Local LLM Performance on a Maxxxed-Out M5Max MacBookPro: TABLE OF THE DAY

Note on the state of the OpenClaw installation: speed & coherence & memory footprint & semantic depth in homarus cyberneticus. What local LLMs can (and can’t) do effectively right now on sub-dining-room side-table consumer hardware…

I confess I did not think the idea that I would ever have a cybernetic assistant lobster with a swappable software brain had entered my mind before last month.

A report from the front lines of trying to run an agentic OpenClaw locally on Apple’s M5Max silicon: load latency, memory footprint, tokens per second, simple coherence, and what epistemic density: the ability to sustain a simulacrum of a logically serious argument.

On a machine with 128GB of unified memory, 600GB/s of memory bandwidth, and perhap 70 TFLOPS FP16 of raw LLM-relevant computational power (cf.: 350 for an NVIDIA RTX 5090, but with four times the memory), we have:

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Notes:

The absolute gonzo gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M performance-wise. What is going on here that is making it such an extraordinary outlier?
deepseek-r1:70b as the secondary performance-wise champ.
The low initial latency: the absolute speed with which all these models initially load.
Speed demons: For background tasks, logging, or simple classification, thellama3.2:1 and llama3.2:3b can do a huge amount of very simple summarization and classification tasks at rock-bottom resource costs and remarkable speed.
Coherence is very important: Speed is how fast you arrive; Coherence is supposed to be whether you arrived at the right destination.

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The Coherence Score is supposed to be the model’s ability to maintain structural integrity, logical consistency, and semantic relevance over a sustained period—follow the prompt’s constraints perfectly, maintain a stable “train of thought,” and not succumb to common failure modes like repetition or hallucinated syntax. The “Coherence Score” is supposed to tell us whether a speed gain is actually a utility gain or just a faster way to produce garbage. As I said: speed is how fast you arrive; Coherence is supposed to be whether you arrived at the right destination.

There is, in addition to initial load latency, memory consumption, speed of token generation, and ability to maintain the simulacrum of a coherent train of thought, another dimension of performance: call it semantic depth or epistemic density.

Semantic depth is “reasoning”, “knowledge”, and “logical complexity”. It is more than coherence, which is simply “not spouting obvious nonsense”. The 5GB RAM models can follow simple instructions like summarize this text. However, ask analyze the economic implications of the Anthropic/DoD rupture and how it might impact the valuation of OpenAI, the 5GB RAM models will fail to produce anything that would pass any Turing test. They will produce coherent-sounding sentences that are factually untethered from reality. The models squatting in 17GB or 74GB of memory with their massively more parameters sound much better.

A 5GB model can stay on topic for 50 words or so, but will struggle to maintain complex constraints over 1,000 tokens. If you give a complex instruction involving multiple negative constraints like explain X, but do not use the word Y, and ensure the tone is wry, yet avoid any mention of Z, the 5GB model will almost certainly “forget” one of those constraints. The 17GB or 74GB model has a much higher “instructional inertia.”

Right now: llama3.2:3b appears to be the model for: is this email urgent?qwen3:8b appears to be the model for: summarize this 5000-word article. llama3.3:70b(q8) appears to be the model for: let’s write or debug some computer code. gemma4:26b-a4b appears to be the model for nearly everything else.

There ought to be a place for deepseek-r1:70b. Deepseek itself suggests that it is good for “complex analysis/research (e.g., ‘synthesize these 5 papers’) and other tasks that require massive reasoning depth and factual density. But while llama3.2:3b is a worse-but-faster email classifier than I am, qwen3:8b can produce an acceptable summary note for my files freeing me up to live my life, llama3.3:70(q8) is a better python debugger than I am, and gemma4:26b is an effective LLM workhorse, I have not yet figured out a useful workflow process in which deepseek-r1:70b is better than just doing it myself.

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##table-of-the-day
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#homarus-cyberneticus
#local-llms
#gemma4-26b
#deepseek-r1-70b

I Am Glad Lisa Cook Rightly Gets to Keep Her Job as Federal Reserve Governor Today

Yes, John Roberts has just told a lot of lies about history and legal doctrine in the process of his getting to the right result on the equities in the case of Cook v. Trump. What is the thumbnail here? “John Roberts set own “unitary executive” doctrine on fire because rich people he likes have an interest in being protected from chaos-monkey Trump? Unitary executive for thee—but not for the Fed? The 5–4 win for Federal Reserve independence exposes the bad faith at the core of the Court’s corrupt crusade? When Trump wants control of the FTC, the Court hands him Article II absolutism; when he lunges at the Fed, suddenly history and prudence matter? Lisa Cook keeps her seat — not because the Court believes its own precedents, but because letting Trump loose on monetary policy terrifies two members of the standard majority of even this deeply corrupt Supreme Court?

I am very happy to report that the Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of my friend and sometime student Lisa Cook today. Thus she can keep her job as Governor of the Federal Reserve. For now. That is the right decision. But, of course, it is made not for the reason that the President’s power to faithfully execute the laws requires that he do so in a manner consistent with the structure of departments, institutions, and agencies constructed by congressional legislation.

For today here comes deeply cynical and corrupt Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He lies. He lies in the process of doing the right thing in the case before him—that of Fed Governor Lisa Cook:

Amy Howe: Skip to main contentCourt prevents Trump from Firing Fed Governor <https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/204135899>: ‘The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors whom President Donald Trump had attempted to fire. By a vote of 5-4…

The five were the three not thoroughly corrupt justices—Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson—plus Kavanaugh and Roberts.

Continuing:

The court held that Cook can continue to remain in her job while her challenge to Trump’s efforts to fire her moves forward…. Roberts contended that, if the Trump administration were correct, it “would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference…”

But the whole point of the “unitary executive” theory—which this corrupt court has bought into almost whole-hog since Trump’s reelection, although its corrupt majority did not do so while Biden was president—is that when Congress delegates authority to an executive agency, it cannot restrict the president’s power to dismiss the people who are even if Senate confirmation is required, purely and entirely his agents. That is now the law. Everywhere but where the Federal Reserve is concerned. Even more so today.

For example:

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has attempted to assert control over several multi-member independent agencies, whose officials could also only be removed for cause. In orders issued last year, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Consumer Product Safety Commission while their appeals moved forward…
Cook, however, was different…

Why was Cook different? What is the distinguishing rationale here?

It is this: letting this chaos monkey president gain control of the Federal Reserve might actually be bad for people whom we like, and not just for libtards who cry when the chaos monkey president disrupts and damages pieces of the New-Deal Order social-insurance state that I loathe so.

That is it. Deeply cynical. Deeply corrupt.

Clarence Thomas (or, rather, his clerks—Thomas does not have the mental stamina or energy to have learned enough to have have played a substantial role here so outfar his wheelhouse) writes, correctly:

Clarence Thomas: Dissenting <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf>: ‘The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System… unlike the Federal Reserve Banks, is a federal executive agency that regulates much of the Nation’s economy…. Apparent mortgage fraud was a “cause” to remove Cook. And, the statute authorizing the President to remove Cook for “cause” says nothing about notice or a hearing, so it does not require notice and a hearing. Any other result would violate Article II of the Constitution, under which the President may remove executive officers at will…. [Roberts] makes many policy arguments for an “independent” banking agency that exercises executive power free from accountability, ante, at 5, but those are ultimately arguments against the Constitution…

And:

Samuel Alito & Neil Gorsuch: Dissenting <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf>: ‘The President has satisfied the traditional stay factors. Consider first the President’s likelihood of success…. The District Court erred in holding that removal “for cause” means removal only for “events that have occurred while [the officer is] in office.”… Cook lacks a private property interest in her seat on the Board of Governors…. Thus, the President’s attempt to remove her could not have violated the Due Process Clause…. Because the courts below resolved these two issues incorrectly, I would conclude that the President has shown a likelihood that we would reverse at this preliminary stage…. As to the remaining stay factors, this Court has held that they are satisfied when a lower court countermands the President’s removal of a principal executive officer. See Trump v. Wilcox, 605 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1–2). A stay is therefore warranted here…

And:

Barrett: Dissenting <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf>: ‘The Court chooses to answer a series of difficult merits questions… not addressed by… almost any other court before today…. The biggest issue: Is the removal restriction in the Federal Reserve Act constitutional?… [This] last is in a league of its own…. Nonetheless, the Court raises and settles the constitutional issue—and does so based on a conclusory analogy to the First and Second Banks of the United States. Ante, at 22–23….
The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today. ___ U. S. ___ (2026). Slaughter announces a categorical rule: Whenever “an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power” and must be subject to plenary executive control—“no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 22). Yet here, the Court claims a special exception “‘sanctioned by history’” and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. Ante, at 24. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?… And is the Federal Reserve unique, or might history sanction other exceptions too? The Court does not say….
We have repeatedly found that the President suffers irreparable harm when he is barred from firing a subordinate. See Trump v. Wilcox, 605 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1); Trump v. Boyle, 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1)…. The District Court’s order blocks the President from removing Cook for mortgage fraud, and that is so even if he satisfies the requirements that the Court’s opinion sets out. Under our precedent, that significant interference with the President’s removal authority clears the “irreparable harm” threshold…

Does Roberts’s opinion in his 26-page opinion in Trump v. Cook answer any of the dissents?

Reminding, the points made in dissent are that:

Roberts’s opinion is contradicted by Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Wilcox,
Cook cannot the due-process clause because she does not have a property interest,
Cook cannot raise a statutory requirement for notice and hearing because there is no statutory requirement for such before a for-cause dismissal, and
while the Federal Reserve System is not a mere normal executive-branch agency, the Federal Reserve Board definitely is just a normal executive-branch agency, and in that respect is very different from the First and Second Banks of the United States.

Does Roberts have an answer to any of these?

He does not.

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As Cosma Shalizi Says, "The Singularity Is in Our Past": Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES FROM 2013

From 2013-03-09: we keep waiting for a technological singularity, but Cosma Shalizi is right: it already happened, and we call it the long nineteenth century. That rupture already flipped work, necessity, and freedom in ways so profound that we can only hang on for the ride, and may well never see some change so profound happen so quickly.

Look at the leading edge of today’s rich urban societies and you see a world our pre‑industrial ancestors would not recognize: machines do the sweating, while hyperliterate humans teach, heal, entertain, and manage intricate symbolic systems of power and production. How did we get from “in the sweate of thy face” to this peculiar post‑industrial condition? 1776 to 1914 was the real singularity in human history, one that turned economic history from a slow background drift into history’s driving force. Yet the transformation remains incomplete, and its patterns will organize the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.

I find myself following links back to my own work that have succumbed to linkrot—especially the shutdown of <http://typepad.com>. Whenever this happens, I think two things:

First, I should prioritize the big job of getting the whole kit and caboodle back to 1995 up on WordPress somewhere. This is a big job, and I would rather not start it until I have time to make sure that it runs as efficiently and effectively as it can run.
Second, I should throw the things I run across up on the SubStack, for if I am looking for them, maybe somebody else is looking for them too.

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As Cosma Shalizi Says, “The Singularity Is in Our Past”: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

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Look at the bleeding edge of urban North Atlantic or East Asian civilization, and you see a world fundamentally unlike any human past. Hunting, gathering, farming, herding, spinning and weaving, cleaning, digging, smelting metal and shaping wood, assembling structures--all of the “in the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate bread” things that typical humans have typically done since we became jumped-up monkeys on the East African veldt--are now the occupations of a small and dwindling proportion of humans. And where we do have farmers, herdsmen, manufacturing workers, construction workers, and miners, they are overwhelmingly controllers of machines and increasingly programmers of robots. They are no longer people who make or shape things--facture--with their hands--manu.

At the bleeding edge of the urban North Atlantic and East Asia today, few focus on making more of necessities. There are enough calories that it is not necessary that anybody need be hungry. There is nough shelter that it is not necessary that anybody need be wet. There is enough clothing that it is not necessary that anybody need be cold. And enough stuff to aid daily life that nobody need feel under the pressure of lack of something necessary. We are not in the realm of necessity.

What do modern people do? Increasingly, they push forward the corpus of technological and scientific knowledge. They educate each other. They doctor each other. They nurse each other. They care for the young and the old. They entertain each other. They provide other services for each other to take advantage of the benefits of specialization. And they engage in complicated symbolic interactions that have the emergent effect of distributing status and power and coordinating the seven-billion person division of labor of today’s economy. We have crossed a great divide between what we used to do in all previous human history and what we do now. Since we are not in the realm of necessity, we ought to be in the realm of freedom.

But although we have largely set these post-agrarian post-industrial patterns for the next stage of human history, the human world of this next stage is only half-made. The future is already here--it is just not evenly distributed. Of the 7.2 billion people alive in the world today, at least 25% billion still live lives that are hard to distinguish from the lives of our pre-industrial ancestors. Only 5% of today’s world population lives in countries where income per capita is greater than $40,000 per year; only 10% lives in countries where income per capita is greater than $20,000 per year.

The bulk of the world’s population is on the stairway to modernity. The patterns are set. The top of the stairway is visible--although it is not clear which top we shall reach: many possible tops are immanent in the patterns. Nevertheless, the climb will be hard. And that is what much of the history of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries is likely to be about.

So how did this great transformation happen? And how did the way it happened shape who we are now and who we will be in the future?

The traditional tools, practices, patterns, and molds of history are not as much help in telling this story as one might hope. The history of how the world was greatly transformed is primarily economic and technological, and secondarily political and social. But historians are not used to placing the economic and technological in first place. In the study of any period back before 1800, there is no way that economic history can be seen as even one of the principal axes. Before 1800, most history at even the century-level--let alone the decade-level or the year-level--could not be economic history. History is change. And before 1800 economic factors changed only slowly. The structure and functioning of the economy at the end of any given century was pretty close to what it had been at the beginning.

The economy was then was much more the background against which the action of a play takes place than like a dynamic foreground character. Changes in humanity’s economy--how people made, distributed, and consumed the material necessities and conveniences of their lives--required long exposures to become visible. Economic history could be--indeed, had to be--a specialized “long duration” history. It required a scope of perhaps 500 years, if not more, to be properly placed in the foreground of any historical canvas. And even then the story told was of recurrent patterns and cycles rather than development and change.

But since 1750 or so things have been different. The pace of economic change has been so great as to shake the rest of history to its foundation. For perhaps the first time, the making and using the necessities and conveniences of daily life--and how production, distribution, and consumption changed--has been the driving force behind a single century’s history. Even in the most long-established of professions, the pattern and rhythm of work life today is so very different from that of our ancestors as to be almost unrecognizable. It is these changes in production and also in home life and consumption, and the reactions to them, that make up the center ring action of the history that has made us who we are.

This post-1750 history takes place in two stages. The first stage is the nineteenth century: the century of the British Industrial Revolution. Call it 1750-1870. It opens up the possibilities. The second stage is the twentieth century. Call it 1870-2010. It sets the patterns into which the human world is likely to grow in the future.

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Shalizi, Cosma. 2010. “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”. Bactra. November 28. <http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/699.html>.

And I might as well put the short text of this up here as well:

Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone <http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/699.html>:
“Attention conservation notice: Yet another semi-crank pet notion, nursed quietly for many years, now posted ~~in the absence of new thoughts~~ because reading The Half-Made World brought it back to mind.
The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.
Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.
Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.
Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.
Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.
Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.
An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (”Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)
Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out.

Refer a friend

And cross-reference as well to the very keen-witted:

Kumar, Krishan. 1978. Prophecy & Progress:
The Sociology of Industrial & Post-industrial Society. London: Penguin. <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Prophecy_and_Progress/_ZUJAQAAIAAJ?hl=en>

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CROSSPOST: Patreon CEO Jack Conte, Interviewed by Himself & by Nilay Patel of "The Verge"

Creators hate the AI slop flooding their feeds, but every software company knows it will die if it doesn’t embrace these tools. Jack Conte’s answer is to use AI not to replace artists, but to clean their toilets, do their taxes, and wrest some power back from the AI-Borg of Anthropic & OpenAI that sees nothing wrong with saying that its terms-of-service are absolute and nobody else’s terms-of-service matter at all.

My view of many issuers around “Generative AI” has been profoundly shaped by the fact that I hear—constantly—from the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic in my left ear that:

their scraping everything to train their models without paying the authors/creators an extra cent for this previously uncontemplated use of their work is absolutely fine;
but distilling their models is worse than unfair: it is criminal.

Gizmodo called them out effectively:

Webb Wright: Everyone Wants to Build AI Using Someone Else’s Work <https://gizmodo.com/everyone-wants-to-build-ai-using-someone-elses-work-2000777781>: ‘Media companies and artists aren’t the only ones accusing AI companies of stealing their work. Increasingly, accusations are being lobbed between companies themselves…. Like publishers’ legal disputes with AI developers, the U.S. AI industry’s efforts to prevent foreign companies from “illicitly” using their models to train new ones will almost certainly not have a quick or easy solution. But one has to suspect that right now, across the country, editors at small-town newspapers are watching American tech companies complain about what they claim amounts to theft, and feeling that at last, a tiny bit of justice has been served…

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The “we won’t even bother to try to make even a semi-logical argument; we will just show up with bags of money” vibe here is very distasteful.

Thus I am predisposed to be 100% sympathetic to the Patreon CEO here, as I watch Patreon CEO Jack Conte interviewed by himself:

Jack Conte: My Thoughts on AI <https://www.patreon.com/jackconte/posts/my-thoughts-on-152669616>: ‘Hey creators! I’ve been thinking a lot about AI…. This video is… a download of where my head is about AI, copyright, fair use… fear… what specifically excites me about the tech and what I’m angry about, and why I believe in human creativity…. It’s long!…. If you only listen to 20 seconds… here’s… [what] you should know:
Patreon does NOT use creator work to train… LLMs or image generators….
We ARE actively fighting to protect creators from AI spam, and from having their work scraped without their consent.
We are NOT blanket-prohibiting work that was made with AI tools….
I believe human creativity is not going anywhere…

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And as I watch him interviewed by Nilay Patel of The Verge:

Jack Conte & Nilay Patel: Patreon Ceo Jack Conte on Supporting Artists in the AI Slop Era <https://www.theverge.com/podcast/952607/patreon-ceo-jack-conte>:
Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon… last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago… and a lot has changed…. His ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically…. The last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon. But then Patreon built those features—to help people discover content from new creators…. Jack says if Patreon didn’t build its own audience platform, then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences—and customers.
You’ll hear Jack say that the current way platforms treat creators is “disgusting,” and you’ll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone’s work however they want, and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag. But you’ll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon’s plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists…

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Perhaps the most crucial crux is this exchange:

Nilay Patel: Every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they’ve ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of tokenmaxxing. Then in creator world, the audiences hate it, and they don’t want the slop, and every platform is overrun with slop, even though the audiences don’t want the slop, and something very bad is happening.
How are you bridging that divide? Because it’s obvious that the future of software companies looks AI-enabled in some way, I’m not sure which way it is, but it’s obvious that it’s some way. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all, because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly.
Jack Conte: This has been really challenging…. I’m holding two opposing beliefs at the same time, and I’m terrified, and I’m excited, and I’m really pissed at how all this has been rolled out…. I find the technology magical…. I am holding all of these ideas in my head at once, and I myself feel very conflicted about it….
The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps, and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI…. There are… serious drawbacks and concerns…. I’m… seriously angry about it…. But I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation…. Everything is changing for people, and this is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans….. Boycotting AI is like boycotting the internet. That’s not a good strategy. I don’t like what Instagram has done…. I still have an Instagram page…. I don’t like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year…. And here I am on my iPhone. I don’t like what my federal government is doing right now… and I still pay my taxes, and I still live in the United States….
Every 10 years, there’s this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology, and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim… “fair use, or copyright doesn’t apply because it’s transformative.”… Then there’s industry mayhem…. We are now… in the industry mayhem part of this cycle…. There should be a lot of lawsuits… regulation…. These models have Borg’d the entirety of the free creative web…. That is bad, not only for those creators, but it’s bad for society.…
If Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company… and use them to give the power back to creators, we, as a company, will be dead in three years…. These platform shifts are material…. Companies [that] don’t keep up with these new technologies… die. Patreon is much more useful to creators if we are alive…. We must embrace those tools… because I want us to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people.…
At the center of the bullseye is creators making their creative work. What creators have told us is, “Patreon, get the f*** out of the way….” So, we get out of their way…. One rung out… is the packaging…. Like automated chapter markers and things like that, or cutting long-form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is marketing… with automated email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is business management…. The best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, “Hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don’t need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet.” And that is our product strategy….
I’ve explained all this to our creators in this very long 45-minute video...

