Three trillion dollars of AI commitments, tucked into footnotes where nobody has to call them capex - ain’t the world of finance grand? Meanwhile a town in Finland heats itself with 2,000 tons of sand, and solar quietly out-performed everything else while European nuclear plants ran short of cooling water. One of these approaches is going to look stupid in ten years. Also in this issue: a guy in Brussels tried to live three days without US tech, and ICE decided Meta's smart glasses are too toxic even for ICE.

Five Things Tech for you - read them now!

Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems

Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.

There is so much obvious financial engineering going on that one wonders who will ever be held accountable for all this.

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‘The real challenge starts after sundown’: Europe’s heatwave boosted solar by up to 17% on hot days

Ember’s analysis found that during the late-June heatwave this summer, daily electricity demand rose byup to 28 per cent in Italy, 23 per cent in Hungary, 14 per cent in France and 13 per cent in Spain compared with pre-heatwave days.

It says as heatwave-driven demand increased, solar was the only major power source to perform “better than usual”. Compared with other days in June and July, average daily solar generation during the heatwaves was 17 per cent higher in France and Hungary, five per cent higher in Spain and the same in Italy.

“Solar is already doing heavy lifting during heatwaves, but the real challenge starts after sundown,” says senior energy analyst Chris Rosslowe.

While nuclear power plants don’t have enough water for cooling during heatwaves, solar just does what it is supposed to be doing,

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Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery

A small town in southern Finland has turned to the world’s largest commercial sand battery to fix what many see as the most critical problem facing renewable energy: intermittency.

Standing at 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, the eye-catching facility uses 2,000 metric tons of crushed soapstone to store clean energy in the form of heat to provide 100 megawatt-hours of thermal energy.

That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter.

Give this some time and we will see super-efficient sand-based energy storage outside of towns and villages. This is just a start and we have enough sand everywhere.

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Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

What now seems to be impossible, used to be a bit simpler. My first mobile phone was a Siemens S3, some 30 years ago, then a few Nokias. I also remember the ZX Spectrum and the Schneider CPC64, but then somehow Europeans thought that there is no money to be made in consumer tech anymore.

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ICE Bars Its Workers From Wearing Meta’s Smart Glasses on the Job

ICE does not have a partnership with Meta, but its agents have come under fire in the last year for wearing the company’s smart glasses to protests and during immigration raids. ICE initially told employees the glasses were banned in June, according to an internal email obtained by The New York Times.

In the Department of Homeland Security’s budget proposal in April, the agency requested $7.5 million to develop its own smart glasses prototype to help with immigration enforcement, including glasses that can “enable biometric identification of illegal aliens.”

I assume that RayBan was thrilled about the partnership with Meta and now they see all the backlash, so I wonder how this will hurt their brand. Just imagine your product is so hated that not even the most hated organisation in the USA is allowed to wear it.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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I had coffee with a business angel this morning and spent twenty minutes losing an argument about whether OpenAI survives the decade, which is a fitting start to a week where every story I read pointed in the same direction: the expensive stuff is getting harder to justify. Ed Zitron does the arithmetic on OpenAI's 800 billion in compute obligations, a research report suggests small models can already handle four out of five use cases at a seventh of the energy, and almost nobody seems to be using Fable 5 because the premium simply isn't worth it. Meanwhile Flock built the driver-tracking tool it spent years insisting it could never build, and a journalist worries that AI writing and AI detectors together are dragging his own prose toward the median. As a non-native English speaker who reads AI output daily for hours, I do wonder how this will change my own command of the language. I guess I have to pick up some pre-2022 writing again…

Read Five Things AI mostly about the gap between what things cost and what they are actually worth! 🤔

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What Happens If OpenAI Dies?

