ftav

Nothing is certain except death and robotaxis

AI is thematic ZIRP. To any layperson, the AI boom is another case of infrastructure overbuild that ignores product commodification and falling barriers to entry. But long-dated binary outcomes of incalculable extremes are protecting a broad subset of investors from multiple compression.

honest-broker.com

The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

What's happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they're seeing. But they don't have the power individually to stop the insanity. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely.

honest-broker.com

Amazon is Polluted

Before the advent of the worldwide web, I sometimes searched bookstore shelves for years before finding a desired volume. But Amazon made it possible to acquire those hard-to-get books with just the click of a mouse.

stratechery.com

2026.36: Friction and Feedback

That conversation ultimately echoed a very early Stratechery riff on the society-altering implications of tech that removes friction; 13 years later, our generation is still catching up.

noahpinion.blog

Why you won’t get a flying car

If we had flying cars, we'd enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we'd be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.

wired.com

The Best Label Makers (2026): Brother, Niimbot, Dymo

A good label maker should be easy to use, produce clear and durable labels, and connect to your phone or computer without a fuss.

ftav

To err is humanoid

This is perhaps one of the biggest efforts by Beijing to turn a fantastic vision of the future into reality, almost by force of will. They know the technology is not ready, but they think if they can turn it into this big spectacle that will crowd in investment and trigger this boom.

ftav

The silicon god delusion

Chatbots are the C-suite's ultimate yes-men — able to buttress egos by condensing information their users don't care to fully understand while avoiding questions they don't want to consider. They'll never say the plan is dumb.

platformer.news

The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief

I think there is a real dirty secret right now, which is that almost every writer is using it. Just, most of them are not saying so.

whyisthisinteresting

The Unwillingly Courteous Edition

I know in fact that to chatGPT transcendence is just a word. I had become unwillingly courteous. A friend told me I was being illogical and irrational. But everyone needs a caress, even chatGPT, even me.

wired.com

Skylight Buddy Review (2026): Kid Routines Just Got Easy

This kid-friendly version of Skylight's digital calendar actually gets my son to complete his nighttime routine in a timely fashion.

theconvivialsociety

What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

ftav

AI people need people

The intelligences we care most about are still organic, not artificial. The fortunes of the company that invented the large language model remain, perhaps more than any other in the trillion-dollar club, all about its people.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #205

All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator. Now that's vertical integration.

noahpinion.blog

The end of the age of heroes

In essence, humans were always what we now call edge compute — little devices that reported data back to a central world-mind. Except the world-mind we reported to wasn't a computer; it was society itself — the network of corporations, governments, universities, and human networks that disseminated human knowledge and coordinated our actions.

platformer.news

This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.

upstartsmedia.com

Why AI Won't Replace Accountants — It'll Make Them Richer, Says Basis CEO Matt Harpe

There's enough accounting work in the U.S. for 30 million specialists, he says; we make do today with just 3 million, and the number is declining.

notboring.co

AI is Oil, Not God

I think it comes down to whether you think AI is more Oil or God, more 'an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do' or 'supremely intelligent and powerful being that's going to wake up and make humanity subservient (if we're lucky).'

lennysnewsletter.com

Claude Opus 5 review: this model is brilliant (but annoying)

Why I think we've hit an intelligence overhang and what that means for which model variables actually matter now

honest-broker.com

Predictions on the Future of Netflix (and Other Huge Platforms)

Audience capture is rapidly becoming the default approach of the largest companies in the world. So its potential for abuse must be a matter of concern for all of us. This would have been unthinkable a half century ago.

honest-broker.com

What Do You Have to Hide?