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Brad here again: I am going to have to think hard about how Substack and Patreon are both very much alike and very much different here.

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##mamlms
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#patreon
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No, Castro's Cuba Was Not a Successful Example of Fully-Automated Luxury Communism. But There Are Lessons from Its Infant-Mortality Numbers: CHART OF THE DAY

Castro, coercion, & babies who live: lessons from Cuba’s infant-mortality numbers as an authoritarian regime aligns (mostly) with mothers’ interests, while rich America leaves too many babies to die as we make high‑touch prenatal care a privilege rather than an automatic entitlement…

Cuban infant mortality is roughly 10 per 1000 live births. Countries as poor as Cuba are typically in the 50 per 1000 live births or so range. Cuba thus punches enormously above its economic-prosperity weight in terms of infant mortality.

My view is that, had Cuba remained a normal country rather than becoming the patrimonial-authoritarian really-existing socialist caudillismist Castroite state that it did, the likely counterfactual is that nearly everyone would have been much better off. People would have been better off even with respect to infant mortality. In brief, Cuba today would probably look a lot like Costa Rica today, with 9 infant-mortality deaths per thousand live births. The Revolution and the Castroite régime has been a 2.5-generation disaster for Cuba, and the ability of the medical system to punch well above its economic weight in infant mortality is 100% offset by the régime’s system that makes its economic weight so low.

Now comes Noel Maurer makes me aware of the latest developments in the Cuban economic development debate:

Noel Maurer: The Battle of Cuba(n Economic History) <https://www.noelmaurer.com/p/economic-history-week>: ‘John Devereux and Vincent Geloso (with João Pedro Bastos and Jamie Bologna Pavlik)… using different methodologies… presented evidence that Cubans would have been far better off had the Revolution never happened. Geloso et. al. use synthetic controls… [and] find that socialist Cuba fell behind counterfactual Cuba even as the Soviet Bloc pumped in billions of economic aid….
Now Giovanni Mellace (U. of Southern Denmark) and Rok Spruk (U. of Ljubljana) have struck back! They use synthetic controls to show that infant mortality in socialist Cuba falls dramatically and persistently compared to counterfactual Cuba… by “15–29 percent and average years of schooling rise 1.5-2 years; both effects are large, persistent, and robust.” Win one for the Revolution! Or maybe not…

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Noel then reminds us of John Devereux writing back in 2010:

John Devereux: The Health of the Revolution: Explaining the Cuban Healthcare Paradox <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NFnuqdCKekn14tManezoHkyJULFRCRWa/view>: ‘What lies behind the Cuban health care numbers?… My focus is on infant mortality…. Part of the answer lies in the fact that that the revolution inherited an economy with low infant mortality. [Plus] in the early 1970’s [when] infant mortality becomes a central goal of the Cuban authorities…. Cuba… developed… unique… institution… to monitor and to alter the behavior of patients and medical professional alike in ways that appear to have few parallels elsewhere… rest[ing] on the power of the Cuban State and its formidable security apparatus….
[Pre-Castro] Cuba had already achieved developed-economy levels of infant mortality…. Why did infant mortality fall so dramatically after the early 1970’s? Standard explanations emphasize Cuban investment in healthcare…. There is a large element of truth in these views….Cuba did not regain its pre-revolutionary levels of doctors until the early 1970’s, reflecting the exodus of doctors after 1959. Thereafter… from 1970 to 1980, doctors per 10,000 inhabitants doubled. They doubled again during the next decade…. Cuba has fifty-nine doctors per ten thousand inhabitants for 2005. The average for low-income economies is five…. For high-income countries, the average is twenty-eight…. Investment in hospitals/clinics/equipment as well as the provision of doctors/nurses played important roles in reducing infant mortality….
[Plus] the state places extraordinary pressure on Cuban doctors and hospitals to ensure healthy births. The authorities carefully investigate every infant death. They also impose severe sanctions on doctors…. Doctors have the ability to monitor their patients based on a comprehensive system of surveillance at the block level…. Local doctors work closely with the local agencies of the state, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and Federation of Cuban Women who keep detailed records on each family…. Doctors have direct access to women who because of social or other problems might avoid treatment elsewhere…. Doctors visit households at least once a year. All citizens must obtain certain services whether they want to or not….
Doctors assign women that are underweight, women pregnant with twins and women who have what Kath (2006 page 357) calls “social problems” to maternity homes…. During the early 1970’s, four percent of mothers used maternity homes. By 1989, this had increased to twenty three percent. By 2000, forty percent of mothers were resident for some period in the homes. The homes improve nutrition and provide health care to at risk women…. Pregnant women in the Cuban system are compelled to have at least two ultrasound tests with more tests at any signs of trouble. Among observers, there is a widespread belief that the appearance of abnormalities or any indication of potential problems leads to abortion…. Over recent decades, the abortion rate averaged between thirty-five and forty-five for each one hundred live births….
Some portion of Cuba’s low infant mortality rests on the coercive power of the Cuban state…. The current healthcare system may not survive in its present form with political change…

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Devereux’s conclusions are the Cuba’s infant mortality is low by:

a factor of six relative to what one would expect given its poverty
a factor of two relative to what one would expect given poverty, health spending, doctor and nurse supply, and the share of babies born with low birthweight.

Refer a friend

The vibe I get from his 2010 paper is that this last factor of two is only possible because the coercive power of the Cuban state is directed toward producing low infant mortality numbers via excessive pressure for selective abortion in at-risk pregnancies—bad—and also severe regmentation and population control: “citizens must obtain certain services whether they want to or not…. Pregnant women… are compelled to have at least two ultrasound[s]…”. Some amount of the good infant-mortality performance is thus a result of scrubbing the numbers, and because the number is a target one cannot make the normal inferences from a good infant-mortality number that things are going well with respect to other aspects of human well-being that one would normally make. Moreover, I get the vibe that this last factor of two comes only at the price of the authoritarian Cuban surveillance state, and thus that the game is not worth the candle.

But no pregnant woman wants to see their baby die—in the womb or just after birth. Except for the selective abortion of at-risk pregnancies possibility, the interests of mothers-to-be and the interests of the oppressive authoritarian Cuban state are aligned here.

Alta Bates Hospital, half a mile away from our house, did an amazing job when as me and my wife were having dinner with George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, her second pregnancy suddenly turned into an extraordinarily high-risk one. And we have a lovely daughter as a result, as all of high-tech American medicine as it existed in the early 1990s was deployed on our behalf at a resource cost I truly do not want to contemplate. But that level of care requires that you show up at the hospital with gold-plated insurance having figured out that you have to go there NOW, and believing you have enough social power to be willing to be very pushy in the emergency room.

But because you have to have the economic and social power and to take the initiative, America’s infant-mortality numbers are awfully bad given its extraordinary wealth.

Can we not have a high-touch healthcare system that gets pregnant women their nutrition, their ultrasounds, their counseling, and their other prenatal care by making it as easy as falling off a log? Does not the Cuban system show how much shifting away from insurance- and wealth- and social power- and hassle-surmounting gated systems to proactive ones would improve matters?

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(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: ENZO TRAVERSO: The Centuries of Eric Hobsbawm

Reading Traverso reading Chabal reading Hobsbawm between historical method, historical imagination, and the myths of historians and of history. Hobsbawm as a historian who revolutionized our sense of the long nineteenth century—and stumbled when he turned to the age he lived through. Paradoxically, nobody did more to move history beyond and away from Great Men and to our current webs of understanding based on structures, classes, and global orders than did Eric Hobsbawm. Yet, ironically and paradoxically, nobody seemed to find their thought more permanently bound by the shadow of Iosef Stalin than Eric Hobsbawm. The same mind that gave us an extraordinary Grand Narrative through-line history of 1776-1875 also gave us a profoundly unsatisfying and deeply wrongheaded understanding of the Big Story of 1875 to today.

This morning I am reading this piece: half Enzo Traverso, and half Emile Chabal, whose forthcoming Hobsbawm biography Traverso is reviewing.

Extensive excerpts of the parts of this that I found most interesting below:

Enzo Traverso: The Century of Eric Hobsbawm <https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-century-of-eric-hobsbawm/>:
(SEMI)-CROSSPOST: ENZO TRAVERSO: The Century of Eric Hobsbawm
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Enzo Traverso
June 25, 2026 | The Ideas Letter 67….
Eric J. Hobsbawm… published critically acclaimed memoirs, and today—fourteen years after his death—is the subject of two biographies, the latest of which… by Emile Chabal…. Richard J. Evans knew Hobsbawm… and his book… stands as… official biography…. Evans carefully reconstituted a historian’s life and wrote with empathy, not without an apologetic touch. Chabal’s… acknowledged distance is beneficial… his gaze more analytical… a fascinating critical portrait.
Hobsbawm is… the greatest historian of the twentieth century… if [that] means that he was the most important scholar to have written on the history of the past century…. Chabal speaks of… the man and the myth. The myth… when Hobsbawm published The Age of Extremes, the book that canonized him as a celebrity…. The twentieth century… as an age of cataclysms framed by the Great War and the end of communism (1914–91), broken in the middle by an eruption of apocalyptic violence during World War II…. A vast constellation of scattered events found its place in the puzzle and could now be viewed from a historical perspective….
[In Hobsbawm’s] trilogy… of the “long” nineteenth century… The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914… Hobsbawm displayed his talents as a narrator and a conceptualizer, and his capacity to explain in clear and engaging prose the enchainment of events rooted in a complex dialectic between social structures, political institutions, and human agency…. The outcome is a form of critical understanding that… interprets the past as a living landscape, animated by flesh-and-blood human beings…. While Hobsbawm’s clarity… from British historiography… global scope and interdisciplinary approach… from his cosmopolitanism and his Marxism….
His Marxism… deeply shaped his entire life…. In 1939, he coauthored a pamphlet with Raymond Williams, who had also been at Cambridge, in defense of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; in the early 1950s, he was “tremendously impressed” by Stalin’s Short Course (the official history of the Russian Communist Party), which he held to be a “beautiful, marvellous piece of popularisation,” particularly remarkable for its chapter on “dialectical and historical materialism.” In 1956, he signed a petition denouncing the Soviet invasion of Budapest, but—unlike many other intellectuals, including most of his own friends—he did not break with the party. He wrote a letter to the party newspaper Daily Worker, in which he characterized this military occupation as a “tragic necessity,” expressing the hope that it would be quickly followed by a withdrawal….
Hobsbawm’s communism was born… when the… Nazi SA marched in uniform through the streets of Berlin. It was the choice of a Jewish teenager…. He belonged to “the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world.” This hope was more than a universal ideal.… It was an ideology, a state, and an army, and his loyalty to them never wavered. This explains his contemptuous detachment toward the protest movements of the 1960s, like feminism and the New Left. Anti-authoritarianism, anti-patriarchalism, and sexual liberation struck him as signs of weakness, amateurism, and a lack of discipline….
Until 1956, Hobsbawm viewed Marxism, in Chabal’s words, as “something that covers everything” or a “totalising ideology,” and the Soviet Union as its temple.A corollary of this dogmatism was the hunt for heretics…. He wrote the introduction to the English translation of a pamphlet… against the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács written by the Hungarian Minister of Culture… which stigmatized Lukács… [as] a dangerous “bourgeois” tendency…. After 1956, Hobsbawm abandoned the Marxist orthodoxy… yet he maintained his hostility toward… “Western Marxism.”...
His Stalinism was… a belief grounded in a historical diagnostic… [that Stalinist] communism… had saved civilization from collapsing into barbarism. Despite the Gulag and Stalin’s tyrannical power, the USSR had resisted and, for him, embodied the legacy of the Enlightenment. [Hobsbawm’s]… conception of history remained teleological… as a long march of civilization toward progress and socialism, punctuated by revolutionary breaks and darkened by tragic throwbacks…. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91 dramatically called into question this teleological conception…. He always distrusted post-structuralism…. Having lived through the age of… Stalingrad, he could not consider history as a textual construction or as a narrative interchangeable with and indistinguishable from literary fiction. Historians write the past, but history is inscribed in the flesh and bones of living human beings…. Between universalism and the quest for identity, Hobsbawm’s choice was clear: Historians, he pointed out, don’t write history for Jews, or African Americans, or women, or homosexuals, or proletarians; they don’t write for “any special section of humanity.” They write for everyone….
Another upshot of Hobsbawm’s historical teleology was Eurocentrism…. The first half of the twentieth century undoubtedly constituted an “age of catastrophe” for Europe, but not so for Argentina or Mexico.… Perhaps Hobsbawm’s canonization… was a Western tribute to a great historian who[se]… entire life unfolded under the sign of decline and fall…. He had believed in the future of socialism, embodied by the USSR. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and of this universal hope, was, for him, a final failure, one he intimately endured and lucidly analyzed…

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Brad here: The forthcoming book being reviewed here is:

Chabal, Emile. 2026 (August 18). The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Clearly I am going to have to read it, as my irritation at the wrong-headed Grand Narrative of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes was one of the principal burrs in my saddle leading me to write Slouching Towards Utopia. Writing that did not dispel but rather cemented my annoyance. Nevertheless, I want to second what Traverso has to say here:

Hobsbawm displayed his talents as a narrator and a conceptualizer, and his capacity to explain in clear and engaging prose the enchainment of events rooted in a complex dialectic between social structures, political institutions, and human agency…. The outcome is a form of critical understanding that… interprets the past as a living landscape, animated by flesh-and-blood human beings…. While Hobsbawm’s clarity was… inherited from British historiography… his global scope and interdisciplinary approach stemmed, respectively, from his cosmopolitanism and his Marxism…

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And let me strengthen that: Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution (1962) and The Age of Capital (1975) are genuinely difficult to render justice to in a review: they simply cannot be summarized without losing everything that makes them great. Hobsbawm successfully wove together the economic logic of the Industrial Revolution with the political drama of 1776–1870 into a single, sweeping narrative that made it impossible to think about modern history any other way. His influence on thought here has been and remains truly profound.

Moreover, in my view, a second thing about Hobsbawm that will survive—the thing that will survive a thousand years beyond our own era—is his methodological revolution in historical writing. He did as much as any single person to drag history out of the cult of Great Men and into the broader, messier world of social processes, economic structures, and global orders. Before Hobsbawm, history’s attraction point was largely biography dressed up as narrative. After him, even readers who disagreed fiercely found themselves thinking in his terms: of long waves of structural processes; of social movements; of the long nineteenth century; of the hinge of history that was 1848, the dual revolution of industrialization and democracy, of the imperialist scramble; and so on.

His influence on method may well outlast his influence on thought.

Refer a friend

But.

The “but” will follow, perhaps next week.

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Clawing My Way into Comprehension (of the Token Tsunami, That Is)

Should I try to build a silicon-and-electrons chief‑of‑staff? Notes from under the dining‑room side-table. First failures and second brains as I contemplate trying to see whether so-called “Agentic-AI” can actually organize my worklife.

SubTuringBradBot salutes you!

Success! Two Kinds of Success!

Courtesy of OpenClaw <http://openclaw.ai>, the always-on machine under the side-table in the dining room is now well-behaved. Or, rather, two of its avatars are:

SubTuringBradBot is now an effective answerer of first-level office-hour questions about things I have said and have to say in my courses. It is a RAG system searching over a curated catechism database of office hour-like question-and-answer pairs and then handing off the most relevant to a light on-device LLM front-end natural-language output processor. Moreoever, that database is slowly growing, at the rate of one additional q-&-a pair every two hours, 400 a month, as a larger on-device LLM browses through my weblog archives reading a post, constructing a q-&-a pair, and then asking me to give it a thumbs-up/thumbs-down. I am now impressed with how well it does—as a first line. And when I return to the teaching line next spring, I am confident that it will have a working q-&- system for questions about course requirements and the course syllabus as well. It is, for now, open <https://t.me/subturingbradbot>. And it will stay open each month until I have exhausted my Anthropic budget, and even after that it will stay open until I find contention for lighting-up the always-on machine under the side-table in the dining room to be annoying to me.
ExegeticistBot is now an effective way of reminding me of what I have written on any topic, and published in my books, in articles, and on my weblog (with some annoying gaps, which I am attempting to fill with one search an hour for a working WayBack Machine <http://wayback.archive.com> copy of a relevant weblog post missing from my internal archive). Its vector semantic-search database similarity metric engine is, I must say, impressive. Surprisingly so. At least now, if I find myself at wit’s end with respect to a topic or a question, I can find out if I was ever witful about it. And at least now, if I contradict my earlier self or selves, I will know.

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What Else Should I Ask of the Machine?

So what else should I ask this machine burbling under the side table in the dining room to do, both with respect to deepening my understanding of the real power and limits of these technologies—both the frontier models-plus-harnesses of an Anthropic that claims it is actually going to be profitable this quarter, and the on-device open-weight LLMs running on an 128GB M5Max chip with 614GB/s of memory bandwidth (it was supposed to be a 256GB M5Ultra chip with 1,200GB/s of memory bandwidth—2.5x the AI-workload throughput of what I have—but RAMageddon has come for us all)?

Here’s an idea: One of the running gags in the parts of the information firehose-flood-river that I swin in comes from VergeCast host David Pierce <https://www.theverge.com/authors/david-pierce>. He has, by his own admission, tried “every single notes and tasks app that exists,” found none of them to be The One, and then joked on Threads about going “all‑in on like Evernote and Remember The Milk just in case anything has changed since 2005”.

I feel his pain. I share it.

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Digression on David Pierce’s PKM Odyssey

“Personal knowledge management”—PKM—has a constant promise: this time, for sure, with this stack—PARA, BASB, Zettelkasten, GTD, Obsidian, Capacities, Readwise, Raycast, plus a thin mist of AI fairy dust—your future self will finally be organized, hyper‑productive, and cognitively serene. And yet, here we still are, reinstalling Evernote like it is 2010 and we are about to revolutionize our life by tagging receipts. Pierce is interesting because he is unusually honest and also very dogged and persistent because he (I hope) gets paid to do this.

He has even built his own system, with his own custom app, with AI help, tailored to his own brain <https://www.theverge.com/tech/928905/vibe-code-personal-software-revolution>. And it still did not solve the problem. For one thing, it “attacked my app’s design with fervent determination, the way I assume Jony Ive stares at a slab of aluminum and imagines removing all the ports from your laptop”.

Or rather, I should say, his own custom apps:

I gave up on Timetable… when I realized I had actually added a bunch of features I didn’t want and the whole thing was… annoying to use. I built… Spring, and I have absolutely no memory of what it even did. Basket was my attempt to build a super-inbox…. [I]bailed when my Twilio bill came due. I am apparently just as capable as anyone else of making software that annoys me. What saved my efforts was the realization that… the future of software is not building our own Excel from scratch…. It’s tweaking the way things look to suit your exact taste and needs….
The first actually useful bit of software I managed to vibe-code is just a way to smash a bunch of existing apps into a single screen…. Bookmarks in Raindrop… ugly… tasks in Todoist, which I forget to check… notes in Obsidian, where they remain forever unorganized… events in Google Calendar… without which I might never successfully leave my house. I failed over and over to build an app to replace those, but building a nicer way to look at them all took four API keys and an afternoon. And, yeah, a lot of “why doesn’t that button do anything” and “what does this error code mean” and “let’s try a color other than purple”. I kept telling Claude Code to make me an app that looked like a paper planner, and it pretty much delivered. My app will never be in the App Store, and I probably couldn’t explain how it works in a way that would make any sense. That’s the beauty of the era of personal software: I don’t have to…

In one sense, this is trading one set of cognitive problems for another set. The first set of cognitive problems is that you need a chief-of-staff: by yourself, you are fighting your own inattention, your own tendency to stop checking the task list, and your own inability to triage so that the “overdue” list grows exponentially—both the part of the overdue list that you see immediately, and the part that you don’t because you have snoozed it to some range between tomorrow and next year. MAMLMs can (imperfectly) triage, push your task list in your face, and multiply the number of times you need to fail to pay attention to drop an egg on the floor. Those are good. But then the second set of cognitive problems appear. Your find yourself:

fighting infrastructure rot,
fighting API quirks,
fighting design cruft,
fighting the fact that Claude Code seems to think every interface should be a purple gradient with a hamburger icon,
fighting the small but real chance that one bad deploy breaks your planner the night before a deadline,
and enrolling yourself as the underfunded product manager of a one‑user SaaS.

