link.dump.8.09.2026
experimental drugs, technology, existential dread for mathematicians
I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. Every Sunday (if I remember) I will send out my weeks worth of links. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward these if someone might find them interesting.
Bill Gates’ post on all the good news in the world is a great very short read. Everyone should check it out.
How to keep thinking. This is something Squirt and I have talked about a lot recently. I think this will be a differentiator for his generation. The old quote about there being no different between a person that doesn’t read and a person who cannot read will hold true in a new way with AI - there won’t be a difference between a person who doesn’t THINK and a person who lets the AI do all the THINKING for them.
India blocked telecommunications, this little application let people communicate anyways. This type of distributed network that end-runs around authoritarianism is really cool and a great consequence of technology. Starlink in Ukraine has a similar vibe as well.
Sucks that giving and taking credit in tech companies is so fucking complicated.
The Non-MAGA Mutiny by Nick Catoggio is well worth a read…but I’ll believe it when I see it in an election or two.
Montana making experimental drugs much easier to come by. I think this is a pretty net-positive thing because it allows innovation to happen faster and giving consumers/patients more agency and options to try. Seems like the right approach.
A mystery book that sold for millions got pulled from publication over concerns of AI. What’s amazing to me is not that this happened, businesses are still figuring out what needs to happen and the legal landscape is incredibly fuzzy. What I thought was interesting is the takes from two different authors — John Scalzi and Hugh Howey - and how different their approaches are. Lots of thoughts here, obviously, and I’ve touched on it a bit here with my own AI use.
The Millennial Midlife Crisis: Part IV. I have enjoyed this entire series as he’s written it, I think there’s lots of interesting “generational shift” types of things bubbling inside.
Noah Smith on how AI is ending the age of heroes. I think he’s right for some form of heroes, but thankfully I think others will survive just fine. However…
Mathematicians are having an existential crisis in the face of AI solving so many hard math problems — The Dark Night of Mathematics. Honestly sounds even worse than for technology folks like me.
Stop chasing your “one true passion.” This is a pretty great little piece as somone who doesn’t have “a passion” so much as lots of things I enjoy doing/playing/working/building/solving.
Could piece on Trump’s stupid arch and the absurdity of it all. It’s a little more calm and collected than I am.
Teen got paid for some meme games on Steam and, honestly, I feel like this is just social commentary more than anything else.
Are the Democrats going to save us this time? It’s a great fucking question, but they seem more concerned with fighting than with winning and I think that’s a bad recipe.
Software Engineering is Dead. Long Live Software Engineering! I wrote a whole piece that ended up referencing this one at the end.
SpaceX new price guidance, and the argument for why it’s worth so much, was interesting to read here.
Meta has a model for catching up to the frontier models — turn their customers into the product like always. Honestly, seems like an idea that might work very well, I’ll be interested to see how it goes, but I’m not sure Meta has the cachet they used to have. Time will tell.
Death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen dramatically — what were the breakthroughs behind this? In 90 years we've taken the biggest killer of humans in the US from 750 in 100,000 to below 150 through medical innovation. I thought it was also fascinating that Covid shows up clearly on this chart as well.
Old piece from Matt Yglesias on the techno-optimist manifesto “fallacy.” Some good thoughts. I’m a little bit different than him and Andreesen so maybe at some point I could write up a bit more.