- Lily Lynch for The Ideas Letter: Cold War Fixations.
Book reviews make for great essays, particularly when the reviewer vehemently disagrees with the author’s main premise. The author here is Michael McFaul, a 1990s style liberal democrat who, much like his neoliberal counterparts can’t see that his project failed and therefore cannot even conceive of taking responsibility for that failure. Lynch takes him to task.
- Andrej Karpathy on X: A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.
Where the reliably sensible Karpathy provides an update on how he uses LLMs for programming and, well ᔥTyler Cowen:
Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We’re also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.
Of course, I would have named it slopocalypse instead of slopacolypse but, you know, potato potatoe.
- Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu: From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: Why I Made the Switch.
Both Windows and and MacOS have become sufficiently sloppy that people are looking for an exit. This will be the decade of Linux, and it already started with the Steam Deck about which I haven’t written anything here but have discussed briefly in a podcast (Serbian only).
- Bryan Vartabedian: Three Adaptive Stances of Doctors.
Scenarios on how physicians may respond to recent developments, with a Focus, Fight, or Build phenotype. At a glance it may look like the Build phenotype may be the “correct” one, but of course Vartabedian correctly points out that these people may soon enough become bullshit artists themselves. These are my words, not his. Dr Vartabedian was much more measured:
The problem I find is that a lot of builders aren’t in the trenches for long. They move into startups or administrative positions. And as they evolve, their view of medicine becomes fixed. And when you’re not struggling with the realities of an inbox, you begin to solve for a world that doesn’t exist.
This is something I also noticed, many years ago.
- @AutismCapital on X: Severus Snape - ALWAYS (LIVE at Hogwarts) 🔥🔥🔥
An LLM-generated music video for millennials ᔥKevin Kelly which is getting a lot of attention because of course the quick cuts and incoherence of Sora and others are perfect for the medium. This is why people thinking that MTV shut down when it actually didn’t was so salient: its former viewers are being made to think that everyone will soon enough be spinning their own music videos set to their own (kind of) music.