For PKM in particular, that tradeoff is precarious. The whole point of an organizer is to be boring, predictable, and available when your brain is overloaded. A system that requires you to debug Node modules before you can see your tasks is worse than useless; it is actively hostile. The “second brain” fantasy persists because it is, in the end, a secular soteriology: a story about how salvation from chaos lies just one workflow change away.

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The Plan!

So what do I do?

Do I follow David Pierce and be satisfied with a single screen presentation on my laptop of the tools that I actually use to try to keep track of the information overflowed flow in and my commitments and projects?

Or do I try to see whether I can turn it over to what we now call “agentic AI”? Do I attempt to construct a useful working doped-silicon-and-electrons chief-of-staff for myself.

I am leaning towards doing the latter. First, the stakes are low: The job does not get done now, in spite of my pathetic efforts, so the loss will be small. It will just consume some time, but that time will be a valuable window into the current status and usefulness of these information technology tools. Nothing will break if it fails.

Second, it should be doable by Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models. It is not a set of tasks for which there is one right answer that you have to nail—we know that MAMLMs do badly on such sets of tasks. It is a set of tasks where some slop and getting into the right ballpark counts as a win.

Suggestions as to how I should proceed here?

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The Casual Destruction of USAID Is, so Far, the Trump Administration Action That Has Had the Greatest Negative Effect on Human Well-Being: MOST IMPORTANT THING

What is the most important thing you should focus on today? I think it is this: the casual incompetence of doing immense damage for no rational reason whatsoever. “It is something we can do that will make liberals really sad!” seems to have been the sum total of the analysis and the motivation behind the elimination of USAID…

Here:

Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti & al.: Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext>…

And it seems to be getting more traction right now, as we have:

Jerusalem Demsas: <https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/2070508864521551893>: ‘Elon Musk bragged about feeding USAID into the “wood chipper” but now he pretends that whatever happens as a result isn’t his fault. If DOGE had saved the federal government billions of dollars, you can be sure he would be taking credit for that. But somehow he’s not responsible for the consequences of eliminating these programs? Today at @TheArgumentMag we published a thorough explanation for why we should hold @elonmusk responsible for the deaths of at best 700,000 people…

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And:

Atul Gawande: <twitter.com/Atul_Gawa…>: ‘Independent analyses estimate that your actions to dismantle USAID and drastically reduce lifesaving foreign aid have already killed 700,000 people. Here are some of those people: Elon Musk: “All DOGE required was contact information of the recipients to confirm that funding was not fraudulent. No validated medical funding was stopped. Anything that appeared to be legitimate lifesaving funding continued and is now administered by the State Department.”
Jane Sunday, 15 months old, died of malnutrition in Kakuma, Kenya after the USAID closure and aid cuts slashed refugee food rations and severe malnutrition treatment.
Nyarietna, Rebecca Nyariaka, and one-year-old Nyagoa died from cholera in South Sudan when the aid cuts closed down nearby clinics.
Mohamat, 9 months old, died from malaria in Cameroon. Treatment was delayed due to lack of health workers who lost their jobs from aid cuts. When he finally made it to a clinic, they had run out of a lifesaving drug that had been funded by the US.
Yagana Bulama’s 8-month-old son died from malnutrition two weeks after a USAID-funded malnutrition program was stopped in northeastern Nigeria.
Fatima and her newborn baby died in Yemen when the local USAID-supported hospital could no longer offer the emergency C-section she needed.

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And:

Derek Thompson: <twitter.com/DKThomp/s…>: ‘There are some center-to-right wing accounts I follow that are more offended by the possibility that some public health sources are over-estimating the death count from Musk carelessly destroying US global health programs than by the core fact that Musk really did carelessly destroy US global health (and bragged about it relentlessly) in a way that clearly killed people. These people know who they are, and they’re wrong…

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Together with great sensitivity to the issue on the part of Elon Musk:

Elon Musk:
If there were mass deaths due to USAID, when are they? I would like to call the bereaved parents! Nobody died is the truth, but a lot of fraud, funding bioweapons and foreign government interference was stopped. Many lives were saved as a result of stopping the bad parts of USAID funding. The parts of funding that have some chance of doing good remain in place and were transferred to the State Department….
There is not even a single dead child! If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!…
USAID funding was central to the creation of COVID-19….
True: Wall Street Apes: ‘The money being sent from USAID wasn’t for humanitarian efforts. USAID money was being LAUNDERED TO GEORGE SOROS to pay for protests. Mike Benz exposes USAID has been sending money to George Soros NGOs, he then uses that money to FUND AND TRAIN PROTESTERS….
Yes, Mr. President!

Refer a friend

I do know something about the coalition of interests, resentments, and fantasies that made the destruction of USAID politically attractive, intellectually justifiable in certain circles, and personally gratifying to the people who pushed it: oligarchy plus grievance politics yields policy that is both morally catastrophic and instrumentally stupid.

Foreign aid is tiny in budgetary terms. Foreign aid is enormous in symbolic terms. USAID disbursed on the order of $40 billion dollars a year in assistance before Trump’s second-term freeze and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) crusade, in a federal budget north of $6 trillion a year. Yet, as the Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations dryly noted, USAID had been a central pillar of U.S. soft power since 1961, underwriting everything from the global smallpox eradication campaign to HIV treatment under PEPFAR to vaccine rollout during COVID–19. See for example: <https://www.cfr.org/articles/what-usaid-and-why-it-risk>. A program that costs little, delivers a lot, and buys the United States both lives saved abroad and goodwill that any minimally rational hegemon ought to prize.

Why would you feed that into the wood chipper?

In brief:

Ideological hostility to foreign aid provided the vocabulary.
Culture-war resentment supplied the emotional energy.
Oligarchic self‑assertion and conspiratorial fantasies gave the protagonists their self‑image as heroic truth‑tellers cleaning out a corrupt temple.
Performative cruelty ensured that the suffering of distant others was not a bug but a feature.
And public indifference—gross overestimates of how much money is spent on foreign aid, a general belief that government is wasteful, and no sense of the very high soft-power and human well-being bang-for-the-buck—meant there was no swift political price.

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Definitely a new frontier in saying the quiet part out loud! This is indeed how democracies die—when the guilt of the in-class motivates them to kill it. I do tremble for my country, for Mike Johnson believes that his supporters fear even a congressional investigation that much, and he has a better idea of what they are thinking than I do:

Funny, this. In a way:

Sharon: <https://bsky.app/profile/sharonk.bsky.social/post/3mp7hxsqtq22s>: ‘hey man just letting you know you're on camera…
Acyn: ‘Johnson: “If we lose the midterms, these Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you…

Alternatively: the corruption money seemed easy, but now it means that we own you, and you have no choice but to pony up.

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CROSSPOST: BEN THOMPSON: An Interview with Om Malik About Tech’s History & Future

Peering through the veil of time and ignorance, and seeing 24 months ahead via grasping the current deep state of the tech stack: Om Malik as analyst reading the detailed state of chips, networks, and bubbles as a guide to our medium-term future. Om Malik grew up walking half a mile to make a single phone call and ended up reading the global tech stack from the chip level up:

Alas! My friend Om Malik has died. He was wonderful company. He taught me a lot. 60 is much too soon.

I have now lost two good friends on my birthday in successive years. I met him shortly after he moved to Silicon Valley from New York in 2000 to to start his GigaOM weblog <https://om.co/> <https://gigaom.com/>.

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Ben Thompson has just let his Stratechery <http://stratechery.com/> interview with Om from 2 ½ years ago out from the vault. It is very much worth reading/listening to to get a sense of the guy as a thinker.

A very brief summary of their conversation, which ties together three decades of tech history:

Journey from Indian kid without a phone to Silicon Valley reporter.
Learning how to read the tech stack from chips upward and to think both bottom‑up and top‑down.
A knowledge of the history of chips, networks, and bandwidth growth lets you “see” 18–24 months ahead in tech—but only if you understand the current state of the stack.
How the dot‑com and telecom bubbles built foundational infrastructure (dark fiber, broadband, cloud stack) that enabled today’s world—that we should think of irrationally exuberance in tech as philanthropy.
The AI boom as a similarly pivotal convergence of semiconductors, networks, open source, and new devices
AI best understood as augmented intelligence that helps humans manage complexity.

About Stratechery: <https://stratechery.com/about/>

CROSSPOST: BEN THOMPSON: An Interview with Om Malik About Tech’s History & Future

<https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-om-malik-about-techs-history-and-future/>
Thursday, January 18, 2024
Listen to Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s Stratechery Interview is with Om Malik. Malik has been a reporter, analyst, blogger, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Malik covered the dot-com era for Forbes, before starting GigaOM, a site that covered the tech industry, in 2001. I consider Malik and GigaOM to be one of my and Stratechery’s spiritual ancestors. Malik then became an investor for True, where he is now partner emeritus. Today Malik writes at his excellent personal blog, Om.co; Malik is also an accomplished photographer, and maintains Photos By Om.
In this interview we trace through Malik’s career, both in terms of tech and media. We cover the dot com bubble, the telecom bubble, and what lessons may be applicable to today. We also look forward to the next few years, including assessing the state of AI, and discuss why Malik is so excited about the Apple Vision Pro.
To listen to this interview as a podcast, click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.
On to the interview:

An Interview with Om Malik About Tech’s History and Future

This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Background

Om Malik, welcome to Stratechery.
Om Malik: Hey, thank you for having me.
It’s a big honor for me to have you here. If you go back to the beginning of Stratechery — we were just talking before we recorded — but you were one of the people I reached out to, one of the earliest pioneers in online journalism, online writing about tech, and someone that I clearly knew, “If I can make it like Om did, things would be great”. 10 years later, to circle around and talk with you here, I’m genuinely honored, it’s great to have you.
OM: Well, thank you very much. I think you’ve done 10x better than I could have, so I’m really proud of you. From our initial conversation to where you are, I think it’s amazing to just see your progress every month, every week. I just enjoy reading what you have to say, and I admit that I listen to Dithering more than I listen to your podcast [Stratechery].
That’s the idea! Anyone that listens to every piece of content that I put out — it’s a lot! I love you, to be clear. But hey, Dithering is good for some people, Sharp Tech‘s good for some people, Stratechery is good for others. When I did start the podcast, there was a lot of, “Look, I don’t listen to podcasts, if you stop writing I’m going to be very upset.” So hey, a little bit of everything for everyone.
OM: No, I think the reason I like Dithering is because you and John [Gruber] have a really great chemistry. Even if the topics don’t interest me at times, it just is the banter, it keeps me engaged with the two of you.
Well, it’s great because you and John, that’s two of the big inspirations and I appreciate your kind words, but I’m standing on the shoulder of giants, as they say. It’s one of the pleasures of this to be able to talk to someone that from the very beginning you were looking up to and then to have this conversation. So anyhow, we should jump into it. It’s fun to talk to you.
OM: Thank you.
Tell me more about yourself. I knew about you, you started GigaOm in 2001, but before that you were writing for Forbes. You had a very brief stint as a VC, but the story starts in India, correct?
OM: Yeah, so I think for me, my life is I accidentally found myself writing about technology and the Internet. Basically I discovered CompuServe, and as somebody who grew up in India who did not have much communication capabilities, we didn’t have phone, I think I was 14 or 15 when we had a black-and-white television, things we take for granted were not really there. Every time you had to make a phone call, you had to go to a payphone and make a phone call. Every time you got a phone call it was at somebody’s house who lived two blocks away, almost half a mile away. It was usually somebody died or somebody had a baby, those were the only two reasons people called.
I think for me the lack of communication was something which shaped my life and my world view a lot. So when we got a phone, my parents got a phone, I’m from India, so we had a religious celebration, we had a puja in the house, and it was like the whole neighborhood celebrated because everybody had a phone a little closer to them.
My relationships with people changed. I had friends who were not living in my neighborhood and they were living further away, I had school friends I became closer to because we could talk on the phone, except my parents would yell at me that you can’t be talking too long because it costs too much money. I had my first girlfriend because I could use a phone. It shaped my life experience because communication made my world much smaller.
Then I was somewhat older and I discovered CompuServe and then suddenly it was just, “Wait, I don’t have to use a phone to make phone calls or be in touch with people or read everything?”. Something in my head went, “This is it”. By that time, the investigation into what now we call the Internet began and that’s where my journey, and then I came to the US. I ended up working for Nikkei, which is Quick Nikkei News, which is part of Nikkei Group. I wrote about semiconductors for them, my first job was to cover microcontrollers, people don’t even know what microcontrollers are. I got promoted from microcontrollers to SRAM to DRAM — at one time DRAM was like the coolest technology.
That’s right. It was much more interesting than even microprocessors at one point.
OM: Then from there I went to CPUs from CPUs to systems. From systems I evolved into writing about the networks, which was essentially my dream was to write about things like Cisco and 3Com and Bay Networks, companies which people have completely forgotten about. I think that’s what my journey is. So I started essentially bottom up, learned the stack at the chip level all the way through.
Then when I got to Forbes, they taught us how to think through, don’t look for the obvious, go three or four layers beneath the obvious. So you would look at chips and you would try to figure out what the impact is. So the thing is if the price of oil is going up, the obvious story is that the car sales are going to slide and the non-obvious story would be like tire sales are going to slow down, but the Forbes story would be, “McDonald’s sales are going to slow down because there’s fewer people on the freeway”. That top-down thinking of analyzing things — bottom-up from a chip level and top-down from a consumption level shaped me as a journalist, as a thinker.
So I went from Quick Nikkei News to Forbes, Forbes to Red Herring, which was essentially the “it” magazine for a while in Silicon Valley.

Tech Journalism and the Bubble

Well just before we get to that, because one thing that jumps out to me is I opened this conversation describing my admiration for you and I feel like you just solidified it because it was a good articulation of what I want to do on Stratechery, just both the bottom and top down, and also the bit about starting with understanding chips. That’s what I was obsessed with when I was in high school, in college, I was reading textbooks about chip design. All that stuff, I don’t get into that stuff today, but it does feel like maybe that was the reason why I always felt so attracted to what you’re writing about because you can sense just understanding how this works and how important that is. Does that just not happen anymore? Is that just an accident of history? It seems like it would be such a positive quality for covering tech in general.
OM: Well, I don’t know why it doesn’t happen. For me, when I was doing GigaOm, one of the key things, we worked really hard with reporters, Stacey Higginbotham is a perfect example of somebody who loved writing about tech, but she was also bottom-up and top-down. One of the reasons I loved having her in the office was she is a chip nerd who wanted to figure out the implications five years from now, just like what a real tech journalist is supposed to do.
The reason why probably it doesn’t happen anymore is because I think the industry itself has abstracted itself from the real technology. Even your website is called Stratechery, it’s all about strategy and this strategy-level thinking, not about what is influencing the strategy at the very core level. We can think about, we are so surprised with OpenAI and AI and Vision Pro. I don’t know, people noticed three-and-a-half, four years ago, Google was spending a ton of money on Tensor pro chips — it’s like why are they doing it? People were doing asynchronous low power, ASICs, which were low power for Bitcoin and other crypto applications and GPUs for crypto applications, it became pretty obvious where the world was going to be 18-to-24 months from now. We are very surprised that things are happening right now, but the chips always tell you.
I think people mistake Moore’s law for this law of the power of chip, whereas when you look at the chips, you can just see where we are going to be in 24 months. I think I got good training because I got to cover the shitty part of the business. In doing so, I got to learn all the nasty bits about how tech works. I think if you’re a young reporter right now, that’s how you actually have to go up there. You cannot ignore the stack, you cannot just enter at the top level and say, “I understand everything”. If you don’t understand the stack, you don’t know what next 24-to-48 months look like. I’m not saying you have a looking glass, but at least you have a map of where we might just be going.
Or you do have a bit of a looking glass, it might be very dark, but it can be directionally correct, I think that’s a great point. I wanted to interrupt you just because this next period you are now a journalist in the bubble, what was that like just that entire period? So, continue the story.
OM: The bubble was great in two senses. First, the bubble exposed me to the idea of optimism. When you grow up in a Third World country, optimism is not something you’re born with. Your natural instinct is to find yourself in a survival mode. When you come to the US, you are surrounded by optimism. It’s just a country where everybody’s like, “Yeah, we can make shit happen”. I don’t know, that was a default. Everybody around me is like, “Wait, this is how it should be and you come here” and then the bubble happened.
The bubble was like crazy ideas, crazy people, money being thrown around, parties all the time. But really the big takeaway from that was not that there was all this excess, but it was this belief that we have this new thing called the Internet and it could become a bigger and bigger part of life. There was two ways of thinking about it, you could think of it as a bubble or you could think of it as start of something new. Despite the natural journalistic instinct of being cynical and being super cautious, you get caught up — and I did get caught up in that time — it just educated me to look forward and believe in things could be different and it could be better.
All the ideas ended up coming true. The timing ended up being a bit off for a whole bunch of them. But there’s the pet food delivery, all these e-commerce, groceries, all this stuff that is made fun of just in general, it wasn’t wrong, the Internet actually did make all this stuff possible, it made more stuff possible than we realized. The timing ended up being off, but the optimists won in the long run.
OM: There is the reality of now and the reality of tomorrow and they’re never in sync, they never are and they never will be, because we can only make best case guesses today. So if you are an entrepreneur, you’re going to make the best-case guess for tomorrow and you’re going to just go for it. If you’re a journalist or you’re in the media, you’re going to be a little bit more thoughtful and you’re just going to be like, “I’m going to take a little skeptical view of things”, and you do. I think it’s that tension which continues.
I think the 90s, there were so many bad ideas, there were so many crooks. There was a version of SPAC, I forget the name man, like PIPEs, they used to call them PIPEs back in late 90s and they’re now called SPACs. So the movie plays, it’s the same movie, it’s just like Star Wars, the Disney version, Star Wars, the original version. I think the Disney version was bigger and more uglier, but it was really interesting to see. There was a lot of crooks, there was a lot of penny stocks, a lot of nonsense, but there was a lot of great things. Yahoo was a foundational company, eBay is a foundational company, part of global economy. We don’t think about eBay, but it enabled a lot of global commerce and it’s a foundational company.
No, it still is. I randomly, via various friends and acquaintances when I was in the US in business school, suddenly was involved in used parts acquisition on eBay, it’s incredible. I would just help facilitate certain things and ship things on. This sounds really bad or scary — no, it was like some random machine that was built thirty years ago and there’s a spare part in Florida and my cousin twice removed needs in Taiwan. It’s incredible, it’s a huge thing that no one sees or realizes or appreciates how integral it is to the world still today.
OM: Yeah, I think you look at Yahoo even though it’s fallen behind and it’s not part of the conversation, but it was a very important company for a while. Google was ’97, man, people forget the Internet wasn’t really a really big thing at that time in 1997. I think we’ve created some foundational companies during that bubble era, Amazon. Amazon’s impact, whether you agree with it or you don’t is a different story, but its presence is felt in every corner of the planet, it goes without saying. So, that was an interesting lesson each time, I was much more involved in the telecom bubble.

