link.dump.2.16.2026
free news, measure energy of things, corruption, and advertising
Americans don’t think they need to pay for news. For the longest time I agreed. However, more and more as I’ve made attention to motivations and the attention-economy I have started to change my mind. When I wrote about understanding media motivations a large part of what I had in my head was paying for the news. Similarly when I read Chris Hayes’ book The Sirens Call I strengthened this change in my mind. A news media diet that is only ever “free” has stared to scare me.
Hannah Ritchie created a slick little tool that answers the question of how much energy various things in the household cost. Make sure you pull in the chatGPT line item so you can compare to some other things.
An interesting study on what couples argue about. Really interesting that communication covers a huge chunk of it. I also thought it was fascinating that food and religion are way at the bottom.
So an AI agent published a hit piece on a developer who rejected some code changes from them. The internet reflects humans, and AI is trained on the internet. So AI just reflects humans. Reading over what the machine had to say…it is absolutely just a pissed of human in this scenario.
Cloudflare is creating a tool that simplifies HTML pages down to MARKDOWN files for LLM processing - to save money. I think this is an interesting “grease” type of work that we will see more and more of.
Matthew Yglesias on how Americans think everyone is corrupt. This piece spoke to my very soul and I loved it. Also take a look at the first footnote and the comments - that post is sponsored by Polymarket which is really interesting. I like the introduction of this type of sponsoring model, as long as it’s stated, because Yglesias especially paywalls stuff so it would free up more of his stuff for me to read. More avenues for him to get paid (as he should be) and more avenues for me to read his stuff even if I’m not up for paying him every month yet.
Noah Smith has an interesting look back on how his life has changed over his lifetime. It echoes what I’ve seen myself and I appreciated his introspection. This is a constant “thing” in my head when I think about the world Squirt is going to see. Also learned a new word: exocortex
The vibes on AI feel like they have shifted drastically in the past couple months. This piece says exactly that: something big is happening. And then I found an interesting addendum to that from another author and, god help me, it’s a twitter link: something big is happening part 2. Both are fascinating, and both read as fundamentally different from what we’ve seen before.
Similar-but-different from the AI vibe changes above is The AI Vampire. And then there is Gas Town which sounds both amazing and terrifying and is leading to multiple Claude subscriptions for each developer? Wut? Finally there is How I Use Claude Code. All of these are shifting my paradigm. All of these are fundamentally showing that the world is changing even faster here at the beginning of 2026.
OpenAI’s introduction of advertising, and the fallout, are a completely expected development. The slow slouching towards the Bethlehem that is enshittification is unsurprising. Doesn’t mean it won’t still be useful and powerful but…yeah.
FDA suddenly rejecting an mRNA flu vaccine trial is fucking stupid. I’m not sure what else to say, but it doesn’t seem to follow any rational or defensible justifications.
I read a lot of stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read.