honest-broker.com

People Are Rejecting Screens—and Returning to Communal Events

The entire music industry has embraced digital tech and streaming. But the music economy is going in the opposite direction—back to live music and in-the-flesh contact with the audience. As a result, the percent of consumer spending targeted at concert tickets is growing rapidly. Income generated by digital music has meanwhile collapsed, and shows no sign of rebounding.

themarginalian.org

How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life

Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it's not death we're afraid of but too much life.

stratechery.com

2026.41: It’s Not You, It’s Me

The future of consumer technology is likely completely custom on one hand, and completely integrated on the other.

jefftweedy

John Prine is immortal

It sounds romantic, in a way, until you really put it together that he's singing to his son who may or may not be out on the streets. It always really touched me—'Come on home, No you don't have to be alone.'

ftav

AI is Poochie

Relentless noise continues to benefit the few while distracting from literally anything else. There's little evidence that investors are pricing in aggregate benefits from AI spend — perhaps because they're not being anticipated, or maybe because they are on such extreme ranges of possibility that they defy modelling.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #214

engineers coaxed those few devices out of a toolset built for chips, and each one takes years of process work to get up and running. Atomic Machines wants to go after a whole new swath of sci-fi products now that they've made it easier: gears the size of a grain of sand, robots that work inside the body, cooling built into AI chips, even a device that runs instant blood tests — Holden argues that her dream was possible, but needed a manufacturing technology that didn't exist yet.

ai-supremacy.com

AI off the Charts II

According to Anthropic's internal index, Claude led 26% of measured model R&D work in August, up from under 1% in February. How fast will internal model RSI teams accelerate new more powerful models? Researchers set the tasks and supervise execution, and Anthropic reports that this is speeding up development.

noahpinion.blog

Maybe the Rapture is already here

It's possible to think of vertical short-form video feeds as a kind of heavenbanning. Your feed is curated by AI, tailored to your own preferences. The videos you see aren't made by anyone you know, or (probably) by anyone you'll ever meet.

themarginalian.org

Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us Forward

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of "you can't."

upstartsmedia.com

Reviving Mammoths, Raising Billions, And Building Noah’s Ark 2.0, With Colossal’s Ben Lamm

"We are trying to do things in science where one little slice of it would win a Nobel Prize," he claims. Much of that work is in gene editing, where Colossal has gone from 20 gene edits to engineer a dire wolf to tests involving a thousand.

whyisthisinteresting

The Intention Edition

The state everyone is chasing only arrives when a hundred small decisions about bodies, sound, sightlines, queues and toilets have been considered. Hotels call this invisible service. Clubs learn it faster, because a bad decision shows up faster.

fs.blog

Ryan Serhant: How to Get People to Say Yes

Ryan explains his time management framework of treating each day as a bank of 1,000 minutes changed the way he works, and why success can still feel insufficient after you achieve all of your dreams.

themarginalian.org

Why Are We Not Better Than We Are

It felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth's atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we weren't in space. We were on earth — finally, really on earth.

upstartsmedia.com

Exclusive: Fin Ships A New AI Agent In First Release Since $3.6B Salesforce Buy

The company's bet: customers will increasingly use one, or just a couple, of more powerful agents to handle cross-functional tasks, instead of replacing current human job functions on a one to one basis. "It would be sad if we end up reinventing the world with a dozen different, disparate tools," Traynor says.

ai-supremacy.com

AI: Off the Charts

Meanwhile personal agents are likely to accelerate token usage but a lot of it might not have much economic value but still require tremendous amounts of compute. This could result in a Capex compute mismatch that is markedly bearish for the AI boom.

noahpinion.blog

There is no “Indian Question”

Throughout most of the 2010s, there was a popular notion that society should basically ignore and shun people like that, and that if we all simply shunned them, and pressured our friends and colleagues to shun them, they and their views would vanish from American society — or at least remain marginalized. That approach failed. Anti-immigrant ideas didn't remain marginalized — in fact, they took over the country, despite their continued unpopularity among the general American public.

themarginalian.org

Loneliness, Resilience, and the Right Choice: Poet Diane Ackerman on What She Learned While Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

platformer.news

Does intelligence need a hard cap?

The former say we may see a catastrophe as soon as next year; the latter has vacillated between creating a de facto licensing regime for frontier models and publicly encouraging US companies to go even faster. But the Trump administration remains frustratingly obtuse on the question of where all this is headed, even as more warning signs blink red.

fs.blog

[Outliers] Charlie Munger’s Interview with Todd Combs

There are people who will make you feel that you're born into the wrong species.

whyisthisinteresting

WITI Interview: Paul Theroux on a Life of Travel Writing

The only way I think you can really write about something, or somewhere, is to talk to strangers about it. When people are speaking to me, it's as an equal. I'm there at the diner or whatever, having breakfast, you're next to me having yours, we strike up a conversation. The omelette; the weather; the upcoming election.

honest-broker.com

Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell

At a time when teenage tastes controlled the charts, and three-minute anthems of rebellion took over the radio, Campbell found success in the most unlikely way of all, with lonely songs about lonely guys far away from home. The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn't heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He's not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son. He's sad and alone and wants to get back to Phoenix—or Wichita or Galveston or some other place he used to be.

stratechery.com

Apple and a Hacker’s Future

The one I ignored was its recommendation that I not invoke Claude anymore; in fact, I used Claude to root out the malware — we eventually found the exact four second period where it gained access — create a tool to watch for it in the future, and then wiped the Mac Mini. All of this happened before I found the Ars Technica article detailing the vulnerability, and it was pretty remarkable. I understand that people are nervous about giving these agents access to one's computer — as I noted, the Mac Mini in question has nothing on it except for Codex and Claude — but in this case you could make the case that I would have been in much more trouble had I not had an agent running persistently.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: 8 real Jev use cases + How OpenAI uses ChatGPT Sites (live at DevDay!) + Claire’s DevDay recap

Software can now be temporary and still worth building. Kath might create a personalized site for one business trip, use it for a week, and discard it afterward. When development overhead falls far enough, even a tool with a seven-day lifespan can deliver meaningful value.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with David Prior

I am not a nostalgic person, and I would like to be a little less relentless about wanting more, but it is the one place I reliably stop and ask how any of this happened. For this reason trains and their stations are romantic to me and I always find myself a little contemplative about the momentum of life.

ai-supremacy.com

The United States is Militarizing and Weaponizing AI

I believe that between 2027 and 2037, in this immediate next decade we'll be reaching the most dangerous period for military AI to cause massive harm to human civilization. That is, just when AI appears to becoming more powerful in things like cybersecurity (a military application), global conflict appears to risk serious escalation. I believe it will soon become impossible to maintain human-in-the-loop systems and safeguards in some, and a growing number of multiple and many new aspects of warfare.

noahpinion.blog

What the AI boom is doing for Americans

And remember, this was at a time when Trump was deporting construction workers en masse — 13% of the construction workforce is undocumented, and deportations also have knock-on negative effects on the industry that result in the firing of native-born workers as well. This probably explains the pause in the increase of construction employment in 2025. But even that couldn't stop construction's rise.

themarginalian.org

Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person

What infuriates and enrages someone else saddens him — the sign of a superior heart.