this did happen. I don’t have to assert that it is theoretically possible, because I have already seen a community which functions in this way.
From bottoms-up to big business
But things have changed in recent years for New York’s tech community. What used to often be about extending a hand to neighbors has, much of the time, become about simply focusing on who’s getting funded to chase the trends defined by Silicon Valley. The vibrancy of the New York Tech Meetup took a huge hit from covid, preventing the ability for the community to gather in person, and the organization’s evolution from a Meetup to an Alliance to being part of Civic Hall shifted its focus in recent years, though there has been a recent push to revitalize its signature events. In its place, much of the public narrative for the community is led by Tech:NYC, which has active and able leadership, but is a far more conventional trade group. There's a focus on pragmatic tools like job listings (their email newsletter is excellent), but they're unlikely to lead a rally in front of a Senator's office. An organization whose founding members include Google and Meta is necessarily going to be different than one with 100,000 individual members.
When I spoke to the Wall Street Journal back in 2013 about the political and social power of our community, at a far different time, I called out the breadth of who our community includes:
The tech constituency encompasses a range of potential voters who remain unlikely to behave as a traditional bloc. "It's venture capitalists and 23-year-old graphic designers in Bushwick," Mr. Dash said. "It's labor and management. It's not traditional allies."
I wanted to make sure people understood that tech in New York is much broader than just, well, what the bosses and the big companies want. It is important to understand that New York is about founders, not just funders.
The distinction between these groups and their goals was never clearer to me than in the 2017 battle around Amazon’s proposed HQ2 headquarters. The public narrative was that Amazon was trying to make a few cities jump through hoops to make the best possible set of bribes to the company so that they would build a new headquarters complex in the host city. The reality was, New York City offered $1.5 billion dollars to the richest man in the world in order to open up an office in a city where the company was inevitably going to do business regardless, and the contract that Amazon would have to sign in exchange only obligated them to hire 500 new workers in the city — fewer people than their typical hiring plan would expect in that timeframe. In addition, the proposed plan would have taken over land intended for 6,000 homes, including 1500 affordable units, would have defunded the mass transit system through years of tax breaks for the company while putting massive additional burden on the transit system, and raised housing prices. (Amazon has since signed a lease for 335,000 square feet and hired over 1000 employees, without any subsidies.)
At the time, I was CEO of a company that two entrepreneurs had founded in 2000 and bootstrapped to success, leading to them spinning out multiple companies which would go on to exit for over $2.2 billion, providing over 500 jobs and creating dozens of millionaires out of the workers who joined the companies over the years. Several of the people who had worked at those companies went on to form their own companies, and those companies are now collectively worth over $5 billion. All of these companies, combined, have gotten a total of zero billion dollars from the state and city of New York. In addition, none of those companies have ever had working conditions anywhere close to those Amazon has been criticized for.
But the story of the time was that “New York tech wants HQ2!” Media like newspapers and TV were firmly convinced that techies were in support of Amazon getting a massive unnecessary handout, and I had genuinely struggled to figure out why for a long time. After a while, it became obvious. Everyone that they had spoken to, and all the voices that were considered canonical and credible when talking about “New York tech”, were investors or giant publicly-traded companies.
People who actually built things were no longer the voice of the community. Those who showed up when the power was out, or when the community was hurting, or when there was an issue that called for someone to bravely stand up and lead the crowd even if there was some social or political risk — they were not considered valid. People liked the myth of Aaron Swartz by then, but they would have ignored the fact that he almost certainly would have objected to corporate subsidy for the company.
New York tech today, and tomorrow
I am still proud of the New York tech community. But that’s because I get to see what happens in person. Last week, I was reminded at every one of the in-person commemorations of the community that there are so many generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful people who will fight to do the right thing. The challenge today, though, is that those are no longer the people who define the story of the community. That’s not who a new person thinks of when they’re introduced to our community.
When I talk to young people who are new to the industry, or people who are changing careers who are curious about tech, they have heard of things like Tech Week, or they read trade press. In those venues, a big name is generally not our home-grown founders, or even the “big” success stories of New York tech. That’s especially true as once high-flying New York tech companies like Tumblr and Foursquare and Kickstarter and Etsy and Buzzfeed either faded or got acquired, and newer successful startups are more prosaic and less attention-grabbing. Who’s left to tell them a story of what “tech” means in New York? Where will they find community?
One possible future is that they try to build a startup, doing everything you’re “supposed” to do. They pitch the VC firms in town, and the big name firms that they’ve heard of. If they’re looking for community, they go to the events that get the most promotion, which might be Tech Week events. And all of these paths lead the same way — the most prominent VC firm is Andreessen Horowitz, and they run Tech Week too, even though they’re not from NYC.
Another possible future is that we rebuild the kind of community that we used to have. We start to get together the people who actually make things, and show off what we’ve built for one another. It’s going to require re-centering the hundreds of thousands of people who create and invent, rather than the dozens of people who write checks. It’s going to mean that the stories start with New York City (and maybe even… in the outer boroughs!), rather than taking dictation from those in Silicon Valley who hate our city. And it’s going to require understanding that technology is a set of tools and tactics we can use in service of goals — ideally positive social goals — and not just an economic opportunity to be extracted from.