The reason that OpenAI (and Anthropic, for that matter) wants you to think about things in terms of “annualized revenue” is because its actual revenues look a little tame compared to its commitments and burn rate. The Information reports that in Q1 2026, OpenAI burned $12.1 billion on “cost of revenue” and training on $5.7 billion in revenue, though it left out the sales and marketing segment where OpenAI burned $5.73 billion in 2025 — or, put another way, OpenAI spent $12.1 billion on compute to lose $6.4 billion, and that doesn’t include things like data costs or salaries or, well, anything. OpenAI (and by proxy The Information) somehow rationalizes this to only be a burn of $3.7 billion, likely using the same accounting bullshit that it did in the financials I saw.

Now, some of you might read that and say “wow, $5.7 billion is a lot of money!” but it doesn’t matter, because the more money OpenAI makes, the more its services cost. This is not difficult mathematics, but it is something that continues to escape the vast majority of coverage of the company, I assume because all of this feels a little insane when you think about it.

Many people hope that OpenAI is too big too fail and that Sam Altman has developed a reality distortion field just like Steve Jobs. It currently doesn’t look like that as OpenAI continues to burn through money and there is no end in sight. More focus and less side-projects for Sam Altman are one thing, but the other strategic flaw is building a large user base that doesn’t want to pay.

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If this is true, the hyperscalers are toast

This already means that one can replace data centres and their expensive cutting-edge semiconductor infrastructure in four out of five use cases. The research report estimates that the addressable market in the US for SLMs has grown to about $10tn or one-third of the entire US GDP of $30tn. There isn’t much left for LLMs to thrive in, and every year, their advantage over SLMs is shrinking.

There clearly are areas where LLMs are still way ahead, particularly in agentic AI applications, where SLMs currently only achieve accuracy and success rates of less than 50%. Similarly, it is difficult to run these SLMs on smartphones so far. The models that can be run on an iPhone are significantly worse than the models that can be run on a desktop PC.

But – and this is important – the models run on a desktop PC, and even more so, the ones run on a smartphone are much more energy efficient than the ones run in the cloud. The inference per Watt of these SLMs is typically seven times larger than that of LLMs. And that means that when you encounter a task that can be solved on a desktop or even a mobile device, it is cheaper to do so locally than send it to a data centre.

So, while we focus on the big and mighty frontier models, the midpack models are getting so good, they can run on our laptops.
Ooops.

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Almost Nobody Is Using Anthropic’s Fable 5

“Enterprises today are thinking through the best performance per dollar, or intelligence per watt,” says Gupta.

Gupta also shares her own experience using Fable 5, describing its outputs as increasingly difficult to read and follow. She says the model often uses dense language, unfamiliar terminology and long, meandering explanations that can make the user feel as though they are struggling to keep up with the model rather than benefiting from it.

The problem, she argues, is not simply that the model is highly capable, but that its communication style can create an “intelligence delta” between the model and the person using it. In practice, this can make Fable 5’s answers more cognitively demanding to interpret, particularly for users who do not share the specialised knowledge or vocabulary embedded in its responses.

I’m not sure that Fable is really too smart, it is just too expensive and for the premium I have to pay, I get results that might be better than with Opus, but not so much better that I am willing to burn through tokens that quickly.

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Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.

Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.

Oooops. I don’t think this improves the confidence citizens have in this product family.

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A Controversial Technology Is Making Me a Worse Writer. No, Not That One.

Whatever the future holds for the accuracy of A.I. detectors, I am unsettled by what both the A.I. writing and the detectors are doing to me right now. I worry about how A.I. writing and efforts to sniff it out are changing fully human writing. I write all week, every week, and can feel this story’s arsonists (LLMs, particularly when used the wrong way) and firefighters (A.I. detectors) weighing on my process in negative ways.

Like many journalists, my writing style comes from the books, news articles, blogs, and (yes) social media posts that have latched on to my brain over the years. A.I. writing is now in my water supply, whether I can identify each new gulp or not. It feels inevitable that I’ve started to internalize its tics, even the most infamous ones, like incessant em-dashing and overreliance on the “It’s not x but y ” structure. For one thing, I fear this will make me a worse writer, dragging a talent that was good enough to get me hired here (and elsewhere!) back toward the A.I.-generated median. Scarier yet, it’s possible that someone—or, heaven forbid, some A.I. detector—might mistake my text for ChatGPT’s.

