August 2026
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
Is Anthropic Making Money? How Much Money?
Brad DeLong: “And, I was confident, selling your soul to SEO and charging for the eyeballs your second-rate search results trapped into repeated casts of the yarrow sticks would ultimately be self-defeating. … And, I was confident, selling your soul to clickbait-rage and charging for the eyeballs your outrage-bait feeds had trapped into doomscrolling would ultimately be self-defeating. Guess what? Selling your soul to SEO was not self-defeating. Neither was becoming the master necromancer of rage-bait doomscrolling. Am I missing something similar here and now?”
Monday, 17 August 2026
Collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation would lead to substantial oceanic carbon release and additional global warming
D. Nian, M. Willeit, N. Wunderling, A. Ganopolski & J. Rockström: “Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7 °C (60 °N–90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6 °C (60 °S–90 °S).”
Friday, 14 August 2026
Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’
Ian Sample, The Guardian: “They may be the nascent, swaddled phase that marks the beginning of almost every supermassive black hole’s journey’”
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
Florian Herrengt: “You can’t afford bad engineers anymore.”
Thursday, 13 August 2026
rent, always rent
Dan Davies: “Which means that, in general, when you look at the recorded profit margins of a retailer in the accounts, what you are learning about is how good a job the real estate investment bankers did.”
Tuesday, 4 August 2026
The 90 day disclosure policy is dead
Himanshu Anand: “Your monthly maintenance window is not a safety margin. It is an attack window.”
See also: the time it takes to fix, qualify, build, distribute, and receive an OS update.