We would never talk about education by only talking to those who invest in making pencils. We’d never consider a story about a new movie to be complete if we only talked to those who funded the film. And certainly our policymakers would balk if we skipped speaking with them and instead aimed our policy questions directly at their financial backers, though that might result in more accurate responses. Yet somehow, with technology, we’ve given over the narrative entirely to the money men.
In New York, we’ve borne the brunt of that error. A tech community with heart and soul is in danger of being snuffed out by those who will only let its most base instincts survive. Even our investors here are more thoughtful than these stories would make it seem! But we can change it, and maybe even change the larger tech story, if we’re diligent in never letting the bad actors control the narrative of what tech is in the world.
Like so many good things, it can all start with New York City.
He’s Amplified Faked Porn of Real People, and Cutting Him off Is $Imple
Fake pictures of women nude or in pornographic situations have been around for a while. Elon Musk’s AI program Grok, and it’s easy connection to his X social media, have exponentially amplified and simplified that. He could easily choose not to.
Why should he? There was an interview recently that spells it all out very well. It was on the NPR show Science Friday. The interview was with Hany Farid, professor at UC Berkeley School of Information who has studied related issues for decades. Here I quote both his interview and his message to me when I asked more about all this.
One problem is the volume of abusively fake images. Just in recent weeks it has exploded as people unskilled in making them have discovered that with a few clicks and prompts they can make excellent ones in seconds using Grok.
Another problem is the quality. You can grab any image you have or off the net and tell Grok to put the person in some pornographic situation and it will perfectly put their face on a AI generated image while maintaining the background. So it looks like that person is in a setting they would know while doing whatever. They are so good that, in testing, people have little better odds than simply guessing whether it’s real or not.
A third problem is what it does to people. Did you have some social awkwardness in high school? Imagine if, back then, someone made a horribly embarrassing fake picture, put it on social media bound to be seen by many, and now you have to spend the day in school, while trying to deny it’s real. All while you don’t know if it was some of them who made it. And in adult life, with that kind of picture out there, will you get the job offer? The rental you’re applying for? The date through the dating app you’re trying for?
And fifth is sometimes such images of teenagers aren’t just for posting, they’re sent to the victims to extort them.
The New York Times just reported that the European Union is investigating the X platform for possible violation of their regulations on these issues. In response they say, “X limited Grok’s A.I. image creation to users who paid for premium features” and, “later expanded those guardrails, saying that it would no longer allow anyone to prompt Grok’s X account for ‘images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis.’ That sounds like a loophole. As if people who pay, and people who use Grok directly then post either on X or other social media can continue. Unclear but the European Union is not satisfied and is proceeding with their investigation.
The thing is there are simple fixes for this. I love when big problems have simple fixes. Those are called elegant solutions.
One of those solutions would be as simple as Elon Musk deciding he’s rich enough that he doesn’t have to allow this to happen. As Mr. Farid pointed out, “take many of the prompts that you’re seeing people put into Grok AI and try to put them into OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, and it won’t work” because those companies have simply programmed filters into their AI to refuse such requests. Obviously Grok could be programmed the same. As Mr. Farid pointed out though we need to stop simply appealing to media CEOs and hope they’ll play nice when there are solutions with more clout.
Along those lines he had several other solutions that don’t depend on Musk or media CEOs. They are conceptually simple. They’re not easy because they all have to do with money, but they are doable.
One: Apple and Google could easily declare the app a violation of their app store policies because of it being used for so much abuse, and they could refuse to carry the app. Boom! Suddenly step one, get the app, is blocked.
Two: Stop the advertising that goes with it. When these images are posted on social media a great deal of them are shown next to ads. If many of the biggest advertisers were shamed into demanding that their ads not be shown next to such images, the profit behind it would take a huge hit. In his message he noted about the advertisers, “they hold the power to effect change.”
Three: Mr. Farid noted that there are also websites, separate from Grok or X, that offer making such images as a service. Upload a picture, ask what you want it turned into, pay a fee, and they’ll make the fake for you. But did you notice a little phrase in there, “pay a fee”? How is that fee paid? Often such sites accept standard credit cards and common online payment systems. Shame those big banks and financial companies into refusing to process for such sites and there goes that system. Mr. Farid noted in his message this has actually been done before, when PornHub lost the ability to accept payments after revelations of child pornography. Fake image sites could get around the ban by accepting payment in crypto but most novices don’t know how to make raw crypto transactions. They only do it through some financial service that handles it for them. Same thing. Shame those financial services into refusing those sites. The beauty of this solution is it even applies to sites hosted in countries where there is no law or enforcement that would otherwise stop it.
So, there are simple solutions to a big problem, a serious problem that does serious damage to many people, where the only issue is a small hit to the money some big companies make. If it’s the big companies and the profits that decide the end result and the damage to people is allowed to continue, doesn’t that perfectly fit the definition of an oligarchy? Seriously, how else can one explain such a result? Bernie Sanders is being right on target.
Market Design
