Links (7)
I have not yet begun to link!
Been a bit busy, so slightly delayed from my usual cadence, but I’m Still Here!
Disclaimer: Just because I include a link does not mean I endorse it or am confident in its claims.
AI & Technology
AI Will Not Make You Rich by Jerry Neumann: Really enjoyed this long-form article by Jerry Neumann arguing that (most) investors won’t get rich off of investing in AI, even though I tentatively disagree with it. The central thesis is that AI’s market trajectory will look similar to container shipping, where very few people made tons of money because the competition quickly ate away most of the profit, but consumers and the world benefited massively. Much of my disagreement comes from being skeptical of the central claim that AI is obviously the “epitome of the ICT wave”, as it rests on an unjustified claim that proprietary models prevent revolutionary experimentation. That said, still feels worth thinking about hard!
Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature by Mitchell Hashimoto: Good field report from Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Terraform and founder of Hashicorp) on implementing a real Ghostty feature (mainly) with agentic coding.
Why future AI agents will be trained to work together by Anson Ho: Epoch Research with qualitative predictions on how multi-agent systems and models will evolve over the next few years.
AI coding agents rely too much on fallbacks by seangoedecke.com: File this one in “yep, yep, yep.”
An exclusive conversation with Yang Zhilin one year later: “Standing at the beginning of infinity” by 张小珺: Interview with the founder of Moonshot AI, creators of the Kimi K2 model. If you want a sense of how a Chinese AI leader thinks about things, this is a great source.
Bitter Lessons From HALO’d Companies by Michael Dempsey: Characteristically good post by Mike Dempsey on the dynamics leading to so many HALO (Hire-And-License-Out) deals. Mike deserves credit for having foreseen many of the dynamics now playing out in AI, including some for which I was wrongly skeptical of at the time.
Coasean Bargaining at Scale by Cosmos Institute: Extremely idea-rich piece by (friend of the blog) Seb Krier on how AGI fundamentally changes the calculus around transaction & coordination costs. Highly recommended. I suspect the level of transactability this would introduce into society at the extremes would bother many, but I also don’t think Seb is proposing going all the way in one hop.
Walter by Rohit Krishnan: Fun practitioner’s post about training a small model to write better tweets using RLVR. I know I’ve said this many times throughout my writing but it’s still crazy to me that you can just do RL and have it work!
AI Protopia by Nomads Vagabond: A speculative look at what AI “protopia” could look like. As with every hypothetical situation, this is, in my opinion, better read as a vision than a prediction.
Business Strategy & Management
Chaos and Coherence in Business by Cedric Chin: Good follow-up on the Chaos / Conscientiousness post from last time by Cedric, who referred me to the original post. Similar to Cedric, I operate more naturally in the conscientious mode so it’s helpful to have someone who comes from a similar starting point explain the problem with not being able to also embrace chaos.
The Joy of Small Markets by Cedric Chin: Infohazard for many of us but good nonetheless.
A Primer on Strategy Choice Chartering by Roger Martin: Useful examples of percolating strategy down an org.
Bill Gates Memo - “...our strategy for the 90’s is Windows...” by tech-insider.org: I’m always a sucker for these old memos. The thing that often strikes me is how, even well before the age of remote work, early tech companies had extremely strong written cultures in which senior executives would spend lots of time debating their strategy over email. I sometimes feel like some of this has been lost with Slack...
The Visions of Neil Mehta by Jeremy Stern: Really interesting profile of Neil Mehta, founder of Greenoaks Capital. Between this, the above Jerry Neumann piece, and the more recent Josh Kushner piece, Colossus is crushing it.
How Rockefeller and His Partners Built Standard Oil by Austin Vernon: Austin summarizes the alternative, IMO more interesting, story behind Standard Oil than the one I spent most of 700 pages hearing about in Titan (which was still good).
Biotech & Healthcare
Where are all the trillion dollar biotechs? by lada nuzhna: Lada runs through potential sources of trillion dollar biotechs and ultimately concludes that the most likely, although not only possible, avenue is curing highly prevalent diseases, with a focus on age-related diseases. Lada makes a lot of great points, but I think she misses the business model factor. If you look at the list of trillion dollar companies and think about their moats, network effects and scale economies loom large. To date, biopharma has lacked network effects and has a form of scale economy, but not nearly as strong as the tech titans (or a company like Tesla for that matter).
From chaos, order: On the nature and measurement of biological aging by Jose Luis Ricon: Good post by Jose with his take on aging clocks and the nature of aging.
Manifold Bio: Barcoded Biologics by Elliot Hershberg: Elliot profiles Manifold Bio. Manifold has flown under the radar!
How do you use a virtual cell to do something actually useful? (3/3) by Abhishaike Mahajan: Abhi wraps up his series on how they’re using virtual cells at Noetik.
Anatomy of a Biotech Failure by age1: This post is great. Case studies like this are very underrated and hard to find. If I were to summarize, I’d say cognitive biases like confirmation bias are littered throughout these stories.
Your newborn is not Hepatitis B vaccinated because of wokeness by Ruxandra Teslo: At risk of crossing my “no partisan politics” line, I really enjoyed this post by Rux. Maybe it was a bit of a guilty pleasure but we all deserve those, don’t we?
A Playbook for Human Evidence by Dr. Shelby: Shelby with ample wisdom on the myriad strategies for gathering human evidence (besides the standard trials playbook).
Software Engineering
What is “good taste” in software engineering? by seangoedecke.com: If you’re interested in software engineering meta, you should be reading Sean.
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work by seangoedecke.com: Great post that validates my natural inclinations and is therefore Platonically correct. That said, having recently interacted with frontend more again, the simplest thing that could possibly work sadly becomes mighty complex when you introduce browser edge cases...
Hardware & Manufacturing
Building a Safety Culture: Move And Don’t Break Safety Critical Things, Part III by Substack: Really enjoying Blake’s series on building a hardware company. Feels like real, hard-won management wisdom.
The Electric Slide by Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico: Admittedly I have not finished this but, so far, an interesting deep dive into the emerging “electric stack” platform. I want the stove so badly…
Biology & Evolution
One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants by Y. Juvé et al.: Evolution’s power remains underrated!
Misc & Interesting
Why I shop via print catalogs in 2025 by kevinlynagh.com: My friend, Kevin, on why he prefers print catalog design. I too long for the level of information density McMaster Carr provides. Why do more sites not provide it?! Why do designers think I can only handle one sentence per scroll page?!
Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier by dynomight: Main takeaway from this for me is the Wirecutter is sadly no longer credible as a trusted neutral reviewer. Sad.
Attention by Substack: Meditations on attention, and meditation. Recommended!
Government & Policy
Four Ways to Fix Government HR by Santi Ruiz: Characteristically interesting and wonky interview from Santi Ruiz at Statecraft on government HR and why it’s especially bad at the federal level.