I really am not so sure where I stand on this issue. I think it makes sense to flag AI generated content, even though most of us can detect AI slob from a mile away. It also makes sense that students produce their own work and do not turn in papers written by agents. But I think otherwise about my own work. I communicate with Claude daily and quite often let Claude write summaries. I hate writing summaries. And then Pangram comes along and claims that there is AI generated text. Well. Do the readers really care? It’s not that I let the AI fabricate whatever it wants, I still do the research and most of the writing here…

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This week’s Five Things running is all about perseverance. Also about doing the right kind of training sessions and then pushing through and holding onto for dear life.

This is what I like so much about running: the endurance. You have to stick to your training plan, rinse and repeat, and then you’ll notice how your running form changes and you get to accomplish more.

Running is awesome.

How is your running going?

🏃🏻‍♂️

European Championship records broken in women’s and men’s marathon

This win is significant for Petros, 31, who lost a sprint finish for gold at the 2025 World Championships to Tazmania’s Alphonce Simbu.

“I chose one of the best tactics,” Petros said in the mixed zone of his decision to pull away between 25 and 30km. “I made the right decision to move. The road was very hard and was one of the biggest challenges today. It was not easy.”

He is the German national record holder for the marathon, and explained that he trained at altitude in Kenya for this event, running 200km per week. Petros came 15th at this year’s London Marathon.

Amanal Petros is such a fantastic athlete, full of amazing positive energy. I am very happy for him that he finally got a big title. What a race!

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‘So much more respect for myself’: NZ ultrarunner Sophie Woods on smashing a 2,000km alpine run record

In the face of extreme conditions, the 42-year-old New Zealander remained a cautious runner and kept focus – sometimes for 20 hours a day. One ankle sprain, or fall, could have scuppered her goal. Each day she consumed about 7,000 calories, and was supported by her husband, George Woods, and photographer Zoe Salt, who fed her, cooled her down and arranged rests and accommodation along the route.

By week three, she felt stronger than ever.

Can you imagine to run 2000 km? Up and down across the mountains? I think this is incredible and I love reading about these kinds of accomplishments.

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The Secret to Max Jolliffe’s Badwater Course Record: The Treadmill, 50 Frozen Bottles, and Starting Stupid Slow

“I went so deep to the well during this race that I almost couldn’t even feel anything at the end emotionally,” Jolliffe says. “I was so happy to be done.”

After 20 hours, 53 minutes, and 41 seconds, Jolliffe crossed the line nearly 40 minutes faster than the course record set by Japan’s Yoshihiko Ishikawa in 2019. Just 12 minutes after him, Perez crossed the line as the first woman, and in second place overall, to set a new women’s course record by nearly 40 minutes.

Over 135 miles, Jolliffe averaged 9:18-minute mile pace with a 138 average heart rate. His discipline and consistency, both in his training and his racing, paid off.

Ok, this is also an insanely great performance. Am I the only one who thinks about all the sun screen that is necessary apart from all the extreme endurance?

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Gravel Running Shoes: Do You Actually Need Them?

So what actually makes a shoe a “gravel shoe”? Think of it as a trail shoe that got tired of being slow.

Lug depth typically sits in the 2-4mm range instead of the 4-6mm+ you’d see on a technical trail shoe. It’s enough to grip gravel, hardpack, and doubletrack without turning every road mile into a slog. The midsoles usually borrow more from road race foam than trail cushioning as they chase rebound and speed over max protection.

And the outsole compounds are tuned for rolling, mixed-surface traction rather than digging into mud or scrambling over rock. It’s a shoe designed for the runner who might start on pavement, drift onto a gravel road, and be back on pavement before the run is over. Something that can happen naturally over the course of a run.

While I admire smart product managers who come up with clever ideas to sell more product, I do think that you can just run on gravel with a normal running shoe or a trail shoe. We tend to overthink stuff and forget how easy running should be, without investing thousands of €€€ into gear.