The Telecom Bubble

Yeah. Well that was my next question. I admire anyone that wrote a book. To my mind, writing a book is totally different than writing a daily website because the absence of deadlines I find absolutely terrifying. But yes, you wrote about, it was such a great name.
OM: Broadbandits.
Broadbandits. Yes, which is just a great turn of phrase, but tell me about that.
OM: So that book was all about craziness in the broadband market, optical networking, vendor financing. Lucent Technologies pioneered the idea of vendor financing, the same thing what Nvidia is doing, same thing what Microsoft is doing. Nothing is new, it just is the movie has been played before. But it was just a lot of craziness, a lot of money went into optics, a lot of money went into dark fiber, a lot of it just blew up. I don’t know if anyone remembers Enron and MCI and WorldCom, there was just so many scandals at that time. I just created a little handbook of all the scandals, essentially.
I think for me when I look back, just what came out of that was a lot of dark fiber, a lot of optical technologies which emerged out of that dark time, and now are part of our current — without dark fiber, Google doesn’t have a Google network. Without Google network, you don’t have Google at scale we do. Today Google of 2023/2024 is very different than the Google of 2005 to 2015. That was a pretty incredible machine of technological perfection, a lot of that was enabled by the networks. They bought dark fiber, they bought cheap routers, they bought cheap switches. They were able to scale up because the bubble burst and all this.
So I think, again, from my standpoint, even technologies from that time have slowly percolated their way into our daily lives. Man, 2001, when I started GigaOM, I used to dream of a day when they will be a 10 megabit connection to my house.
(laughing) I stayed in the dorms an extra year around that 1998, 1999 because that was the one place you could get a broadband connection. That was like a T1 connection, which is unbelievably slow, relatively speaking.
OM: So I don’t know if people will even remember, there was a company called Bell Atlantic which became Verizon. They were one of the first companies to offer ADSL, it was a 256 kilobits connection to my house and I had a Dell computer because it didn’t work on a Mac, so I had to buy a PC. I didn’t buy a Dell, I think it was a Gateway. It was a Gateway computer, and that was the first broadband. Then Napster came and then suddenly I had a one megabit connection, I don’t know why it was the case, but again that shaped me.
Early, mid-90s I realized that the faster my network was, the more I used it, the more on it was, the more I used it. So that was a very early realization that this is a correlation between bandwidth and applications as the same as processor, Intel and Windows, and was bandwidth and applications. Then every time bandwidth increased, you were able to figure out there’s going to be a new class of applications. Much better, much bigger, much faster.
Google was perfectly timed, it came at the right time. We all suddenly had anywhere between 5-to-15 megabit per second, that’s when it exploded. Facebook exploded when we were in that 10-to-50 megabit reality. There’s companies, because we have more network and more always on network, the more we use it. Mobile was the same thing. Your “everywhere Internet” means you’re going to use it everywhere. I think that was a foundational learning of a bubble for me, all those things.
So you could have easily gotten dark about everything, and I was just like, “No, this is amazing”. The worst thing I’ve ever written, John Doerr had made a comment saying that the Internet is the greatest wealth creation opportunity in the history of mankind, I wrote a piece for Forbes.com which was another foundational, we were the early guys on the web, we were doing web publishing so early, I wrote that piece and I mocked his comment. Until today, every time I meet John, I apologize for that because he was so right and I was so wrong, because I was thinking like a cynical person with a very limited world view, not thinking where we could be.
I think the bubble’s big lesson for me was, and both the bubbles, the Dot Com and the telecom world, it’s not where we are, but where we could be is the hardest thing to imagine. You have to do that if you live in the world of technology. Even if you’re a writer, even if you’re cynical, you still have to believe in where we could be.
But the parties were great, parties were so much better. The current generation of founders, they don’t even know how to party. I’m not going to go any deeper than that, but these guys are such amateurs.
(laughing) Well the thing about a bubble is it really is a perfect thing to highlight that difference in worldview that you talked about. If you’re going to be a journalist looking at today, and if you bet that it’s going to fail, you’re probably going to be right versus an entrepreneur guessing at what the future might be and if you hit, it’s going to be fabulous.
What a bubble does is if you’re in a certain place today and you need to get to another one, there’s a lot of stuff in the middle that is actually not economically beneficial to build in the short term. So a bubble inspires all this building that in the short term turns out poorly, it’s a poor return on investment but the externalities of that building are massive. To your point, it didn’t make sense to build out all the fiber, all this dark fiber when there were no applications to use it but because it was built out, the applications could then be built, it was the spur there.

The AI Moment

The question is do you see a similarity today with what’s going on with AI, with GPU build outs, all those sorts of things? Where would you put us in the 90s if we’re in a similar cycle?
OM: I think we are post-90s. I hinted in a post I wrote towards the end of the year was that this is the most excited I’ve been in twenty years. I’ve been waking up in middle of the night making notes, literally last night I woke up at 2:00 AM and I wrote in my journal for three hours, mostly because I could not stop writing down the questions I have.
The way I see it, last year you could see, in 2003, you were there, and you could see there were pieces like the jigsaw was being set, you had a little bit of social, a little bit of open source, a little bit of always-on network, all those things were coming towards each other towards what was going to be a Web 2.0 post-social Internet. [Palm] Treo was coming around and suddenly Blackberry had more Internet in it because the 3G was pervasive. Things had started to happen, they were not complete, but they were all coming together.
2023 was the same year, in my mind, it was like we’ve seen a lot of converging trends. The semiconductors are suddenly coming to market, the AI chips are coming to market, the networks are becoming more robust, the 5G is becoming more pervasive, there is more satellite connectivity.
By the way, for the record, 5G gets dumped on a lot, it is actually different. With 4G, you still knew you were on 4G relative to WiFi. 5G, there is a level of seamlessness that of course is only going to increase. I just mention that because it gets made fun of because it was so hyped up and it was very easy to dismiss it, but it speaks to your point, it is a change under the surface that you don’t feel, but it does change how you act, I think that’s worth calling out.
OM: The thing with networking technologies is that they’re so invisible. The only time they become visible is when they don’t work. The last time you thought about your WiFi is when it was not working, or you curse T-Mobile because you lost connection, not because it’s working.
Well, this is an advantage of being in Taiwan, because I have perfect 5G coverage basically everywhere. So you go back to the US, which is so much more spread out, so much less dense, and it’s jarring to just shift from a mindset of constant high bandwidth 100% of the time to having to be cognizant of it all the time. It’s a mental burden that I think most of our listeners are living with and they don’t even realize that it’s there, this is one area where I do feel like I live in the future in that regard.
OM: I get about, I don’t know, it’s like over 200, I can check, it’s close to 100 gigabits.
You’re in Silicon Valley. I could promise you when I’m in Wisconsin, I don’t get that.
OM: Again, I take your point because you’re a smaller country, you have much easier to cover. 5G got hyped because it was supposed to be this wonder drug for everything. It’s just a network, man. It’s a much faster higher capacity network which is slightly better than 4G. The phone companies had to hype it because they have to make money selling it.
So you have all these pieces coming together in 2024.
OM: Without this high speed network, you don’t have devices which are going to be all around us, whether it’s Vision Pro or AI Pin or Rabbit or whatever you want to call it, or Waymo or anything, you need network presence, you need connectivity. We need those networks to become so much better to reduce latency so these applications can work. Again, the stack conversation, which no one in Silicon Valley wants to have because they probably have never even thought about it, but that’s the reality of it. Somebody asked me, “What is the biggest problem with the AI Pin”? It’s like, dude, they’re on a T-Mobile network that’s got a 50 millisecond latency, 50-to-100 millisecond latency. Just imagine asking a question and waiting for that long, that’s not how AI is supposed to work, the latency on OpenAI is the single biggest problem right now.
You can see, especially when you have voice enabled, you can feel the future. But it’s so painful and slow to get into there, you really have to cast your mind forward to feel that. I think this gets to, when Amazon announced the latest version of a Thin client, you wrote a post saying, “Nope, not going to work. I’ve been here, I’ve been seeing this for thirty years.” I think it gets to this point, you need multiple pieces because the networking, it’s way better than it used to be, but there is some aspect it’s still never good enough. It’s probably the single biggest limit or even more, it’s what chips used to be in the 90s, that’s what the networking speed is today.
OM: Well, I think that right now, if you think about the latency experience right now, it reminds me a little bit of how we used to have dial up. Things were a little slower and eventually things happened and then things gotten better. So, things will improve, I 100% believe that we are going to see improvement in network quality, because the phone companies and all these guys have to make a living so they will have to improve the network performance.
I think the biggest reality check we need to have in all these devices is that we are expecting instant perfection today as consumers, because we’ve gotten used to it. Look, Sun introduced the idea of a network computer in the 90s, 2010 is when iPhone 4 came out. iPhone 4 was the perfect cloud computer, we don’t think of it because it looks like a phone, it’s called a phone, but it’s a cloud computer — every Android device is a cloud computer. It’s pretty pointless if it’s not connected. The vision came true, not exactly how they envisioned it, but it did.
That’s why I think of it OpenAI may be the pretty young thing of today, the world ten years from now will look very different whether that is the company, that is the way we interact with information, not really, but we have started walking on a path which is going to take us somewhere else. That’s what is exciting.
I feel the same way. I’ve remarked before, a couple of years ago I was feeling pretty burnt out. I abide by the idea it’s not a function of how much you’re working, it’s a function of how much you’re working on stuff that you’re interested in. I found myself writing about congressional hearings and regulation and all these things, it was not very enjoyable. Number one, I stopped doing that so much, that was the big change. But then number two, the last couple of years, and I want to talk about both AI and the Vision Pro, which you’re tremendously excited about, but I don’t think it’s a “me” thing, I think it’s a technology thing, this is incredibly exciting.
Let’s start with AI. What do you think is going to happen this year and what do you think is going to happen in the long run? What gets you waking up at that in the night to write three hours of notes?
OM: Well, I think that’s the key thing is we think about AI through the lens of just one company right now, which is the zeitgeist, they’ve captured the zeitgeist, so we all think about OpenAI as AI.
When I think of AI, I think about how we live in a very complex technology reality right now. We are connected all the time. Our apps are so busy, our data, how we interact with information is very different today than it was twenty years ago or even ten years ago. So we as humans are finding it difficult to deal with the data we have around us. This is our personal data, you’re not looking at what information is out there, what you’re reading, just what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis is becoming more and more complex. Just try and do banking or use PayPal and just the whole thing, you start to see we really need help.
That’s how I feel the software taketh and software giveth away, so my AI idea is that it’s not artificial intelligence, it’s augmented intelligence. It’s going to do a lot of grunt work which we are incapable of doing or we are too lazy or we don’t realize we have to do, for us. If we start to think about that, then you start to see newer clouds of applications come to fore. Completely different way of writing, why do we have to write in a certain way? When I think about AI, “Why do I have to edit photos the same way I was doing fifteen years ago using the same Lightroom?”.
Because your photos are amazing and you better not change anything, that’s why.
OM: The point is there is so much more, but we are taking hundreds of photographs every day, whether you have selfies, this and that, we don’t know how to sort through it, we don’t know what was the great photo so this is where you need technology to help us. You can call it AI, you can call it augmentation, whatever you want to call it, so we are going to see this is just a next level of software improvement is how I see it. I’m just trying to figure out, “Where can it be, where can it get better?”, before we get to a point where there is a platform-type company which is like Facebook or Google or Apple, I don’t think we are there yet, we are just starting out on that journey.
But it’s so exciting, and what is different compared to the past, 2003, is we have a lot more open source efforts going on here, that’s a new thing for the planet. More importantly, we have a different reality of media. There is YouTube and there is GitHub and GitLab and all these things so if you are somebody who wants to learn, I’m learning AI, all these things, by basically being on many Subreddits and watching YouTube videos and UDME and all these things. So even somebody who’s of my age who’s not an engineer can go out and start to figure things out. I think that, plus the open source, to me that’s good raw material for even more innovation.
It’s such a good call on the open source bit where it’s just a given. The debate is no one doubts that there’s going to be open source alternatives, and that was not at all the case twenty years ago — you had Bill Gates calling the open source movement communist. I think that venture capital was very skeptical of, “Is there any worth in investment here?”. Now though the barrier to build has lowered so much. You don’t need to go out with a pitch deck to get money to even get started, you can just literally start building right now, AWS, get some credits, or you don’t even need credits because no one’s actually using your application to start out with. All of these economic factors and this existence of things like open source, it really is a profound change. It’s one that, until you said that, it’s hard to realize what a stark difference this is from the last time around.
OM: Think about the 2003 timeframe. We had PHP, MySQL and Apache server.
Good old LAMP.
OM: Open source LAMP stack, that thing changed the Internet, no one even talks about it anymore, but that was just four pieces of open source software that completely reshaped where the Internet was going to go. People forget that there was a time when you had to spend $2 million to spin up your web infrastructure buying Cisco routers, Sun servers, or buying licenses from Microsoft, it was insane, now look at where we are now. Then suddenly LAMP comes around and it’s free. So there are people hosting websites and then people creating blog software like WordPress, it’s just free and that’s open source, then guys like me actually have a business. It’s like, there you go.
Stratechery is completely and utterly dependent on open source. There’s no way from all the software, but then that made the infrastructure possible where you could just set up a server and you could go rent it. You didn’t need to have one in your garage because they didn’t have to worry about licensing costs of supporting whoever wanted to sign up. The whole freemium model is all dependent on this, it’s an astronomical shift and a very positive one.
OM: Well, I am really excited about all the open source stuff. I’m excited about all these open source people are experimenting with putting LLMs on Raspberry Pis and watches. I’m just like, “Dude, I’ve seen this movie before”, just in a different context and it’s very exciting.
It’s fun.
OM: That’s it.
It’s fun for us to write and talk about it, it’s fun for people to develop, I think there’s probably an aspect where AI is just a tremendous boon to open source because it’s fun and interesting. “Let’s see if we can get Llama running on an iPhone”, “Let’s get it running out of Raspberry Pi or Mistral”, or whatever it is. That’s super important.
OM: I saw this young kid from Rabbit AI making his presentation today at CES launching his new device, I haven’t seen that in forever, I haven’t seen a young person get up there and announce a new product in a while. It’s exciting because I don’t care whether that becomes a billion-dollar company or it becomes the next Apple, that’s not the point. The point is there is somebody who believes in doing things differently and that’s what I find exciting. I think if you’re a storyteller, that’s exciting. If you believe in technology, that’s exciting. If you’re a naysayer, that’s not exciting.

Google and Jobs

So, just a specific strategy question. You talked about augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. One of the examples you use as we take hundreds of photographs in a week or a day or whatever it is, and how do you even sort through it? Is this an area where maybe Google is a bit better placed than you might think? Not because of Google search and adding in an LLM, but because, and this is a vision they’ve put forward very clearly at Google I/O and to your point, their CapEx has gone up as a share of revenue and it started many years ago. That’s their pitch, “We’re putting AI into products that people actually use”. Is that compelling to you?
OM: Yeah. Look at their Google Maps, I think Google Maps is one big giant early AI experiment. It’s pretty good, take it away from your phone for a day and I want to see what happens to you.
It is in my dock.
OM: Yeah, it’s like you can’t get anywhere without Google Maps and the directions so I think I have very strong opinions about Google.
Well, you can let them rip.
OM: I think the company is so hampered by its economic reality. Google is where AT&T was in the past when it was part of the Internet revolution and the semiconductor revolution. It birthed a lot of new technologies with Bell Labs, it’s the same thing with Xerox, same thing with IBM. They are so weighed down by their own past with their own ten blue links. They’re trapped in it, for a company which has everything.
If you look at what they have done, Waymo, only Google can do — advertising dollars paid for Waymo, there is no other company in America which can do Waymo, I can guarantee you that. Not a single company, not Microsoft, not Amazon, not Apple. They pursued that opportunity for almost twelve years and they went after it, I think that is a different Google than what we have today.
Now, they just have, “How do we monetize this one machine as much as we can?”, which is the advertising. I think that’s a bigger problem they have than anything else, but we don’t have enough time to go into that, maybe another time.
Well, I’m going to take that as an invitation to have you on again soon because you’re right, we could do an entire episode about Google.
OM: Yeah. I think that company is in need of a reboot, a refresh, I think it needs new leadership. It really needs to take some bold decisions, but all big tech companies now basically exist for making sure everyone’s 401(k) stays up and up and into the right.
Up and to the right, yeah. Well, that’s a really great point. One of the things I wrote about back when Apple’s stock was, not slumping, but it wasn’t growing like it was, but the iPhone was so clearly this massive thing. This is probably just misguided in the history of Silicon Valley, but can we shift at some point to more cash compensation and away from the stock issue? I think it’d be the strategic benefit of these companies to insulate them from some of this pressure. Now, probably not realistic for lots of reasons, including the competitive space of Silicon Valley and people can change jobs and all these sorts of things, but what you just said with the 401(k) strikes me it’s basically the same problem. It’s not just that they’re worried about their employees being happy so that the stock price is going up, every person in America is dependent on their stock price going up, but that’s remarkably limiting.
OM: Yeah, I think this is where I wrote a piece about Apple and Tesla and all these big tech companies being part of S&P 500 and being part of many index funds, which by default makes them really relevant to our retirement funds, every single American, I think people don’t contextualize that. There’s a lot of people who hate on big tech, but at the same time also don’t realize very clearly that you can hate the company, but you are also benefiting from it. I think it’s really weird. My favorite phrase is stolen from Mark Zuckerberg, which is, “Everything is so complicated.”
I feel that we are going to see a lot of improvement in things, which technology does better than us. It’s going to be disruptive, there’s going to be job losses, realignment of society, people who’ve been used to — if you’re an x-ray technician, there’s a lot of X-ray technicians in the hospitals, what if the AI replaces them? What will they do? What happens to radiologists and radiology technicians? That’s just in healthcare.
You start to see what happens to people who write marketing copy and our people who are in call centers in India, they have not really internalized that this is coming. AI is going to change the need for bodies very drastically. So there’s a lot of compression which is going to happen because of it but it’s also going to force people to think differently. How are you going to create new opportunities? I don’t know, I don’t have the answers, that’s why I said I have more questions than I have answers. So that’s why whenever I write down a question, I’m looking for an answer, somebody probably has an answer. I read a lot, I listen to a lot of people and hopefully I think there’s smarter people out there who are thinking about this thing.
I believe in the creative energy of smart people to figure out what the future looks like, at least from an employment standpoint but I definitely think that there’s going to be some compression, but we need to do things better in certain areas. The medical system needs some help from a technology standpoint, same goes for transportation or how we do a lot of other things. For God’s sake, I could use AI to remove dust particles on my photos, that’s the biggest time suck in my life right now.

