avc.xyz
1/ Gemini passes ChatGPT in terms of DAUs, MAUs, and tokens consumed in the first half of 2026, making Google the king of AI. 2/ The Democrats take control of the House in the Nov 2026 elections, bringing to an end Trump's complete control of the US government. 3/ Smartglasses finally reach product market fit in 2026, but it won't be Meta that delivers the winning approach.
kasurian.com
In this schema, the productive middle occupies an increasingly untenable position. They are too numerous to ignore but too dispersed to organise effectively. They lack the cultural capital to dominate elite discourse and the electoral weight to dominate mass politics. Their interests are in lower taxes, less regulation, stable money, and predictable institutions; precisely those that the top-bottom coalition has no incentive to provide. What, then, are their options?
dougshapiro.substack.com
You—ok, fine, we—are not alone. The average adult in the U.S. spends 13 hours per day with media, as I mentioned in the introduction, or more than 75% of waking time. According to consulting firm Activate, that looks like Figure 5: more than five hours with video, almost three with audio, two playing video games, etc.
lethain.com
Building your intuition for agents As more folks have read these notes, a recurring response has been, “How do I learn this stuff?” Although I haven’t spent time evaluating if this is the best way to learn, I can share what I have found effective: Reading a general primer on how Large Language Models work, such as AI Engineering by Chip Huyen. You could also do a brief tutorial too, you don’t need the ability to create an LLM yourself, just a mental model of what they’re capable of Build a script that uses a basic LLM API to respond to a prompt Extend that script to support tool calling for some basic tools like searching files in a local git repository (or whatever). ....
robinsloan.com
Pile up the tendencies: the Bay Area is the land of the overthinkers; a linguistic technology invites endless rumination about both language & intelligence; it’s more fun to define a cool new standard than go along with a boring old one; the feeling of every creative project, upon completion, is the same: It’s not quite how I imagined it … None of this should prevent us from using plain language to acknowledge an obvious capability.
news.artnet.com
“I’ve always been interested in time and how little time we have,” he said, believing, “we’re all kind of obsessed with time and time stresses us, but time is an abstraction. I think we’re always trying to make it more concrete, but it’s a mental thing. It’s very elastic. And cinema usually plays with that elasticity. Here, I’m setting the clock back on time.”
imf.org
Often they abandoned the international trade that had brought them wealth and sparked creativity. Sometimes commerce collapsed because wars made roads and sea-lanes unsafe, as in Rome and during the late Renaissance. In a reaction against the openness of Song China, the subsequent Ming dynasty banned foreign trade altogether, and the militarization of the Roman and Abbasid economies extinguished commerce. Such reactions reduced their ability to adapt locally to changing circumstances. Severed trade routes eroded economic and technological capacity, and new orthodoxies choked off the flow of ideas and solutions that might have helped them manage the crisis. They lost that spirit of curiosity that had once made them great.
post.substack.com
I think the market is most wrong about the two poster children for AI: Nvidia and Palantir. These are two of the luckiest companies. They adapted well, but they are lucky because when this all started, neither had designed a product for AI. But they are getting used as such. Nvidia’s advantage is not durable. SLMs and ASICs are the future for most use cases in AI. They will be backward-compatible with CUDA [Nvidia’s parallel computing platform and programming model] if at all necessary. Nvidia is the power-hungry, dirty solution holding the fort until the competition comes in with a completely different approach. Palantir’s CEO compared me to [bad actors] because of an imagined billion-dollar bet against his company. That is not a confident CEO. He’s marketing as hard as he can to keep this going, but it will slip. There are virtually no earnings after stock-based compensation.
post.substack.com
I think the market is most wrong about the two poster children for AI: Nvidia and Palantir. These are two of the luckiest companies. They adapted well, but they are lucky because when this all started, neither had designed a product for AI. But they are getting used as such. Nvidia’s advantage is not durable. SLMs and ASICs are the future for most use cases in AI. They will be backward-compatible with CUDA [Nvidia’s parallel computing platform and programming model] if at all necessary. Nvidia is the power-hungry, dirty solution holding the fort until the competition comes in with a completely different approach. Palantir’s CEO compared me to [bad actors] because of an imagined billion-dollar bet against his company. That is not a confident CEO. He’s marketing as hard as he can to keep this going, but it will slip. There are virtually no earnings after stock-based compensation.
anildash.com
The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You're welcome, Time Magazine's people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.
antirez.com
Anyway, back to programming. I have a single suggestion for you, my friend. Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs. Find a way to multiply yourself, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months.
radar.cloudflare.com
When unrest happens, networks of mass communication can not be relied on.
theartnewspaper.com
In his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the media theorist Neil Postman predicted that technology would eventually smother culture by reducing complex issues to quantifiable data and numerical calculations. He noted a fundamental difference between naturally occurring processes, which can be studied scientifically, and human practices, which are not governed by natural laws. Connoisseurship is not a “dubious science”, because it’s not a science at all. AI potentially deceives by offering the illusion of objective certainty in a field—art—that is inherently subjective.
seths.blog
Three things have changed: The long tail means that there’s room for more. Always. As many as 25% of all Spotify songs have only been listened to a few times. The average video on YouTube is seen once a day. AI generation of art, music, video and writing means that the pace of creation is going to grow exponentially. Memetic identities, genres and codewords are easier for AI to begin with than complex images. And so, new genres multiply, get exaggerated, evolve and morph into new genres. It’s genetic material, run amok.
schneier.com
More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013. The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge.
transmediale.de
transmediale 2026 reimagines the festival as a living recursive carrier net – a hammock of relational technologies in practice that stretch across latitudes, rhythms, and root systems – converging in Berlin from 28 January to 1 February 2026 at silent green Kulturquartier and CANK.