You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.

oneusefulthing.org

The twilight of the chatbots

We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one. I think this also explains the turbulence around AI better than the usual stories about hype. AI is not capable of being a real cybersecurity threat until suddenly it is, causing sudden and improvised policy changes at the highest level of government.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Remy Solomon

Good criminals engage with the present in a way major studios do not; they're constantly experimenting with novel technology, and they love to exploit emergent systems. It also gives me a good temp check on what I should actually be worried about in the endless deluge of things I could be worried about, and what's just a nothingburger.

theconvivialsociety

What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

noahpinion.blog

Book Review: "Power and Progress"

The historical examples it cites simply don't support a narrative of out-of-touch technologists inventing the wrong sorts of technologies and hurting workers in the process. The book embraces a highly questionable definition of 'power' in which persuasion in an open democratic society is painted as a threat.

platformer.news

The man who tried 200 to-do apps has some advice about AI

"I think staying ahead is wildly overrated," he told me. "This idea that everyone is selling — that you have to either get on the AI train or get left behind — is pernicious and frankly wrong."

lennysnewsletter.com

How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)

Why AI has split the tech workforce almost exactly in half—one half that's thriving, another that's shaken

platformer.news

OpenAI's big launch — and bigger departure

My big takeaway is that both Sol & Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next-best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you [are] doing any work where better intelligence matters, those two models are your only choices.

platformer.news

Vibe coding has escaped the terminal

Until recently, software development was too expensive to pursue something so stupid. Not anymore!

lennysnewsletter.com

How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two

The question that best predicts how a tech worker feels about their work, in 2026, is no longer 'What do you do?' or 'Where do you work?' It's 'What has AI done to your sense of who you are?'

stratechery.com

2026.26: Summer Vibes

fretting about the future can foreclose an appreciation at how incredibly awesome this technology is, and that the possibilities really are endless. You can do anything — even organize your garage. That might sound silly, but technology, for all of its importance, is also fun, and I'm having a blast.

theconvivialsociety

Your AI Is Not a Tool

The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run. 'The teams using AI most carefully are the ones losing the ability to tell a good option from a merely safe one. The malformation doesn't skip the diligent. It recruits them.'

noahpinion.blog

China is winning the other tech race

The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.

whyisthisinteresting

The World Cup Camera Angles Edition

I watched the game before passing it on, and was surprised at how similar the camera movements and various angles of the broadcast were to contemporary football coverage. The images were black and white, with a blurrier resolution, but the broadcast view, with cutaways to closer cameras for key moments, was very similar to today's coverage. Despite 60 years of technical innovations, broadcast mode still remains the best way to watch live football.

ai-supremacy.com

Codex, Cursor and the Great Beyond

Anthropic's Claude earns more revenue per user than ChatGPT does. That emphasis on B2B and superiority in coding models is really turning out to be a better commercial strategy.

noahpinion.blog

Iran is Trump's Katrina

Before the war, Iran didn't control the strait, simply because it didn't realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn't know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting it down.

longreads.com

The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

This was the Wild West of commercial aviation, after planes had been proven but when the Jet Age was still new and exciting.

noahpinion.blog

Are you finally ready to admit it's the phones?

The students said that they only stayed on TikTok because other people were on it too, and they were afraid of missing out. FOMO is not utility; it's a bad equilibrium.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #83: I told you so!

The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide.

wired.com

M-Audio M Track Duo HD Producer Pack Review: Hot Takes, Cold Opens

The M-Track Duo HD Producer Pack removes the last remaining excuse for terrible audio and potentially terrible opinions.

stratechery.com

2026.22: Luceing Their Mind

electric cars are focused first and foremost on efficiency, and not only is that different than performance, Ferrari's calling card, but also representative of the parts of modern society — including tech — that leave everyone feeling increasingly alienated (and why, surprisingly, AI might help).

readtrung.com

SpaceX: The AI IPO

We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market ("TAM") in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

longreads.com

The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement.

noahpinion.blog

All non-drone militaries are obsolete

The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system.

jefftweedy

Baby Where You Are (Ted Lucas cover)

I'm sharing a cover of a Ted Lucas song today, using the overdubbing capabilities of an iPhone, which are rudimentary but fun.