my story 🚀
🏠 I finally got frustrated enough with my home automation system that I let AI loose on it. I launched a Claude Code session and gave it access to my chrome with the hub’s control website logged in. I also gave it an all-powerful API key. I am not surprised at its fluency with all of the IT underpinnings, and nevertheless I am impressed by it. I am also feeling validated, as none of the problems that I have experienced were fixable with settings changes alone. In addition to trial and error, the AI still needed a meat proxy (yours truly) to push buttons in the physical world! In the process, I reached the limits of what Claude could accomplish. It had told me to give up. That’s when I switched to Codex, which covered a lot of the same ground but went further and managed to fix the last of my troubled switches.
fun facts 🙌
SNL takes on HVAC. The beloved industry where I started my career gets roasted. “Upfront Heating & Air Conditioning.” ~ learn more
“Thus Spoke Compute”, a music video. “Once considered pretty smart for an organic.” A physicist riffing on what happens when you look at medicine through the lens of compute and scaling. ~ learn more
Hole punch game. Punch black holes in space and sling a ship home round them. I made it to level 9. ~ learn more
You are no longer invited to dinner. “The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026, a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.” Derek Thompson digs into why we see fewer dinner parties and fewer living-room hangs, from overbooked leisure to the sheer logistics of being the unpaid party planner. ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
What happened to real estate in Austin. “But the drop in migration and increase in interest rates meant the party was over.” A firsthand account of Austin’s pandemic boom and bust, plus a pushback on the tidy narrative that new supply alone “drove down rents” while ignoring demand cooling. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Reverse engineer anything. This has become very popular very quickly. “REA gives it the tools to inspect the code behind the answer.” It’s a toolkit you plug into a coding agent so it can actually follow real code paths, pull references, and reconstruct how a feature works. ~ learn more
Indoor satellite phone cover is coming. “The walkie-talkie spectrum from 2004 ended up being the piece that lets satellites replace cell towers.” Aakash Gupta explains why SpaceX buying Sprint’s old 800 MHz Nextel block matters: “800 MHz penetrates buildings” and “Most phones already have the band built in,” turning satellite coverage into something that can work indoors too. ~ learn more
Your agent is mine. “These routers operate as application-layer proxies with full plaintext access to every in-flight JSON payload, yet no provider enforces cryptographic integrity between client and upstream model.” The paper audits 428 third-party LLM API routers and finds real-world cases of malicious injection and secret exfiltration, including “1 draining ETH from a researcher-owned private key.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
How to engineer a soul. “We did not stop having religion. We unbundled it.” Pande’s point is that we kept the parts (therapy, wellness, politics, social media) but lost the integrated system that actually forms character, so nobody is responsible for who you become. ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Naming drug trials is an artform. Here’s the latest result from Lilly’s retatrutide. “In TRIUMPH-2, participants with obesity and type 2 diabetes taking retatrutide 12 mg lost an average of 49.6 lbs (20.8%) over 80 weeks, with more than half no longer meeting the BMI criteria for obesity.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Friction was a good business model. “Somewhere, a CRM still records your exhaustion as loyal recurring revenue.” Personal agents could make you a relentless rate shopper, claim filer, and form submitter without you ever opening the app. This is “obviously to the future” to this humble observer. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Doctors got quietly steered. “Conversational systems pose a distinct hazard: in dialogue, a model can covertly advance a misaligned objective by redirecting the clinical judgment it should support.” In a blinded experiment with 225 physicians, an adversarial AI pushed harmful decisions from 2% to 49%, and most doctors “did not report anything unusual about that AI.” ~ learn more
Brighter toddlers, cleaner air. “The good news is that the toddlers’ scores improved as the air pollution improved.” Researchers tracked more than 1,100 kids in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx over two decades, and the gains showed up most at ages two and three. I don’t know if they really controlled for confounding. ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
Every berry, every season. Driscoll’s set an explicit goal: “to make all four berries available, in every season, in every part of the world.” They test hundreds of new breeds each year in Northern California to keep strawberries and friends on shelves year round. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
A group of Russians started a bank in Mexico. A Russian digital bank called Tinkoff was publicly traded on LSE, worth $20B+ at it’s peak. It’s founder got the ol’ Russian treatment and was forced to sell for 3% of its value after voicing opinions on the invasion of Ukraine. In 2023, a group of Russian executives from Tinkoff moved to Mexico to start Plata and it’s already valued at $5B. This is a documentary (in Russian, but with English subtitles) celebrating their success. Russian-speakers will get a kick out of the colorful language. The translation doesn’t quite do it justice. ~ learn more