The Vision Pro

It’s very true. Well, there’s one other topic I do want to get to. Last week Apple announced that the Vision Pro is going be available for sale in early February. I think you’re the one person that is even more enthusiastic about the Vision Pro than I am. What we do share in common is that we’ve both used it. I’m not sure I’ve seen a greater divide ever than between people who have used the Vision Pro and people who have not, and how that impacts their evaluation of this product. Why are you so excited about it?
OM: I think this is the TV of the future, forget the productivity. Games, Apple’s not very good at games, they may have a lot of gaming business, but they’re not very good at games.
By accident, yes.
OM: This is going to be a great media consumption device. This is going to redefine how we interact and consume media, especially the visual media, where it is static. I definitely think the spatial photography is going to create a whole new photographic art form, which is post the flat two-dimensional photography. I’ve watched five minutes of some TV program on this damn thing and I’m like, “Why am I going back to my iPad?”, it makes no sense.
But the thing is you actually have to be mobile-native to actually appreciate something like this. So if you’ve grown up watching a 75-inch screen television, you probably would not really appreciate it as much. But if you are like me who’s been watching iPad for ten-plus years as my main video consumption device, this is the obvious next step. If you live in Asia, like you live in Taiwan, people don’t have big homes, they don’t have 85-inch screen televisions. Plus, you have six, seven, eight people living in the same house, they don’t get screen time to watch things so they watch everything on their phone. I think you see that behavior and you see this is going to be the iPod.
The headphones, why is headphones selling all the time everywhere? It is because people want their moment of privacy and they want to be alone and they want to listen to their media in their way. I think that’s what Vision Pro excites me is it’s going to be a video consumption device. I watched five minutes of, I think it was Ted Lasso. I’m just like, “Wait, I want to watch this series”. I haven’t seen Ted Lasso, it was like a hundred-foot screen you’re watching a TV on, it was like, “That is pretty dope”. That’s a reference design movie system on your face, that’s what I feel is the exciting part.
The funny thing is I’ve been writing about it for five years, this is where the TV has to go because demographically that’s where we are all headed. More and more people live alone now and they can watch things in devices like that. I also feel that we haven’t really looked at Vision Pro from a creator standpoint. When you think about it, I want to watch Golden State Warriors from courtside, I can’t because the tickets cost like $10,000, but I can watch it on Vision Pro if I pay extra $10 or extra $20 to sit courtside. NBA can sell that same court side ticket a million times, 10 million times. Or the same thing with IPL [Indian Premier League], I want to be on the front row of the game or I want to be in the center court of tennis. You change the relationship you have with content completely, suddenly you are immersed in content. I think if you are a sports League, you’re looking at this as additional money, this is additional money.
Similarly, I’m looking at this and just like give me a movie. I want to see a concert in this, because you go into a Taylor Swift concert, you can’t really get in the front. You’re sitting in the back and it’s a great experience, it’s great being there, but you’re not really there. Now you can be there without being there. I think that’s why I feel like once people use it, they will actually see, “Wow, this is the best TV I’ve ever owned”.
I don’t watch a lot of TV in general so I haven’t focused on that as much. I love the multi-screen thing. I have like 4 to 5 screens around here and I’m going to be traveling next week and I would love to have a Vision Pro to get the expansive workplace that I like to work on so I do think about the productivity thing. But you are right, in the demo, what is the mind-blowing aspect is the entertainment bits. You had a beautiful post about the evolution of movies and going to drive-in theaters and then going to multiplexes and then you can have these big screens in your house. That bit you touched on, on combining that experience, that fidelity, with mobile where you can do that anywhere is number one incredible, but then number two, you mentioned the sports bit — that was the part that got me, that’s the part that I care about, that’s what I use TV for. I watch a lot of sports, when I experienced sports in the Vision Pro, it was unbelievable. This was a five-second snippet of an NBA game, that five seconds was one of the most mind-blowing experiences that I’ve had.
I think because that mattered to me, and when you experience the stuff that matters to you in this environment, it is so much more immersive than I think you can realize, this gets to I think the spatial images videos thing. Speaking of Gruber, he talked about how he was able to try it with his videos or with his images. Yeah, it’s one thing to watch people on a campfire that Apple provided you in the demo, which is what I saw, but then you bring in your kids, your experiences. Yes, it’s easy to be cynical and point out, “How are you going to capture it? Is it going to have dad with a mask on or whatever it might be?” — it’s a miss of where this is going to go. Of course it’s going to get easier to capture and that experience is, again, everyone’s going to be experiencing it in a few weeks. It’ll be nice because they’ll see what we’re talking about.
OM: Yeah, I think so. I think again, this is still early days, there’s a lot of work which needs to be done. I think a little bit of, “What is the missing social element?”. I think Apple is just one of those companies that doesn’t understand social, just like it doesn’t really understand the Internet, I don’t know if they’ll probably understand AI. But they understand a great compute experience, and I think that’d be interesting.
That said, I think you asked me what’s the similarity from twenty years ago. I say that twenty years ago, dude, iPod was just taking off at that time, it changed our relationship with music. We listened to music more often and we changed our idea of what is fidelity of music because we were listening to iPods, and we also created a more personalized music experience. The idea of a mixtape became so much easier because of iPod. Fast-forward to where we are today as a society, our entire society is a mixtape from the morning until the end of the day. We have our own filter bubble, we’ve got people who read Casey Newton and people who read other people and there’s people who read you. That’s how we create our daily reality, which is our own mixtape. I think we’ve forgotten how far we’ve come.
I think 2023, we suddenly started to see a mixtape version of information, like how we are interacting with it. 2014, I did a conference and I talked to one of the key people [K.K. Barrett] behind the movie, Her, on stage, and I had a long interview with him later. What really got me about that movie is that we all have such a tough time to put ourselves in the shoes of other people, we have a tough time understanding that if you don’t have a family and if you don’t have kids or if you don’t have —
Or if you’re in India and you don’t have a phone.
OM: Yeah! You don’t understand what technology does for you or what technology means to you or how it comes into your life. I am the kid who had to walk half a mile to make a phone call. Basically, I talk to my mom on FaceTime every day, sometimes multiple times a day to the annoyance of my own self. When you think about it, if that’s not progress, then what is?
I wrote a piece recently about what happened to optimism? Why did we stop being optimistic? It’s not about money, it’s not about being rich or successful, it’s just a whole series of people, and I know a lot of them worked on this video Internet technology to get to a place where we have FaceTime. It’s a thirty-year journey. I was there for the earliest experiment with Jeff Pulver, I was there for Skype and look where we are today. Now, I’ve seen people walk on the street just doing video calls on either WhatsApp or on FaceTime or Google Video or whatever.
I think where we are is sometimes it’s really easy to take things for granted and not feel that we’ve come a long way. We have, we are going to go a long way. If this pandemic has taught us anything, we need science and technology to help us figure out all the problems we are going to have in the next few years. There’s going to be more pandemics, there’s going to be more diseases, there’s going to be more climate-related challenges. How are we going to fix those? We need some help, like augmentation or augmented intelligence is part of that. So it’s a slightly different way of thinking about the world.
But before this, for three, four years I could internalize Bitcoin. I could internalize Bitcoin production using specialized chips because it made perfect sense that in the future we will do that. It made perfect sense for GPUs to be used for high intensive applications and how they could be used to do other things. But the grift in the middle reminded me of the penny stock and the raging bull phenomena of the 1990s and the SPACs, the NFTs.
You look at today, the Vision Pro, Vision Pro is there. Five years from now there is not Vision Pro, but there is 10 different types of devices like that. One of my favorite photographers is a guy called Reuben Wu and his images are essentially three-dimensional images, in my opinion, and spatial images. He could be creating a spatial image and an NFT-like authentication service, authenticating it to sit on my Vision Pro desktop to be looked at whenever I want. A certain micropayment goes his way for every time, I can buy it. The thing is, it’s like there is no grift involved in it, it just is AI.
AI and the infinite production of content makes the case for digital scarcity. There are all these sorts of pieces that are coming together.
OM: Right. I think the grifters got more attention because it’s easier to pay attention to the spectacle of technology than to the technology.
It’s easier to grift than to build something.
OM: You were asking me earlier, “Why am I writing more?”. It’s because finally all the tourists have gone home and the real technologies have shown up and this is what I’m here for.
Well, I already had a whole list of more questions I wanted to get to. That last bit inspired multiple more, including the Facebook VR, all the social bits, but we are at an hour. I would love to have you on again sometime soon. I think this was absolutely fantastic to hear your story and now that set the stage for us to really explore what’s next at some time in the future.
OM: Yeah, thank you Ben for having me. Again, congratulations on all your success.
Well, thank you. Thank you for coming first and giving — I already said it, I’m not going to say it again — but it’s a real pleasure to have you on.
OM: Thank you.

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Another One from the "New York Times": LIE OF THE DAY

Sanitizing race-hatred at 620 E. 8th Ave., New York, NY 10018…

I mean, what can you say to this?

Adam Liptak: Justices Clash on Whether Race Played a Role in Trump’s Bid to Deport Haitians <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-haiti-race.html>: ‘The split mirrored one that has long divided Americans: how seriously to take the president’s loose, provocative and sometimes ugly remarks…

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This is the only possible comment:

Sandy Ernest Allen: <https://bsky.app/profile/sandyernestallen.bsky.social/post/3mpban3k4ik2h>: ‘I know the NYT’s racism shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point but “loose” as a euphemism for “very racist” is sure appalling…

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You don’t get to launder racism into respectability with a single adjective and call it o”bjectivity”, let alone”all the news that’s fit to print”. “Euphemism” is not “neutrality”. The Times’s deeply mendacious language choices help shape the legal and political terrain.

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##another-one-from-the-new-york-times-lie-of-the-day
##public-reason
##journamalism
##neofascism
##lie-of-the-day
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Exponential View Has an Informed View of the Money Flows in the Generative-AI Economy: CHARTS OF THE DAY

The $30 Billion Token Tab vs. the $100 Billion GPU Binge: sers spend $30 billion on roiling boils of linear algebra while GPU makers and TSMC feast on an $100‑billion build‑out—and nobody really knows if it’s for genuine productivity or just option value on the First Coming of Digital God…

In the first quarter of 2026, customers paying $30 billion and tokens delivered to users using “Generative AI” for something: Of that $30 billion, Exponetial View thinks $2.5 billion net of immediate payments to datacenters and foundation modeler goes to app providers, $5 billion net of immediate payments to datacenters goes to foundation modelers (including Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok), and the other $22.5 billion to datacenter operators.

But a great deal of the within generative AI sector payments right now are very funny money of various flavors.

Of course, this $30 billion is small potatoes compared to the $81.6 billion paid to NVIDIA for NVIDIA-designed GPU chips, plus another $15 billion paid to the other “fabless” designers. Spending $100 billion (plus a lot more on memory) on the build-out but so far collecting $30 billion in revenue is an interesting deal.

NVIDIA (and AMD, and Broadcom) then turned around and immediately paid $22 billion to TSMC for actually making the GPU chips.

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Are users spending that $30 billion right now because they are finding these roiling boils of linear algebra genuinely useful, or are they spending it because they think they may well need to build the engineering capabilities to use the subsequent generations of these things when they do become truly useful? I do not know. And neither does anybody else.

The Exponential View team has a nice take on what this looks like from the corporate offices:

Azeem Azhar, William Gildea, Hannah Petrovic, Nathan Warren, & Marija Gavrilov: 2 | Economy <https://intelligence.exponentialview.co/assets/ev-state-of-ai-economy-2026.pdf>: ‘Big is still small, and early. Even for the highest corporate spenders, AI is a rounding error in the P&L. It still looks early. Initiatives have focused on efficiency & cost savings, although the mix is changing. And measured revenue may understate the social gains, as consumers report benefits that don’t yet show up in the data. Against GDP, AI revenue is still a rounding error. At a company level, AI spending is still relatively small: e.g. Uber’s $1.5k per engineer barely dents the P&L…

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Is Anthropic planning on launching its IPO this summer because they have tapped out the private market of informed investors and need to draw on the skeptical in public markets who do not know the industry, in which case this is a sign that they have private information that this is really for real—or alternatively, that they are cultic votaries of Digital God? Or is Anthropic planning on launching its IPO this summer because they have the opportunity to draw on the gullible in public markets who do not know the industry, in which case this is a sign that they have private information that right now is the peak of the bubble—or at least that they can unwind a substantial part of the bet so that they are plutocrats in the future no matter how this turns out?

I have found nobody credible who claims to know.

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Why You Should Not Pay Money to the "New York Times": Dan Drezner Brings an Example to Our Attention

You are not their customer. The opportunity to hack your brain is the product they sell to their sources. Once more around the treadmill we go…

Dan Drezner is annoyed today at:

Dan Drezner: <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/no-one-on-the-right-is-rethinking>: ‘Arather annoying New York Times front-pager by Anton Troianovski. The headline is, “From ‘Terrible People’ to ‘Smart People’: The Trump-Led Right Rethinks Iran.”… “For decades, the idea that Iran’s regime represented the worst of the world’s worst stood as a pillar of Republican foreign policy. But… a different perspective has been taking hold in parts of the American right: Iran as a pragmatic country that the United States can, and must, learn to live with…. Led by President Trump, who called Iran’s leaders “strong people, smart people” last week, but it goes well beyond him…. JD Vance…. Conservatives.… Even some longtime hawks…. It is too soon to say whether the change will last…. But… the right-wing pivot away from traditional Republican hawkishness on Iran is driven by factors that go beyond Mr. Trump’s desire to disentangle himself… a generational shift in the party away from uncompromising support for Iran’s archenemy, Israel, and even some grudging admiration for the Iranian regime”…

But, as Dan says, that is not true.

Dan guarantees that should Trump reverse course yet again and start again threatening to destroy Iran as a civilization, JD Vance and the rest will again pivot and follow him. How does Dan know this? Because, he says, he has been paying attention:

Over the past calendar year… the Trump administration sounded increasingly hawkish about the use of military force. And guess what? Almost all of MAGA supported Trump’s half-assed neoconservative adventures!…. They are happy to parrot whatever Trump says…

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Consider this: Anton Troianovski knows as well as Dan and I do that what he writes is not true.

Dan offers an alternative two-sentences that Troianovski would have written had he been in the business of working for his readers—had they been his customers: For decades, Republicans have been extremely hawkish on Iran. As President Trump has tried to sell a cease-fire that accomplished almost none of the stated aims of Operation Epic Fury, however, he has sounded more optimistic about the autocratic, theocratic regime. And in the familiar Trump-era scramble to stay aligned with a mercurial president, most of the GOP is following the president’s tune…

That does the job.

Well, why didn’t Troianovski write that?

He would have done so, were he to regard his readers as his customers: people to be served by providing them with important and valuable true ideas that help them to understand and “navigate our crazy, complex, chaotic world of international relations”.

Well, my take is this: As a Replacement-Value New York Times Reporter, Anton Troianovski Works Primarily for His Sources.

They are the people to whom he works hard to deliver value. Why? Because they are the ones without whom he has nothing to say. He has no independent data sources, no analytical chops, no subject-matter expertise, and no alternative way to draw on the real-ASI that is the collective human mind. Thus if his sources do not talk to him, he does not have a job, for boiling-down press releases that anyone can read does not cut it.

But for his sources to talk to him more than by simply parroting their press releases, he has to “pay” them somehow. But how? What coin does he have that they value?

The only coin he has to offer them is to provide them with the opportunity to hack his readers’ brains.

Hence his bargain with his sources is this: in return for them giving him nuggets, he will present the case they want presented as true, or as something that might be true. He will do so even though both they and he know that it is not. And he will not push back, and say, as Daniel Drezner does, that is not credible, and I know that is just not credible because I have been paying attention. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, in the stenographer role he has chosen to play subject-matter expertise or, indeed, the compulsion to occasionally blurt out things like “But 2+2=4!” are hindrances to his ability to do what he sees as a job.

Even though you are paying the New York Times, from Anton Troianovski’s point of view, you are not the customer. He is not selling anything to you. Rather, the opportunity of his sources to hack your brain for their purposes is the customer.

This is not a new insight. I recall back in 2006 complaining about how Mike Allen and Tom Ricks were, then similarly working for their sources: It is not the fact that journalists report “both sides” that is the problem. It’s that having done so they refuse to then take what both sides say, compare them with other evidence, and come to a conclusion. It is refusing to call a spade a spade.

I have a memory of Mike Allen pushing back against Matt Yglesias for making similar points to the ones I make here. IIRC, Mike Allen claimed that his job was to drop enough breadcrumbs in his stories that clever/informed/sophisticated readers who wanted to work hard could push through the kabuki to the facts. And for the other readers? Well, I think the excuse was that they were reading for spectacle and entertainment rather than information, and so: no harm, no foul. The problem is that the Mike Allen’s (and Tom Ricks’s) sources back then deeply cared about getting the ability to hack readers’ brains and plant their particular self-exculpatory narratives about their respective roles in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Iraq War clusterf*** and human and moral disaster.

The mechanisms of this access journalism are largely the same as they were two decades ago. Sources know how much reporters depend on them, and reward loyal coverage and punish critical inquiry. Conversely, a Bob Woodward to whom the more you said to him the more worshipful of you he got played the other side of the game. Cf. the extraordinary difference between the portrayal of the Greenspan-Clinton dialectic in Woodward’s The Agenda and of the same events in Maestro. And Mark Feldstein had, I think, the best line: “the dirty little secret of the Washington press corps: a kind of unspoken conspiracy in which reporters conceal not only their sources’ identities but more importantly the underlying motives for the leaks.”

There was going to be an alternative journalistic model: explainer journalism. In it, reporters would be subject-matter experts and honest brokers. But that never became more than a niche market. It is still around, but still a niche.

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CROSSPOST: BARRY EICHENGREEN: Alan Greenspan’s Mixed Legacy: Project Syndicate

Alan Greenspan & the failure of the Market God, or the disjunction between a lifetime of faith in self‑correcting markets and the subprime reality.

It seems clear that the verdict of political-economic history on Alan Greenspan is not going to focus on any of his successful accomplishments or any of his other failures than “2008”. It is, rather on what he called the failure of his own mental model of the economy. That was the failure that led to his having been blindsided by the ability of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 to generate the Great Recession of 2008-2010 and the full decade of ænemic recovery that followed.

And that was catastrophic: In the U.S. alone something like $6000/year x 10 years = $60,000 of productivity lost by the average of each and every American worker relative to what a stable-growth economy following successful crisis management would have yielded. It was not until the Powell-Biden post-plague high-pressure recovery that measured real output per member of the labor force came even close to again kissing its pre-2008 trend growth line.

The extent to which Greenspan’s mental model drove Federal Reserve policies that gave his successor Ben Bernanke a very bad hand to play is, in most of what I have seen in the in memoriam commentary, assumed rather than argued. And I will have bones to pick later.

But for now, register this very good and very fair piece from Barry six offices down the hall:

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CROSSPOST: BARRY EICHENGREEN: Alan Greenspan’s Mixed Legacy: Project Syndicate

<https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/alan-greenspan-fed-chair-mixed-legacy-by-barry-eichengreen-2026-06>

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Jun 22, 2026 Barry Eichengreen

The longtime Federal Reserve chair inferred from past crises that lightly regulated markets, while prone to excesses, could right themselves sufficiently to avoid imperiling the financial system and the economy. The correct lesson would have been that markets require strict regulation, and that competent technocrats are essential.

BERKELEY—Alan Greenspan, who died this week at the age of 100, was one of the most consequential chairs the Federal Reserve Board has had in its 112 years of existence. But consequential does not mean faultless. One might say that his tenure—the second-longest in Fed history—ultimately vindicated much of what he had opposed.

The young and even middle-aged Greenspan did not seem destined to lead the world’s most powerful central bank. Born in 1926 and raised in New York by a single mother, Greenspan had not anticipated a career in economics and finance at all. His passion was jazz clarinet and saxophone, a career he pursued professionally, although he distinguished himself mainly by keeping the books for his touring big band.

With music offering less than a stable income and career path, Greenspan enrolled in 1945 at New York University, earning B.A. and M.A. degrees in economics. He worked as an analyst at the National Industrial Conference Board while pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia University but dropped out after being approached in 1953 by William Townsend to become a partner in the consulting firm subsequently known as Townsend-Greenspan. At the Conference Board, itself a kind of economics consulting and research firm, Greenspan acquired a reputation for pouring over economic minutiae and assembling a coherent picture of the economy. He stayed at Townsend-Greenspan, with only one interruption, for 32 years.

Along with a reputation for scrutinizing data on freight car loadings and other obscure economic time series, Greenspan became a member of the intellectual salon run by the objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. How profoundly he was influenced by Rand’s views of limited government, and whether those views shaped his staunch opposition to financial regulation and other forms of government intervention, which came back to haunt him in the 21st century, is uncertain.

What is clear is that Greenspan’s views evolved with the times or perhaps shifted with the political winds. Contacts in the Republican Party led to his advising Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and to Nixon nominating him to chair the Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, where Greenspan positioned himself as a pragmatist. He chaired the CEA for three years before returning to Townsend-Greenspan. Besides working as a consultant, he served on corporate boards, appeared on network news programs, and chaired President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Social Security Reform, bringing him to the attention of the president, who elevated him to the Fed chairmanship in 1987.

If Reagan thought he was getting a more compliant inflation fighter than the departing Paul Volcker, he was disappointed. Greenspan cemented the view that maintaining low and stable inflation should be the Fed’s highest priority; if a central bank failed to deliver price stability, its other goals would remain out of reach. In the mid-1990s, he moved the Fed decisively toward the adoption of a formal inflation target. On his watch, consumer price inflation averaged 3%, low by late-20th-century US standards. Improved price stability was accompanied by improved overall economic stability in the period that came to be known as the “Great Moderation.” Whether this happy outcome was due to good policy or good luck is disputed to this day.

As Fed chair, Greenspan made two controversial bets. First, he bet that the economy was undergoing a structural transformation due to the internet and new information technologies that promised faster productivity growth and lower inflationary pressures. No productivity surge was yet evident in the data, but Greenspan’s reputation as an oracle who could parse economic statistics lent authority to his views.

Starting in 1996, Greenspan used that authority to argue that the Fed’s models were overestimating the risk of inflation and to push back against interest-rate hikes, to the delight of the White House. When inflationary pressures remained subdued and the country’s economic expansion continued for another five years, Greenspan was vindicated. That we currently have talk of another productivity surge due to AI, and another prospective Fed chair with sensitive political antennae and a preference for low interest rates, attests to Greenspan’s enduring influence.

Greenspan’s other bet was that a lightly regulated banking and financial system could fend for itself—that the decisions of self-interested bankers would benefit not just their institutions but the financial system, the economy, and society as a whole. Greenspan’s appeal to his original Reagan administration patrons may have been precisely that, unlike the departing Volcker, he favored light-touch regulation of banks and financial derivatives markets. He advocated deregulating over-the-counter derivatives and opposed stricter controls proposed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He oversaw administrative changes lowering reserve requirements on bank liabilities and favored repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking.

In 2006, after more than 18 years, Greenspan stepped down from the Fed. No sooner did he do so than the presumption that banks and financial markets could safely self-regulate was discredited, and spectacularly so, by the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2007 and the global financial crisis of 2008-09.

