Faisal’s Web Site
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.
Sunday, 2 August 2026
“The Odyssey” is Actually a Rap Album
Tuesday, 28 July 2026
The Ads on Apple News Continue to Suck, but at Least There Are a Lot of Them
John Gruber: “When streaming services like Netflix let you pay more money for ad-free tiers, it’s an explicit acknowledgement that the experience with ads is worse. Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse.”
The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction
Kyla Scanlon: “We’ve stopped expecting the real world to work. We assume it will be slow, broken, or possibly on fire. That’s just the baseline.”
Friday, 24 July 2026
Scenarios For Ending The Russo-Ukraine War
Phillips P. Obrien: “International Relations theories have had only limited value over the last decades because they often downplay the material differences of different leaderships (let alone political systems).”