link.dump.8.16.2026
pokemon, bad guys, watermarks, antibiotics
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.
Majority of streaming revenue is from the ad tier now. And that’s why they did it - because most of us are totally fine with some advertising if it saves us a couple dollars a month.
Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure. Ross Douthat has an interesting take for his final NYT opinion article. I frequently disagree with him, and I think this piece lacks some self-reflection for sure, but overall very worth your time.
Very exciting to see Sodium batteries doing some cool shit in the US right now.
Really enjoyed this piece about how agentic code quality is different from the old days and it’s all related to the constraints you put on the agent. Very good read.
It’s interesting to read Zuckerberg’s very long AI manifesto. I haven’t read much of his stuff but I find his writing very…robotic? I know that’s a joke about him, and I’m not trying to lean into it, but I struggled to gel with it compared to, say, when I read Gates’ take on these or even Altman. I guess I have other thoughts but maybe later.
To go along with Zuck’s AI manifesto - a release of a local AI model from Meta called Muse Glimmer. And a counterpoint to that — local models will not win. I love the disagreement and tension, that’s how I know this stuff continues to be a big deal. I am inclined to like Goedecke’s writing and points more as well
The poverty of anti-tech thought by Noah Smith is a great little screed and a slap-fight between two writers. I like slap-fights that run to the thousands of words between them as opposed to, say, the TLDR bullshit that seems most desired. I tend to agree with Smith and he’s turned me off ever picking up the book they’re fighting about.
Stratechery - Nvidia’s Risky Business. Detailed and heavy read on the state of the AI business world right now. I certainly don’t fully grok it all but it made for some “light” reading.
Pokemon beat the S&P 500. Welp, time to liquidate my 401k.
So I’m working on a game written in golang, which is sort of bonkers but it appeals when I read stuff like this — Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail.
Throwback to those dudes who get brought up on charges for sinking wine to the bottom of the ocean and then selling it to rich people for $500 a year later. Should have got those permits.
When is a mushroom “alive?” How long do they live? Turns out there are some fascinating answers.
OpenAI / HuggingFace breakdown from some OpenAI folks. Well, this is terrifying.
Trump’s scheme to sell his Truth Social posts is astoundingly corrupt even for him. And, here, I guess have a DOGE was shit at what it said it would do article too.
US wait times for cancer surgeries are getting longer and longer. This was an interesting article because the limited bandwidth is partly that we’re a victim of our own success in that cancer is not the same death sentence it was and partly that, as we’ve specialized, we haven’t figured out how to handle the case loads.
ChatGPT and Anthrophic in a price war. Good for the consumer.
Good read on the AI watermarking stuff not being a big deal. I agree with Sean.
The Amazon Tax. It wasn’t something I’d heard described before but it is a fantastic metaphor for how Amazon operates. They aren’t an ecommerce site, they’re a utility with an ecommerce site as a big customer.
A year ago AI was designing antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs. Every time I see someone raging about datacenter stuff this is the counterweight. I do think datacenters need to be discussed, but I think the consideration that building those datacenters leads to things like this should also be a factor.
AI startup engineers have been working 996. 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Fuck all the way off with this. I guess it’s interesting that others want to do this but I’ll never understand shoveling my identity into anything like that and it seems a tad unhealthy to me. Maybe I’ve just never been “passionate” enough about something.
A deep dive on the reverse proxy design because I’m a nerd and this is hard and it’s interesting.