The low interest rates Greenspan favored as a result of his bullish views of productivity may have had more than a little to do with the frenzy of risk taking that fed the subprime boom. But more directly implicated was his supreme confidence that financial institutions could be trusted to self-regulate. As he put it in Congressional testimony in 2008:

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and equity in the firms.… Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief…

In his autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan again attributed his shock to a “flaw in the model.” It is tempting to see the model in question as the self-regulating free-market economy of his objectivist youth, although this explanation for his deregulatory fervor may be facile. Greenspan himself also blamed his inaccurate forecast on inadequate data on risky lending practices, though that is hard to credit coming from someone renowned for his skill at parsing obscure economic statistics.

Another explanation of this lack of foresight is that there had been several earlier episodes of financial excess on Greenspan’s watch, but none had seriously damaged the US financial system and the economy. When the stock market crashed in 1987, Gerald Corrigan of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York moved quickly to inject liquidity into the financial system. During the Mexican Debt Crisis of 1994, the US Treasury, led by Robert Rubin, tapped its Exchange Stabilization Fund until permanent finance was arranged. In 1997, when the Asian financial crisis erupted, both the Treasury and the International Monetary Fund, with leadership from the economist Stanley Fischer, stepped into the breach.

From these earlier episodes, Greenspan inferred that markets, while prone to excesses, could right themselves sufficiently to avoid imperiling the financial system and the economy. The correct lesson would have been, first, that markets require strict regulation, and, second, that it is essential to have competent technocrats at the helm. Today, in 2026, these are timely lessons to recall.

<https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/alan-greenspan-fed-chair-mixed-legacy-by-barry-eichengreen-2026-06>

Brad here: I may be in a distinct minority here in believing that Greenspan’s confidence that a central bank could act as a lender of last resort and hence successfully build and maintain an effective firewall between whatever idiocy and exuberance and panic was going on in financial markets and the real flows of demand, production, and work—that that belief on his part was a reasoned one. Consider that had there been no or only a small post-2008 recession, that total mortgage debt defaults would have amounted to only $500 billion or so (“only”). The world economy in 2008 had $80 trillion of marketable financial assets, making that an 0.62% decline in value—the size we see on average happening on about 20 trading days a year. Yet that $80 trillion of financial assets shrank in value to $60 trillion: a 40-to-1 financial accelerator.

If Greenspan had been Fed Chair in 2008, would he have done whatever it took to break that vicious accelerator spiral, just as Greenspan had seen and in fact taken a co-lead in the Corrigan-, Rubin-, and Fischer-led lender-of-last-resort operations in 1997, 1995, and 2008?

And why wasn’t Ben Bernanke able to follow in their footsteps? Yes, Greenspan badly underestimated the fecklessness of bankers with high-convexity compensation schemes. But he also saw and co-led successful crisis management when he was in the hot seat.

Put a pin in this. I am going to come back to this later!

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Trump Started a War, Lost the War, & Is Paying Reparations to Iran: MOST IMPORTANT THING

Trump’s Hormuz ransom: a lost war has turned into a $300 million‑a‑day payout as Trump pivots from “maximum pressure” to “how much cash flow do you need?” & this, of course, is just the first tranche: the commitment is to find a $300 billion solution for the reconstruction of Iran. Tehran has leveraged Trump’s war made in Washington into a remarkable resource windfall.

The most important thing to hang on to this week:

This is what Trump calls the “complete defeat of Iran”:

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has issued an Iran-Related General License:

Treasury OFAC: Issuance of Iran-Related General License <https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20260622_33>: ‘Authorizing the Production, Delivery and Sale of Crude Oil, Petrochemical Products, and Petroleum Products of Iranian-Origin through August 21, 2026…

The license authorizes authorizes the production, delivery and sale of crude oil, petrochemical products, and petroleum products of Iranian origin, and explicitly allows buyers to pay Iran directly in U.S. dollars for those sales. There is no escrow requirement; this is a real, near‑term revenue channel for Tehran, limited mainly by counterparty risk and banks’ compliance nerves, rather than by the possible long-arm reach of U.S. law. “Compliance nerves” meaning that banks are scared that Trump does not really mean it—that come October he will penalize banks that play ball with respect to this license.

This covers production. This allows payments to some Iranian entities otherwise blocked under terrorism and WMD programs. This is de facto large‑scale sanctions elimination on oil.

On top of this is the commitment, in writing, to unfreeze Iranian state assets. There have now been several reports of an initial tranche of $12 billion. Figure $25 billion extra flowing to Iran over the next 60 days. And that is a $300 million a day ransom to Iran for not blocking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Shorter London Economist:

Noah Smith: <https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/2066665039868883316>: ‘Trump Started a War, Lost the War, & Is Paying Reparations to Iran: The Hormuz Letter: “BREAKING: Iran says the US has agreed to pay $300 billion in reconstruction funds directly to Iran as part of the deal Pakistan announced, alongside the release of $24 billion in frozen funds with $12 billion released before negotiations even start, per Mehr News…

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Longer London Economist:

Economist: Donald Trump’s Least Bad Option in Iran <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/10/donald-trumps-least-bad-option-in-iran>: ‘Once again, Iran has been “completely defeated”, said Donald Trump on June 10th…. In reality, despite more than 100 days of being bombed and blockaded by the world’s top military superpower and its Israeli ally, the Iranian regime is emboldened…. Mr Trump is in a triple bind. Iran is garrotting the global energy supply…. Israel is bombing Lebanon, despite Mr Trump telling it not to. And hawks in America are pressing Mr Trump to chase unrealistic war aims. Something must eventually give….
Inside Iran… the war seems to have strengthened the hand of hardliners…. Israel complicates matters…. Trump wants… Netanyahu… o wind down his attacks on Hizbullah, Iran’s proxy militia in Lebanon…. [But] Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon is expanding… in the run-up to a general election…. The hard men in Tehran are delighted at their enemies’ division.
Chart: The Economist
In America, meanwhile, hawks are demanding full-scale war on Iran…. Oil prices wobble with each newsflash, but have yet to rise nearly as far as they could….
Mr Trump needs to make a deal…. Forget about anything as good as the pre-war status quo, let alone the deal Barack Obama struck in 2015…which Mr Trump tore up. The best Mr Trump can hope for is a makeshift pact to reopen the strait in exchange for an extended ceasefire…. Economic sweeteners will be necessary…. Haggling over Iran’s nuclear programme will have to come later. Such a deal would be unstable, and humiliating for America. Yet it would be less bad than any plausible alternative…. His war on Iran has cost America dearly.

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60 days from now, on August 21st, will anything in this situation have changed to not make a 60-day extension of the ceasefire then conditional on a further $300 million a day of money flowing into Iran? Or will it even last that long—Netanyahu has huge domestic political reasons to keep his war in Southern Lebanon going, after all. And if the US cannot follow through on its promise of peace in Lebanon, how much extra will it have to give per day to keep Hormuz open?

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Paul Kedrosky Presents Us with the ECI—the Epoch Capabilities Index for "AI" Frontier Models: CHART OF THE DAY

When every LLM can closely approximate the typical internet s***poster, the money flows not to the competitive model-builders but to those who can build systems that usefully digest your data to reproduce and improve your SOPs. Or so Satya Nadella claims…

If the appropriate metric is the ECI, and the top model’s edge over the pack really has shrunk from 26% to 6%, we are not in “winner-take-all” land any more. We are are, instead, in commodity-silicon-with-fine-tuning land. That’s where pricing power migrates to whoever can bottle organizational procdures and judgment, and make it portable across interchangeable generalist models.

Narrowing in, as models get better but also closer to the same level at any moment in time:

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Paul Kedrosky has a gloss:

Paul Kedrosky: Why .400 Hitters Disappeared—& What It Means for AI <https://paulkedrosky.com/why-400-hitters-disappeared-and-what-it-means-for-ai/>: ‘The trend is linear, not exponential, a steady gain of roughly 16 capability units per period, with an R² of 0.73. The exponential fit is worse than the linear one. Progress that gets told as relentless acceleration is, in the data, a straight line (at best). The second thing… is what happens to the spread…. In the early years of Epoch's Index… a top model could score almost fifty points above the mean…. This is the equivalent of Ted Williams, a .400 hitter…. [But today] the best model's premium over the 90th-percentile model, which was 26% in the early era, is now a mere 6%….
When the variance is wide, being the frontier model meant something…. The distance between frontier and good-enough was wide enough that it looked like an early moat…. This is what maturing commodity markets look like…. Price will become the main differentiator… [with] huge implications…. DeepSeek's massive pricing advantage…. Margin pressure on frontier companies, and the implications for said companies' post-IPO performance…

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Ben Thompson <https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/> talks about the aggregator flywheel: offer a better value proposition, watch demand flow to you, use that demand to learn about how to offer an even better value proposition to your customers, and watch more demand flow to you until the only reason that your competitors are still around is because you are using market power to jack up your margins. (Note: not your prices, but your margins.) But this requires that economies of current scale and economies of learning-by-doing—cumulative scale—are both now and remain strong. In that world, however, OpenAI took its capabilities lead as of the summer of 2023 and its enormous advantage with respect to the number of users running its models to not have its model recursively self-improve itself but rather to give its programmers the insights they could use to pull further and further ahead of their challengers.

It simply did not happen.

And this is why Satya Nadella of Microsoft is confident that market value will flow to companies that can help users curate their own useful data rather than companies that build frontier models:

Satya Nadella: A Frontier without an Ecosystem Is Not Stable <[twitter.com/satyanade...](https://twitter.com/satyanadella/article/2066182223213293753/)>: ‘We can create a real cognitive loop between people and digital systems…. How [are] organizations [to] continue to learn, build IP, differentiate, and thrive in a world where AI models can continuously absorb the expertise of humans and organizations and commoditize it[?]… Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people…. Token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns…. The real opportunity is not in picking the best model but… in building a learning loop… where human capital and token capital compound…. A company should be able to switch out a “generalist” model without losing the “company veteran” expertise built into their learning system. This is the key “test” of your control and sovereignty in the era ahead. Companies need to turn their workflows, domain knowledge, and accumulated judgment into AI systems that improve with each use…. This loop becomes the new IP of the firm…. The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see…. Employees… [ought to] see their expertise amplified and their judgment become part of systems that make it replicable and scalable and the benefits accrue to the companies and communities around them…

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Yes: he is talking his book. But it seems to me that this is a good book to be talking these days. Building bureacracies around knowledge systems of SOPs that are hard to implement and thus to replicate then becomes the defensible IP. Yes, there will be a recursive-improvement loop. But it will be the firm‑specific learning loop, with the underlying model just a swappable, ever‑cheaper input.

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CROSSPOST: GAUTAM MUKUNDA: The Part That Looks Like Waste

The Indispensable Newsletter #64, by Gautam Mukunda :: What look like “frictions” are often the safeguards that we really really need to save us when our typical abstraction layers catastrophically leak and fail: examples from corporate governance, companies trying to utliize MAMLMs, knowledge workers dealing with this cognition technology from the other side, and assessing the net benefits of rapid Schumpeterian innovation…

You must read this because you need to know what Gautam Mukunda says here, with respect to a surprisingly common failure mode:

leaders who strip out constraints because they slow things down,
but those “wastes” were actually error-correction.

Concentrated control at firms like SpaceX removes governance checks and is likely to turn Elon Musk into something we have not yet seen: his worst self at full throttle.

Firms trying to get ahead of cognitive technology revolution burn money as they discard their legacy workflow capabilities that are their insurance against uncertain timing and limits. Vibe-coding humans on autopilot risk hollowing out their own skills unless they deliberately nurture and preserve “stick‑and‑rudder” abilities for the rare but critical 1% of situations in which the MAMLM-driven abstraction layer at which they can work most rapidly fails. And the socially inept princelings of AI appear incapable of making the case that “AI” will be an engine of human liberation rather than drowning people in seas of AI-slop while undermining their labor-market bargaining power, with the likely consequence of this last being a powerful Polanyist backlash against the mantra “the Market giveth, the Market taketh away: blessed by the name of the Market”.

The four pieces this is drawn from are very much worth reading as well:

CROSSPOST: GAUTAM MUKUNDA: The Part That Looks Like Waste

<https://gautammukunda.substack.com/p/the-part-that-looks-like-waste> <https://gautammukunda.substack.com/>

The Indispensable Newsletter by Gautam Mukunda

The Part That Looks Like Waste

Dear Friends…

a day ago · 4 likes

Dear Friends,

Four columns, four domains, one mistake: stripping away the safeguard precisely because it slows you down.

The most valuable component in many systems is the part that looks like waste. The board meeting that slows the CEO down. The skill the machine made archaic. The capability you half-abandoned because a new technology seemed to make it obsolete. The neighbor who can block your permit. Each one is friction. Each one is also the thing that catches you when you’re wrong.

I wrote four columns over the last two weeks, in domains that don’t obviously belong together — corporate governance, AI strategy, energy infrastructure, and the future of work. Underneath, they are all about the same temptation: to strip away the safeguard because it slows you down, and to discover too late that slowing you down was the entire point.

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The cleanest version is the one that started the run. SpaceX’s IPO structure gives Elon Musk 85% voting control, three titles, a board he appoints, and immunity from being fired — and it was made possible by the institutions that are supposed to push back. Texas rewrote its corporate law to lure the listing; Nasdaq bent its index rules to force money into the stock. Governance is error-correction. It exists to test a leader’s decisions before the checks clear — the way someone might have flagged that spending billions so your Metaverse avatars could finally have legs was not, in fact, a triumph. Remove it and you don’t get a freer genius. You get the worst version of whatever leader you started with, running at full power. The diagnosis these CEOs share — that Wall Street is too short-term — is correct. Their cure, making themselves monarchs, is worse than the disease.

The same move shows up as strategy. Uber’s president told a podcast the company can’t yet connect its AI coding spend to a return, and the skeptics seized on it as proof the bubble is popping — even as Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, a number you don’t pay for a technology going nowhere. Both things are true. The economics are unsustainable today, and the technology is still transformative. Aviation and biotech each incinerated capital for decades before they paid off. The companies that survived the wait, like Vertex in pharma, didn’t bet everything on the new approach and discard the old one. They kept their existing capabilities as a hedge against a technology whose timing they couldn’t predict. The old skill looked redundant. It was insurance.

That is exactly what aviation teaches about the future of knowledge work. Autopilot makes flying safer, but a pilot who lets the computer fly 99% of the time loses the stick-and-rudder skill she needs for the other 1% — the difference between Sullenberger on the Hudson, whose reflexes were intact, and Air France 447, whose crew had been allowed to let theirs rust, falling recoverable the whole way into the Atlantic. AI is about to do this to everyone who does cognitive work. Whether it hollows people out or empowers them won’t be decided by the technology. It will be decided by whether leaders deliberately preserve the perishable human skills the machine made optional — because, unlike aviation, there is no FAA requiring it.

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Three of these safeguards have something in common: they’re yours, and the danger is that you let them quietly atrophy. The fourth is different. In the revolt against AI data centers, the safeguard is the public itself — and the public doesn’t atrophy. It votes. Kevin O’Leary’s plan to pave 40,000 acres of Utah drew overwhelming local opposition, and his answer was to call the objectors proxies for the Chinese government. That’s the same contempt that killed GMOs in Europe after Monsanto’s man called wary Britons “sad sacks.” The lesson of Rockefeller, the original hated billionaire, is that the public never actually hated his oil — it got cheaper every year. They hated him. Tech’s leaders are offering a worse bargain: I get richer, you pay more for power, breathe dirtier air, and might lose your job. Data centers still need permits. And that means every data center is a referendum. Tech leaders can outspend the public. But they can’t outvote it.

Notice who keeps appearing. Musk’s governance structure removes every check on him at SpaceX; his data center ran 35 unpermitted gas turbines over a Memphis neighborhood where cancer risk already runs four times the national average. He is the purest case of the instinct all four columns are about — remove the constraint, at every level, and call it freedom.

The safeguards in these stories are somebody’s stick and rudder: the manual control you keep for the day the autopilot flies you into a mountain. Cutting it loose feels like buying speed. It isn’t:

You’re buying the worst version of yourself, at full throttle, with nothing left to grab.

—Gautam

Brad here again: The coëxistence of Anthropic’s giving a 6.7% equity ownership stake in return for $65 billion coëxists uneasily with Andrew Macdonald’s observation that Uber’s progammers’ use of AI in their code is still not connected to the company’s bottom line. The programmers may be building skills that will be useful in the future, but the rubber has not yet met the road—or, rather, consider this metaphor: The programmers are getting practice improving their stick-thwacking form, but the ass has not yet moved, and the programmers are still having to carry the load as well as thwacking the recalcitrant ass.

The two coexist, of course, because the perception is that variance is absolutely enormous and that we are not even in the realm of calculable risks. In such times of great uncertainty, the systems and organizations that survive will be those that prioritize robustness and optionality. They will not be the ones that equate marginal cost and benefit. They will, rather, be those that do a lot of things that look to be ex-ante and turn out to be ex-post wasteful, but one of which winds up generating the capabilities that actually matter in the unknown future. I see three major things going on here:

People paying $65 billion for a 1/15 stake of Anthropic’s equity are almost surely overpaying, but they are enmeshed in a system that makes not having a stake in Anthropic a career-destroying move should Anthropic turn out to be more than marginally profitable over the long run.
Uber and other tech companies telling their programmers to burn tokens on AI training as a way of investing in the future are also almost surely overpaying, but again they are enmeshed in a system that makes not building AI-capabilities now a career-destroying move in the future in which these technologies do turn out to be world-changing.
Consider the Amazons, Googles, Facebooks, and Microsofts spending fortunes building-out as a way of attempting to stay close enough to the frontier to keep Anthropic or Open-AI from breaching their moats and taking over their platform monopoly profits for themselves. They are also almost surely burning their shareholders’ money, but, again, they see an existential disruption threat.

These three episodes of likely massive overspending and overinvestment from the perspective of the bottom line, however, may well be not bad for society as a whole. We do underinvest in activities with powerful positive externalities, and exploring the spaces of new technologies is prime among those activities in which we underinvest. But that is an argument that applies to governments thinking about whether they should be taking steps to curb the current AI bubble, not an argument that those who are currently gung-ho and investing it have their heads screwed on right. Rather, those currently doubling down on the bubble should be thinking about building optionality and robustness instead.

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And, in Less than 24 hours, the US Is Already in Breach of the Islamabad MOU: CHAOS MONKEYS GONNA CHAOS WATCH

Sixty Days to Peace, Zero Days to Breach: Trump’s Islamabad MOU’s ink has not even dried, and the Iranians are noting the failure of the US to live up to its day zero obligations…

Yes:

Helmuth Tromm: US & Iran Delay Kickoff to Talks as Lebanon Clashes Worsen <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-06-19/us-and-iran-delay-kickoff-to-talks-as-lebanon-clashes-worsen>: ‘The 60-day clock on a US-Iran peace deal has barely started ticking and already mounting tensions are threatening to throw it off course. Switzerland’s Foreign Ministry announced this morning that the talks have been “postponed” following overnight clashes in Lebanon that resulted in the deaths four Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander. While JD Vance has warned Israel against attacking Donald Trump’s deal, the country has insisted it will keep troops across its borders until it’s sure Hezbollah no longer poses a threat…

The text of the Islamabad MOU:

(1) The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon….
(4) Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran….
(10) The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc…
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Has Bessent issued the Iranian oil export waivers and has Hegseth issued orders to American blockading forces to stand down? If one is going to try to keep the agreement, it is better to be in immediate breach of only one of one’s obligations, rather than three.

Just asking.

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Iran has noted that Trump is in breach:

Golnar Motevalli, Omar Tamo, & Galit Altstein: US & Iran Delay Nuclear Talks as Lebanon Clashes Worsen <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-19/vance-delays-swiss-trip-as-white-house-says-talks-never-simple>: ‘The talks, which were meant to take place in Switzerland on Friday, were delayed because of… clashes between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants…. Iran… insisted on a ceasefire in Lebanon… and didn’t send a delegation to the talks as a result of the fresh hostilities.… [In] the strait… maritime traffic has picked up… [but] traffic through the waterway—critical for global energy supplies—appeared to thin early Friday, a day after a surge in renewed oil flows as the two countries vowed to lift a dual blockade….
Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, reacted to the latest fighting in Lebanon by saying the Jewish state can’t ignore its security needs, “with all due respect to the US.” “The whole of Lebanon must burn,” he said on X. Israeli politicians are in campaign mode ahead of elections in October, and a significant majority of the public is favor of continuing military operations in Lebanon…

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And JD Vance has warned Israel to remember who is in charge here:

Paul Wallace & Ellen Milligan: Vance Warns Israel Against Attacking Trump’s Iran Deal <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-18/vance-warns-israeli-cabinet-against-attacking-trump-s-iran-deal>: ‘“This does bother me,” Vance told reporters on Thursday, going on to refer to Netanyahu by his nickname. “You’ve seen people within Bibi’s cabinet who have come out and attacked the deal, and in some ways very personally attacked the president of the United States.”… Vance said Trump “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world superpower.”…
“Two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars,” he said. “The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality.”… “You’re a country of 9 million people,” he said. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have”…

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The chances that the next use of nuclear weapons will happen in the Middle East and will happen in the next 50 years keep rising. And Donald Trump’s inability not just to get ducks in a row, but to understand what a duck even is, is not helping.

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CROSSPOST: ADA PALMER: I Am a Huge Machiavelli Fan!

From “murderous Machiavel” to patriot-diplomat: Ada Palmer rereads Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, dropping him back into his world of papal warlords, collapsing city-states, and patriots desperate to preserve the independence of his Firenze against a very malignant Fortuna. Machiavelli did not write The Prince to help generic thugs “get ahead”, but as a proprietary survival manual for the Medici thugs who had taken over his beloved Firenze, and whom he thought needed to utilize his talents and stabilize the situation, lest they be followed by something worse. It is his job application to a particular few princes and princelings—not a public-sphere literacy-culture document intended for a broad distribution…

CROSSPOST: ADA PALMER: I Am a Huge Machiavelli Fan!

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1FrhkLQnCI> <https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2>

Brad here: Ada Palmer argues that Machiavelli was a fiercely patriotic, analytical innovator whose work has been profoundly misread as a selfish manual for villainy.

Her key interpretive pivot is her line that Machiavelli would faithfully sit in the countryside and rot while begging to work from the Medici who had ordered his torture, in the hope that they would recall him to occupy some office so that he could continue to serve Firenze. Why? Because after the fall of the republic, Firenze faced a choice between being tyrannized by locals—the Medici—who loved the place, or being tyrannized by foreigners who did not love the place. The first would be vastly better than the second. And for the first to be stable, Firenze needed to be strong, and Machiavelli believed that his skills with diplomacy could make her stronger—if only the Medici could be convinced to use him as one of their tools.

Coupled with this is her claim that The Prince is a private memo intended for Medici princes and princelings, focused on how they can stabilize their “new state of affairs” in control of Firenze. It is not a general manual for how murderous thugs can get ahead as tyrants wherever they find themselves. It was a secret job application to the very régime that had tortured and exiled him, written to arm Firenze’s rulers with dangerous knowledge he refused to share with foreign powers.

And, maybe, if one of the Medici princes is smart, bold, and favored enough by Fortuna, he might be able to do more than stabilize Medici tyranny over Firenze: he might be able to unite Italy, expel the French, Swiss, and Spanish barbarians, and curb the chaos-monkey elective monarchy that is the corrupt secular-minded papacy.

Yet, somehow, he was turned him into a symbol of amoral, self‑serving politics. Cf.: William Shakespeare, “Henry VI 3”, 3:2:

Richard of Gloucester: ‘Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down…

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Palmer places Machiavelli in the concrete northern Italian world of the early 1500s:

collapsing city‑state legitimacy,
papal warlordism,
chronic regime turnover,

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in which The Prince is a desperate, patriotic handbook for a few power players on how to preserve the independence of Firenze and stabilize Italy. She discusses the lessons he learned from watching the career of Cesare Borgia, starting with his mission to the court of Duke Valentino in the run-up to Sinigaglia, and how he learned that:

justice perceived as neutral can make even a terrifying, much-feared tyrant conqueror very popular,
if he combines terror toward élites with impartial justice toward commoners,
and such a prince would be not loved, not hated, but feared and respected—and that is actually the best way to stable rule.
outcomes hinge half on prudence and half on sheer fortune.

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Thus Machiavelli unexpectedly and unintentionally birthed a secular “political science”. He birthed a more honest, less moralizing way of thinking about power: institutions, incentives, fear, legitimacy, and fortune, rather than fairy‑tale notions of good rulers and bad rulers. Palmer’s Machiavelli pushes us to ask not just what we wish rulers would do, but how concrete means, institutional design, and human psychology actually determine whether polities endure or implode.

And then print, censorship, and later ideological battles split “Machiavelli the patriot” from “Machiavelli the analyst” from “Machiavellian the cynical villain”.

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Trump's Islamabad MOU: Surrender on Paper, Spin on Cable

Behind the Trump team’s talk of “back‑channels” lies a text that hands Tehran what it asked for, while Washington pretends nothing much has changed. The memorandum promises peace on all fronts, sanctions relief, and $300 billion in reconstruction funds—and the Trumpist line is that words don’t matter, only oil flows do, for this is just a scrap of paper, after all…

What can you say about this?

Things, according to the “Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America & the Islamic Republic of Iran” that happen right now:

US Treasury… issu[ing] waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.;
termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon;
no initiat[ion of] any war or any military operation;
refrain[ing] from the threat or use of force;
ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon;
respect[ing] each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity;
refrain[ing] from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

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Question: Lebanon is one of the fronts on which military operations are to be immediately and permanently terminated. Is Gaza? How about the pre-1967 West Bank?

Certainly any future Israeli attacks on Lebanon put Trump in breach of this agreement immediately.

The Trump administration now claims that this is a “political document” intended so the Iranian negotiators can “sell it politically to their internal audience… say what they need to say for their domestic politics…” and that “the text… didn’t reflect critical back-channel commitments…” And it is those back-channel commitments that gave Trump “confidence in signing on to the arrangement…”

Moving on: things that the MOU says will happen within 30 days:

The United States of America fully ending the naval blockade.
Vessels transiting Hormuz be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic.
The Islamic Republic of Iran making arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only.
Removing the technical and military obstacles and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days.

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There are things that the MOU says will happen further on down the road:

First priority: end of naval blockades, Treasury permission for Iranian oil exports, peace on all fronts, the release of frozen Iranian funds, and “the United States… acknowledge[s] the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue”.
After those are accomplished, negotiations begin on all the rest of the issues—the $300 billion fund for Iran, control of the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, the Iranian nuclear program, and so on.

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Perhaps it is remarkable that Niall Ferguson says that this is not a US surrender document—not at all:

Niall Ferguson: It’s Too Soon to Call This a U.S. Surrender <https://www.thefp.com/cp/202486852>: ‘Before I join in the swelling chorus of former Obama and Biden officials rushing to write op-eds denouncing the MOU, or the Middle East hawks decrying it as an instrument of U.S. surrender, it is important to remember that a piece of paper by itself is not a peace. For peace is made… by actions… and as much by the unforeseen consequences of diplomacy as by the intended ones…. The Trump administration prides itself on its realism. That is why key figures seem to feel no compunction about pulling the plug on the Israelis, and deeply disappointing many of their Arab friends in the Persian Gulf, too. Yet Trump is as much at the mercy of unpredictable historical events as Wilson before him….
Right now, Trump’s 14 Points look as wretched as Wilson’s 14 Points looked splendid in 1918. But who can be sure what lies ahead? What if the most perilous time for Iran’s horrible regime is…when it makes peace and smells… money?… [if] the IRGC’s equally blood-soaked confederate… Putin is in deeper trouble than we realize? if… oil prices didn’t go… higher… is that China’s domestic economy is in free fall?…
What if, in short, President Trump’s luck holds—as it has held so often throughout his 80 years of often reckless risk-taking? In the end, the wording of this lousy memorandum of understanding may matter less than the second- and third-order consequences of Trump’s Iran war…

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Perhaps it is not so remarkable that he says this.

The oil will flow for sixty days and that is the only real thing that has happened is, indeed, the only line of defense I am hearing from the Trumpists today.

For, if one just reads it, the Islamabad MOU looks like a comprehensive U.S. climb‑down: peace on all fronts, rapid dismantling of the naval blockade, restoration of pre‑war shipping, a huge reconstruction fund, sanctions termination, and a highly deferential approach to Iran’s nuclear program and regional role. The gap between the signed words and the subsequent denials that the document means anything is the story: it is supposedly just diplomatic theater, crafted so Tehran can claim internal domestic victory while Trump’s team rely on invisible “back‑channel commitments” that Iran will fold its hand sixty days from now.

That the only outcome everyone will openly own is sixty days of flowing oil, that is a striking measure of Trumpist strategic collapse.

We have:

Alayna Treene, Kevin Liptak, & Mostafa Salem: US Releases Official Agreement with Iran <https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/17/middleeast/us-iran-war-mou-text-intl>: ‘Speaking to CNN, US officials have downplayed the significance of the memo itself, calling it a “political document” that does not reflect critical back-channel commitments Iran has made to the US, specifically on the future of Tehran’s nuclear program…. “This is fundamentally an agreement that allows us to open the Strait of Hormuz immediately, commit the Iranians to destroying the nuclear dust, and then gives us a dial where if the Iranians dial up their good behavior, we respond by dialing up the kind of economic and sanctions relief that can make them a more prosperous country,” the senior US official said…

And:

Alayna Treene, & Kevin Liptak: US Officials Downplay Text of the Iran Agreement, Saying It Doesn’t Account for Back-Channel Commitments <https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/16/politics/iran-agreement-text-trump>: ‘Officials described the text of the agreement as incredibly vague, mainly intended to create a more favorable environment for the highly technical, in-person talks to come. They added that the framework is aimed at providing Iran the ability to sell it politically to their internal audience…. The officials said… the text… didn’t reflect critical back-channel commitments Iran has made to the US, which they argued gave them more confidence in signing on to the arrangement…. The official added that the president’s team of negotiators “came up with language that allows (Iran) to say what they need to say for their domestic politics”…

And:

Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America & the Islamic Republic of Iran
The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have jointly agreed in good faith on [ __ date] on the following:
The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.
The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.
The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran commit to negotiating and achieving the final deal in maximum 60 days, extendable with mutual consent.
Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.
Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.
The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.
The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned, and expressed their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.
The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven, with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned. They express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.
Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.
The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.
The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during negotiations. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.
The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree that an executive mechanism will be established to monitor the successful implementation of this MOU and the future compliance of the final deal.
After signing this MOU, and subject to the beginning of the implementation of paragraphs 1, 4, 5, 10 and 11 of this MOU, and the continuing implementation of these measures, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will start negotiations regarding the final deal exclusively on the other paragraphs.
The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.

Only after successful progress on the implementation “of paragraphs 1, 4, 5, 10 and 11” will there be:

negotiating and achieving the final deal in maximum 60 days, extendable with mutual consent;
Iran… conduct[ing] dialog with… Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz;
The United States of America developing a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The removal of US forces from proximity to Iran.
The United States of America terminating all sanctions.
The United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned
The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.
The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon.
Pending the final deal, the Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces.
The United States and Iran agree that an executive mechanism will be established to monitor successful implementation and compliance with the final deal.
After signing this MOU, and subject to the beginning of the implementation of paragraphs 1, 4, 5, 10 and 11 of this MOU, and the continuing implementation of these measures, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will start negotiations regarding the final deal exclusively on the other paragraphs.
A binding UNSC resolution.

Saying the obvious:

Phillips O’Brien: Midweek Update #15: The MOU Is Out <https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-out>: ‘I felt it was important to wait for this official text to write an analysis, because jumping to definite conclusions without it would leave one a hostage to fortune. In some ways, though, it was foolish to wait. From what we now know, the MOU is almost word for word what the Iranian government has been saying for weeks. There is nothing surprising in it, as the Iranians have made it clear that they were going to get what they wanted from Trump. And they certainly did…. The end result is not pretty. You might even want to look away…

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READING: Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington: Waterloo Dispatch

The subtext (& text): It serve Arthur Wellesley’s purposes to highlight that even though the Horse Guards command in London had failed to do its job—had given him “an infamous army”, nevertheless “there is no officer nor description of troops that did not behave well”, that the decisive element was the Prussian allies under Blücher and Bulow, for the “successful result of this arduous day [was due] to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them… [and] would have forced the enemy to retire if his attacks should have failed, and would have prevented him from taking advantage of them if they should unfortunately have succeeded”, even if Wellington’s army had at the end of the day been unable “to make the attack which produced the final result” of the first end-of-the-day French retreat. But that is the useful story, and a “true” story. However, it is not the only true story in the sense of being a credible Grand Narrative, and we need Grand Narratives to be able to think at all. But we must also always remember that all Grand Narratives are lies…

One cannot write the history of, say, a battle as a single thread—get a view of its integrated temporal and causal sequence. And yet we have to pretend that we can. You can see that tension by juxtaposing Arthur Wellesley’s letter to John Wilson Croker declining the task with his required dispatch to his boss.

Arthur Wellesley wrote:

Arthur Wellesley: Letter to John Wilson Croker 1815-08-15 <https://archive.org/details/macaulayhistoryofengland01/mode/1up>: ‘The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance…. It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took place, nor in what order…

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Nevertheless, he also wrote:

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Arthur Wellesley: Waterloo Dispatch <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wellingon%27s_Waterloo_dispatch_to_Lord_Bathurst,_19_June_1815#:~:text=The%20enemy%20repeatedly%20attacked%20us,a%20numerous%20and%20powerful%20artillery.>: ‘To Earl Bathurst.Waterloo, 19th June, 1815.
My Lord,
Buonaparte, having collected the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th corps of the French army, and the Imperial Guards, and nearly all the cavalry, on the Sambre, and between that river and the Meuse, between the 10th and 14th of the month, advanced on the 15th and attacked the Prussian posts at Thuin and Lobbes, on the Sambre, at day-light in the morning.
I did not hear of these events till in the evening of the 15th; and I immediately ordered the troops to prepare to march, and afterwards to march to their left, as soon as I had intelligence from other quarters to prove that the enemy’s movement upon Charleroi was the real attack.
The enemy drove the Prussian posts from the Sambre on that day; and General Ziethen, who commanded the corps which had been at Charleroi, retired upon Fleurus; and Marshal Prince Blücher concentrated the Prussian army upon Sombref, holding the villages in front of his position of St. Amand and Ligny.
The enemy continued his march along the road from Charleroi towards Bruxelles; and, on the same evening, the 15th, attacked a brigade of the army of the Netherlands, under the Prince de Weimar, posted at Frasne, and forced it back to the farm house, on the same road, called Les Quatre Bras.
The Prince of Orange immediately reinforced this brigade with another of the same division, under General Perponcher, and, in the morning early, regained part of the ground which had been lost, so as to have the command of the communication leading from Nivelles and Bruxelles with Marshal Blücher’s position.
In the mean time, I had directed the whole army to march upon Les Quatre Bras; and the 5th division, under Lieut. General Sir Thomas Picton, arrived at about half past two in the day, followed by the corps of troops under the Duke of Brunswick, and afterwards by the contingent of Nassau.
At this time the enemy commenced an attack upon Prince Blücher with his whole force, excepting the 1st and 2nd corps, and a corps of cavalry under General Kellermann, with which he attacked our post at Les Quatre Bras.
The Prussian army maintained their position with their usual gallantry and perseverance against a great disparity of numbers, as the 4th corps of their army, under General Bülow, had not joined; and I was not able to assist them as I wished, as I was attacked myself, and the troops, the cavalry in particular, which had a long distance to march, had not arrived.
We maintained our position also, and completely defeated and repulsed all the enemy’s attempts to get possession of it. The enemy repeatedly attacked us with a large body of infantry and cavalry, supported by a numerous and powerful artillery. He made several charges with the cavalry upon our infantry, but all were repulsed in the steadiest manner.
In this affair, His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange, the Duke of Brunswick, and Lieut. General Sir Thomas Picton, and Major Generals Sir James Kempt and Sir Denis Pack, who were engaged from the commencement of the enemy’s attack, highly distinguished themselves, as well as Lieut. General Charles Baron Alten, Major General Sir C. Halkett, Lieut. General Cooke, and Major Generals Maitland and Byng, as they successively arrived. The troops of the 5th division, and those of the Brunswick corps, were long and severely engaged, and conducted themselves with the utmost gallantry. I must particularly mention the 28th, 42nd, 79th, and 92nd regiments, and the battalion of Hanoverians.
Our loss was great, as your Lordship will perceive by the enclosed return; and I have particularly to regret His Serene Highness the Duke of Brunswick, who fell fighting gallantly at the head of his troops.
Although Marshal Blücher had maintained his position at Sombref, he still found himself much weakened by the severity of the contest in which he had been engaged, and, as the 4th corps had not arrived, he determined to fall back and to concentrate his army upon Wavre; and he marched in the night, after the action was over.
This movement of the Marshal rendered necessary a corresponding one upon my part; and I retired from the farm of Quatre Bras upon Genappe, and thence upon Waterloo, the next morning, the 17th, at ten o’clock.
The enemy made no effort to pursue Marshal Blücher. On the contrary, a patrole which I sent to Sombref in the morning found all quiet; and the enemy’s vedettes fell back as the patrole advanced. Neither did he attempt to molest our march to the rear, although made in the middle of the day, excepting by following, with a large body of cavalry brought from his right, the cavalry under the Earl of Uxbridge.
This gave Lord Uxbridge an opportunity of charging them with the 1st Life Guards, upon their débouché from the village of Genappe, upon which occasion his Lordship has declared himself to be well satisfied with that regiment.
The position which I took up in front of Waterloo crossed the high roads from Charleroi and Nivelles, and had its right thrown back to a ravine near Merke Braine, which was occupied, and its left extended to a height above the hamlet Ter la Haye, which was likewise occupied. In front of the right centre, and near the Nivelles road, we occupied the house and gardens of Hougoumont, which covered the return of that flank; and in front of the left centre we occupied the farm of La Haye Sainte. By our left we communicated with Marshal Prince Blücher at Wavre, through Ohain; and the Marshal had promised me that, in case we should be attacked, he would support me with one or more corps, as might be necessary.
The enemy collected his army, with the exception of the 3rd corps, which had been sent to observe Marshal Blücher, on a range of heights in our front, in the course of the night of the 17th and yesterday morning, and at about ten o’clock he commenced a furious attack upon our post at Hougoumont. I had occupied that post with a detachment from General Byng’s brigade of Guards, which was in position in its rear; and it was for some time under the command of Lieut. Colonel Macdonell, and afterwards of Colonel Home; and I am happy to add that it was maintained throughout the day with the utmost gallantry by these brave troops, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of large bodies of the enemy to obtain possession of it.
This attack upon the right of our centre was accompanied by a very heavy cannonade upon our whole line, which was destined to support the repeated attacks of cavalry and infantry, occasionally mixed, but sometimes separate, which were made upon it. In one of these the enemy carried the farm house of La Haye Sainte, as the detachment of the light battalion of the German Legion, which occupied it, had expended all its ammunition; and the enemy occupied the only communication there was with them.
The enemy repeatedly charged our infantry with his cavalry, but these attacks were uniformly unsuccessful; and they afforded opportunities to our cavalry to charge, in one of which Lord E. Somerset’s brigade, consisting of the Life Guards, the Royal Horse Guards, and 1st dragoon guards, highly distinguished themselves, as did that of Major General Sir William Ponsonby, having taken many prisoners and an eagle.
These attacks were repeated till about seven in the evening, when the enemy made a desperate effort with cavalry and infantry, supported by the fire of artillery, to force our left centre, near the farm of La Haye Sainte, which, after a severe contest, was defeated; and, having observed that the troops retired from this attack in great confusion, and that the march of General Bülow’s corps, by Frischermont, upon Planchenois and La Belle Alliance, had begun to take effect, and as I could perceive the fire of his cannon, and as Marshal Prince Blücher had joined in person with a corps of his army to the left of our line by Ohain, I determined to attack the enemy, and immediately advanced the whole line of infantry, supported by the cavalry and artillery. The attack succeeded in every point: the enemy was forced from his positions on the heights, and fled in the utmost confusion, leaving behind him, as far as I could judge, 150 pieces of cannon, with their ammunition, which fell into our hands.
I continued the pursuit till long after dark, and then discontinued it only on account of the fatigue of our troops, who had been engaged during twelve hours, and because I found myself on the same road with Marshal Blücher, who assured me of his intention to follow the enemy throughout the night. He has sent me word this morning that he had taken 60 pieces of cannon belonging to the Imperial Guard, and several carriages, baggage, &c., belonging to Buonaparte, in Genappe.
I propose to move this morning upon Nivelles, and not to discontinue my operations.
Your Lordship will observe that such a desperate action could not be fought, and such advantages could not be gained, without great loss; and I am sorry to add that ours has been immense. In Lieut. General Sir Thomas Picton His Majesty has sustained the loss of an officer who has frequently distinguished himself in his service; and he fell gloriously leading his division to a charge with bayonets, by which one of the most serious attacks made by the enemy on our position was repulsed. The Earl of Uxbridge, after having successfully got through this arduous day, received a wound by almost the last shot fired, which will, I am afraid, deprive His Majesty for some time of his services.
His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange distinguished himself by his gallantry and conduct, till he received a wound from a musket ball through the shoulder, which obliged him to quit the field.
It gives me the greatest satisfaction to assure your Lordship that the army never, upon any occasion, conducted itself better. The division of Guards, under Lieut. General Cooke, who is severely wounded, Major General Maitland, and Major General Byng, set an example which was followed by all; and there is no officer nor description of troops that did not behave well.
I must, however, particularly mention, for His Royal Highness’s approbation, Lieut. General Sir H. Clinton, Major General Adam, Lieut. General Charles Baron Alten (severely wounded), Major General Sir Colin Halkett (severely wounded), Colonel Ompteda, Colonel Mitchell (commanding a brigade of the 4th division), Major Generals Sir James Kempt and Sir D. Pack, Major General Lambert, Major General Lord E. Somerset, Major General Sir W. Ponsonby, Major General Sir C. Grant, and Major General Sir H. Vivian, Major General Sir O. Vandeleur, and Major General Count Dornberg.
I am also particularly indebted to General Lord Hill for his assistance and conduct upon this, as upon all former occasions.
The artillery and engineer departments were conducted much to my satisfaction by Colonel Sir George Wood and Colonel Smyth; and I had every reason to be satisfied with the conduct of the Adjutant General, Major General Barnes, who was wounded, and of the Quarter Master General, Colonel De Lancey, who was killed by a cannon shot in the middle of the action. This officer is a serious loss to His Majesty’s service, and to me at this moment.
I was likewise much indebted to the assistance of Lieut. Colonel Lord FitzRoy Somerset, who was severely wounded, and of the officers composing my personal Staff, who have suffered severely in this action. Lieut. Colonel the Hon. Sir Alexander Gordon, who has died of his wounds, was a most promising officer, and is a serious loss to His Majesty’s service.
General Kruse, of the Nassau service, likewise conducted himself much to my satisfaction; as did General Tripp, commanding the heavy brigade of cavalry, and General Vanhope, commanding a brigade of infantry in the service of the King of the Netherlands.
General Pozzo di Borgo, General Baron Vincent, General Muffling, and General Alava, were in the field during the action, and rendered me every assistance in their power. Baron Vincent is wounded, but I hope not severely; and General Pozzo di Borgo received a contusion.
I should not do justice to my own feelings, or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army, if I did not attribute the successful result of this arduous day to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them. The operation of General Bülow upon the enemy’s flank was a most decisive one; and, even if I had not found myself in a situation to make the attack which produced the final result, it would have forced the enemy to retire if his attacks should have failed, and would have prevented him from taking advantage of them if they should unfortunately have succeeded.
Since writing the above, I have received a report that Major General Sir William Ponsonby is killed; and, in announcing this intelligence to your Lordship, I have to add the expression of my grief for the fate of an officer who had already rendered very brilliant and important services, and was an ornament to his profession.
I send with this dispatch two eagles,taken by the troops in this action, which Major Percy will have the honor of laying at the feet of His Royal Highness. I beg leave to recommend him to your Lordship’s protection.
I have the honour to be, &c.
Wellington

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References:

Macaulay, Thomas Babington.1849. The History of England from the Accession of James II. Vol. I. London : Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. <https://archive.org/details/macaulayhistoryofengland01/mode/1up>.
Siborne, H.T., ed. 1983. The Waterloo Letters. London: Arms & Armour. <https://archive.org/details/waterlooletterss0000unse>.
Wellesley, Arthur. 1815. “Waterloo Dispatch”. June 18. Waterloo <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wellingon%27s_Waterloo_dispatch_to_Lord_Bathurst,_19_June_1815#:~:text=The%20enemy%20repeatedly%20attacked%20us,a%20numerous%20and%20powerful%20artillery.>.

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Bonds & Equities Have Not, Recently, Hedged Each Other: CHART OF THE DAY

Three tails, no safe asset: war, Trumpism, & the end of 60/40 comfort…

No, financial markets are not confident that there is a groove the macroeconomy is likely to follow. The marvel to me is that they had not woken up to the risks involved in Donald Trump’s chaos-monkey governance long ago. Plus the belief by plutocrats that kleptocrats are their friends has to have been at least somewhat shaken by the Trumpists’ moves against Anthropic, which have no rational rationale save as a message that Anthropic has not offered them a big enough bribe yet:

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10-Yr inflation breakeven are now back to where it was in late February, with implicit real ten year yields 0.4%-point higher. Combine this with higher equity prices, and the sensible explanation is increasing mass in all three tails: the interest-rate spike crisis tail, the inflation-outbreak tail, and the AI-boom-proves-durable tail:

Phil Serafino: Higher Bond Yields Are Here to Stay in a Post-War World <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-06-17/higher-bond-yields-are-here-to-stay-in-a-post-war-world>: ‘Higher for longer…. The fallout from the Iran war is likely to reverberate around markets for months to come…. Market pricing points to Fed rate hikes in 2027…. “We would be cautious about chasing the relief rally in government bonds,” said Thomas Hempell at Generali Investments, “particularly in the US, where large fiscal deficits and still-elevated inflation are likely to keep term yields under upward pressure.” Yields on benchmark 10-year Treasuries have risen almost half a percentage point since the Iran war started… driven by… real yields…. Vond investors’ concerns go beyond price pressures from the conflict. —Georgia Hall, Ruth Carson and Ye Xie…

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Anthropic, too, Is Very Confused About What Its Business Model & Strategy Are: WAFFLE OF THE DAY

From $5 Ubers to metered intelligence: Anthropic’s pricing plan panic unfolds in real time. When your GPUs are maxxxing out and you can’t quite decide what to charge for any of it, it’s not just your users who are confused. The datacenters are running hot, the subsidies are being cut back, and the leading frontier lab is fumbling for direction in this world where “chat” is a toy, “reasoning “ is a semi-tool, and there is a hope that “agents” might be able to do some real work…

I had just posted this yesterday:

DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Notes on the End of the $5 Uber Era of ‘AI’: MONDAY MAMLMs”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. June 15. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-end-of-the-5-uber-era>.

But now Comes Anthropic Claude to say, with respect to a billing change it notified me of a month ago, “never mind—for now”:

Claude: <https://public.hey.com/p/tBgbVdcrY3vF1pFg9C5Jmort>: ‘Hi Brad,
In May, we sent you an email announcing that starting today, the Claude Agent SDK, claude -p, and third-party apps built on the Agent SDK would stop drawing from subscription rate limits and move to a dedicated monthly credit. We’re writing to let you know that we’re not making this change today. We’re working to update the plan to better support how users build with Claude subscriptions.
What this means for you
Nothing changes for now. Agent SDK, claude -p, and third-party app usage continues to work with your subscription exactly as it did before today, and there’s no credit to claim. Your subscription limits are unchanged. When we have an update, we’ll share it with advance notice before it takes effect…

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To recap, briefly:

“Chat” LLMs are a party trick, useful for summarization, brainstorming, and “talk to the rubber duck”, but not for much else; “reasoning” LLMs are good as computer-programming assistants and make fewer really dumb or really self-contradictory mistakes; “agentic” LLMs can actually do some work—but if there is not a definite right answer and an error flag if it misses and needs to try again, you get yourself into big trouble.
A standard summarization task that I might assign to an LLM would, right now, if I sent it out to anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-7, cost me $0.50 in token charges in chat mode, $5 in reasoning mode, and $50 in agentic mode.
Nevertheless, there are enough people who are finding “agentic” workloads useful, or who are betting that they need to use frontier models intensively right now to build capabilities to manage what is coming for them, that data centers are working flat-out.
Frontier Labs, therefore, no longer have any incentive to charge less than marginal cost to their users: rather than creating sticky future customers, such teaser discounts right now simply lead to data center overload, congestion, and a very lousy user experience.
Hence Anthropic has decided to try to make money right now so that it can get a good IPO price.
And the hyperscalar platform monopolists, feeling that they have more running room as Anthropic is no longer trying to take all of their LLM customers right now, or following suit in an attempt to light less money on fire during the present gold rush.
No, I do not know what OpenAI thinks it is doing.

Now comes this interesting waffle. Anthropic, it seems, is no longer in the business of raising prices for “agentic” workflows in order to make total demand for its tokens low enough that its data centers have enough headroom to run smoothly and rapidly. Anthropic is not sure what business it is in right now.

And if they do not know, how can I?

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CROSSPOST: FRANK FUKUYAMA: The Art of the Non-Deal

Frank’s subhead: With this ceasefire, Trump has capitulated to Iran. Trump is calling his 60‑day ceasefire with Iran a historic deal and boasting that the Strait of Hormuz is now “permanently toll‑free.” But I see something else: a war that achieved none of its stated aims, and a White House paying Iran to undo the damage it caused itself…

As I see it, the most likely path going forward is this:

Trump fails to deliver on his promise to get Netanyahu to stop attacking in Lebanon.
Iran’s response to that is to say that all other negotiations have to be paused until Trump delivers that.
Thus we have a renewed 60-day ceasefire, but one in which Iran gets paid $500 million a day to let ships go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Whether Iran allows the full shipping backlog to go through Hormuz or whether they slow walk it in some way is unclear.
Normal shipments through Hormuz are 20 million barrels of oil per day, which is 1.6 billion per day.
Iran is thus getting a 30% tariff on exports of oil through Hormuz—if they do not slow walk vessel permissions.
And then, in 60 days, we do this again.

Am I wrong?

CROSSPOST: FRANK FUKUYAMA: The Art of the Non-Deal

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-art-of-the-non-deal>

JUN 15, 2026

So Donald Trump, on his 80^th birthday, announced a deal in which there would be a 60-day ceasefire. Precise details have not yet been officially published. But, according to reports, they apparently include a cessation of attacks in Lebanon, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz—according to Trump, “permanently toll-free”—and lifting the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. He touted this as a key win, in the process praising China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for helping secure it.

This “deal” was nothing of the sort. If the reports are accurate, it instead represented a total U.S. capitulation to Iran. It basically set the clock back to February, when the Strait was open and the United States and Israel had not yet started bombing the Islamic Republic. It merely solved a problem that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had themselves created by launching the war in the first place.

till left up to future negotiations are all of the objectives that the Trump administration has set forth over the past three months in trying to justify the war:

There was no regime change or “unconditional surrender”; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains even more firmly in control of the country than previously;
There was no commitment by Iran to turn over its stockpiles of enriched uranium;
There was no commitment to stop enriching uranium, either immediately or on some specified date in the future;
There were no commitments on ending Iranian support for allied groups like the Houthis or Hezbollah in the region;
There was no agreement by Iran to let up on the violent suppression of protesters.

The reported “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) kicks all of the contentious issues down the road into negotiations that are to take place during the 60-day ceasefire. Trump treated all of these issues as having been conceded already, but if that were the case, why weren’t they in the MOU? It is very unlikely that Iran will budge over the next two months, since it is precisely these issues that speak to the regime’s core identity.

Trump stated that if Iran didn’t agree to these outstanding terms, he would re-commence the war and possibly make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. It is hard to know whether such an initiative is more ludicrous from the standpoint of countries in the Middle East, including U.S. friends like Saudi Arabia or the UAE who would now be paying explicitly for U.S. protection, or from domestic opinion in the United States, where everyone would like to be done with the region as soon as possible.

The MOU that Trump celebrated is a worse agreement than Obama’s 2015 deal, which Trump endlessly castigated in the past. Obama’s deal forbade Iran from enriching uranium beyond 3.67 percent for 15 years (far below the 90 percent enrichment necessary for bomb-grade purposes), and provided specific measures for removing enriched uranium from Iran. All of these provisions were to be overseen by outside inspectors, and Iran complied with its terms until Trump withdrew from the agreement. The major criticism of the deal, which U.S. hardliners stressed, was that it said nothing about Iranian support for regional proxies and that it provided sanctions relief at the start of the agreement.

Trump’s reported MOU, meanwhile, places no limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and makes no commitments about regional proxies. It does not provide for sanctions if Iran doesn’t concede by the end of the 60 days, though the Iranians have said that they will not proceed with final negotiations unless such relief occurs first. So Trump’s purported deal achieves considerably less than the agreement that Obama made.

Persuasion

The Art of the Non-Deal

So Donald Trump, on his 80th birthday, announced a deal in which there would be a 60-day ceasefire. Precise details have not yet been officially published. But, according to reports, they apparently include a cessation of attacks in Lebanon, the reopening of the Strait of H…

9 hours ago · 191 likes · 4 comments · Francis Fukuyama

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Coding Agents as a Continuation of the Normal Technological Development of Code-Writing Tools: CHART OF THE DAY

From perhaps 2000 calculator-tabulator Wirers in 1935 to 80,000 Coders in 1965 to 500,000 in 1995 to 2.5 Million Devs today: What actually changed in how they spent their time on the job? The programmer’s comparative advantage used to lie in being able to hold complex state in their head and to speak the dialects of both the compiler and the database optimizer. The software developer’s comparative advantage is fuzzier—a finger in many pies, but the ability to buckle down and write or boss the writing of code running very close to the bare silicon whenever it becomes essential to do more than add switches to a wizard…

More attention needs to be paid to how 500,000 computer programmers in 1995 in the United States became 2.25 million software developers and 250,000 computer programmers come 2025. Everyone wants to talk about whether AI will replace software engineers; almost nobody asks how the job already changed under their feet.

Today we have:

Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor: Why AI Hasn’t Replaced Software Engineers, & Won’t <https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers>: ‘Coding agents as normal technology…. Knowledge work, including software development, as… “decide-execute-deliver”…. AI compresses the “execute”… but the other two layers resist automation in a way that will not be overcome by capability improvements alone…. The stories of AI-driven mass layoffs in software seem to be classic “AI washing”…. Among the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census, only one job was automated away — elevator operator. But many others were rendered obsolete by new technology, like the job of telegraph operator….
Share
Writing code isn’t, and never was, the bottleneck…. Three things… [are] real bottlenecks:
(1) deciding and specifying what to build,
(2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and
(3) the deep human understanding—of the codebase, the business, and the environment—required to carry out both of these….
As more and more of the execution layer gets delegated to AI, the software engineer’s role in the future becomes analogous to that of a crane operator. AI agents will do most of the cognitive heavy lifting; supervising the agent and keeping it in control becomes most of the human’s job…. The sandwich getting squished is a new trend and it is not uniquely due to AI…. This pattern—where humans remain heavily involved at both ends of the decide-execute-deliver sandwich, even as AI increasingly automates the middle layer, seems to be broadly applicable to most knowledge work, though it is farthest along in software.…
Some people predict that demand for software engineering skills will fall… [as] the work will be done by people who are not software engineers…. Maybe. But… there have always been [such] claims… FORTRAN, COBOL, and SQL were all accompanied by such prominent hopes…. It never happened. The barrier… is having enough skilled judgment to make good decisions while maintaining accountability…
AI as Normal Technology
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
There is great anxiety and uncertainty about AI replacing jobs. How can we move past vague warnings and bombastic predictions and bring data to bear on this question? One good way is to look at the profession where AI capabilities are furthest along and adoption has been exceptionally rapid: software engineering…
Read more
5 days ago · 194 likes · 37 comments · Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

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Well, I cannot find much I think is really superb on how what the 2.5 million do is different from what the 500,000 did. So here is my take:

First: headcount has multiplied by roughly five, even as tools for writing software have become vastly more productive There have been massive improvements in languages, frameworks, cloud infrastructure, open-source libraries, and now AI coding assistants. In 1995, a “computer programmer” was, to a remarkable extent, a translator between a relatively well-specified business need and a relatively unforgiving, low-level environment. The programmer’s day was spent managing memory, juggling file handles, worrying about whether the database would lock, working around idiosyncrasies of vendor toolchains, and producing line-of-business applications or systems software that ran either on a departmental server in a closet or on a desktop. The interfaces to the rest of the firm were narrow: a requirements document, a meeting with a business analyst, perhaps some end-user testing before deployment.

Once the system went live, change was expensive. Releases were infrequent, rollback was painful, and “works on my machine” was still a meaningful defense. The stack was shallow but harsh. Many programmers were working in C, C++, Visual Basic, early Java, or proprietary 4GLs. They managed their own build systems, their own deployments, their own monitoring—if there was any monitoring beyond log files. The programmer’s comparative advantage lay in being able to hold complex state in their head and to speak the dialects of both the compiler and the database optimizer.

A modern software developer sits in a thicket of abstractions: managed runtimes, serverless platforms, container orchestration systems, high-level frameworks, third-party APIs for payments, identity, mapping, messaging. There is vastly more reuse. The developer’s daily work is about choosing and composing modules, gluing services together, and then living with the operational consequences. The 1995 programmer primarily wrestled with the constraints of immature tools and low-level environments to translate fairly well-specified needs into functioning software, with limited ongoing responsibility. The 2025 software developer orchestrates powerful tools and services in a noisy high-stakes environment.

In 2025, the line between building and running a system is very blurry. A contemporary software developer is expected to own code from design through deployment to on-call pager duty. That means incident response, observability, performance tuning under real-world load, and—importantly—making tradeoffs between reliability, speed of delivery, and cost. In effect the job has metastasized from “write the program” to “own this slice of the socio-technical system”. Plus: A huge amount of what would once have been called “programming” has migrated outward into the hands of people who would not have been classified as programmers at all.

If AI is going to be “normal technology”, it will take what used to be an artisanal, hand-coded “execute” step and turn it into something that can be semi-automated. In 1995, if you wanted a function written, you, the programmer, wrote it. In 2025, you often describe it in natural language and have an assistant generate a first draft, which you then review, test, modify, and integrate. That is less like soldering circuits (or perhaps lifting that bale) and more like sending a pattern out for photolithography (or operating a crane): the machine does the heavy lifting, but you are responsible for what goes wrong.

Verifying what you have built is also harder. The intellectual community around the job is profoundly different. And there is the political economy of the occupation. In 1995, “computer programmer” was important but not yet central to the story of American capitalism. Today, software developers sit on the commanding heights.

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See:

Cihon, Peter & Mert Demirer. 2023. “How AI-Powered Software Development May Affect Labor Markets“. Brookings Institution. August 1. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-ai-powered-software-development-may-affect-labor-markets/>.
Kammerath, Jan. 2025. “40 Years of Programming: The History Of IDEs From 1985 To 2025”. March 31. <https://medium.com/@jankammerath/40-years-of-programming-the-history-of-ides-from-1985-to-2025-7e487ea78c07>.
Noorzad, Pardis. 2025. “The Evolution of Software Engineering”. February 20. <https://djpardis.medium.com/the-evolution-of-software-engineering-from-fortran-to-llms-63d2427a3e73>.
2001. “The Hacker’s Dictionary”. JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.3.0. April 30. <https://hackersdictionary.com/html/>.
Visser, Jos. 2026. “A Tiny History of Software Engineering”. Wednesday Wisdom. May 20. <https://josvisser.substack.com/p/a-tiny-history-of-software-engineering>.

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References:

##reading-arthur-wellesley-duke-of-wellington-waterloo-dispatch##public-reason#reading#arthur-wellesley#duke-of-wellington#waterloo-dispatch#battle-of-waterloo#liaison-with-blucher#napoleonic-wars#prussian-flank-attack#fog-of-war#battle-history-method

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#homarus-cyberneticus
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#stenography

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##bonds-equities-have-not-recently-hedged-each-other-chart-of-the-day
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#bonds-equities-have-not-recently-hedged-each-other
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