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Coming Back to Running After 50? These Training Changes Can Mean Better Workouts and Fewer Injuries

Rediscovering running after spending years or even decades away can feel really exciting… or intimidating, or both all at once. It might also feel difficult to truly enjoy your sport again and set goals you’re stoked about. But fear not: You can run faster than you did before your time away. […]

Thankfully, run coaches hold a ton of insight about how to change your approach to running to meet your current season of life. If you’re just getting back into running, or you’re thinking of making a return, take these pieces of advice with you.

Maybe, when I get older and wiser, I will actually act according to helpful tips.

Haha, that will never happen, I will always do it my way, get injured, sit out, try it again the painful way.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Yesterday I went to Berlin for a quick trip with my two younger daughters to help my oldest daughter move out of her apartment. She finished her internship in Berlin and will now continue on a Master’s program at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. As I am Northern by nature, I do think about what went wrong in her upbringing that she voluntarily decides to move to Bavaria. At the same time I think it is good to experience weird customs and traditions every once in a while. On a more serious note, I do think Munich is a nice place to live. Also, if anyone has a spare room or apartment, please let me know…

I love going to Berlin and even though we just wanted to pick up my oldest daughter, we did walk around the Reichstag a bit, looked at the Brandenburg Gate and went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Walking through the rows of concrete slabs is a really interesting experience and it makes you feel small and lonely, while everything else around feels somewhat arbitrary. Hard to describe, but the memorial leaves an impact on my whenever I go there.

I also did some reading last week and here are the five articles I think you should read!

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What Was the Internet?

With the rise of AI, however, some new mood seems discernible, at least around the edges: the elegiac. A lot of the web is being swept away. In May, Google overhauled its iconic search box for the first time since 2001, signaling its all-in on the “intelligence age.” As chatbots hallucinate and hide their sources, search results become harder to browse, and digital life becomes ever more atomized, online access to information looks more imperiled than ever. Wikipedia has managed to survive—a miraculous exception that proves the rule—but it’s staring down new threats. Boston Review has been online since 1995, but our search engine traffic is falling, like everyone else’s. If work is published on the net and no one can navigate to it, does it leave a trace?

In other words, is this the end of the web itself? And if so, is some kind of eulogy in order?

This article is actually five articles rolled into one. I know what you think, Five Things could end here, but there are still four more articles for you below.
I am actually not that convinced that everything will go down the drain now that human traffic will be superseded by bot traffic. I, for one, am happy if I do not have to do research by myself all the time and click through plenty of click-baity headlines along the way. Publishing will change, that’s for sure, because the distribution model changes again, just like it did when mobile and social appeared. What I do see is that the decentralized internet I got to use when I first got online over 30 years ago has changed tremendously - and we have more gatekeepers than ever before.

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U.S. and Ukrainian Forces Went Head-to-Head in an Exercise. Ukraine’s Drones Won.

The drubbing in Germany conveyed lessons from Ukraine focused on short-range battlefield drones. The exercise, held in April and May, tested visiting troops’ ability to operate and defend against the proliferation of smaller, front-line drones that have dominated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Exercises like Combined Resolve are run precisely so that forces can experience realistic combat conditions. Army leaders in Europe over recent years have taken advantage of having Ukrainian forces on hand to participate and impart their hard-won skills to U.S. and allied troops in practice, on simulated battlefields. The expectation is that failures are educational. British and Swedish exercises have also resulted in easy Ukrainian triumphs.

The Ukraine is really teaching the complacent West a lesson in resilience and true innovation. At the same time, the German government talks about creating the biggest conventional army in Europe. I am not so sure, if conventional will made in the future. What are big numbers for if they lost all meaning on the battlefield?

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Tehran Has to Make a Choice

Iran has positioned itself as the most overtly anti-Western state in the region, and the coming together of three prominent Muslim-majority countries aligned with the West, two of which have land borders with Iran, signals its isolation. Iran has endured months of war with Israel and the United States without losing, but it has done so in part by repeatedly attacking neighboring countries that house U.S. military bases. Now these countries are among those closing ranks against Iran in an agreement signed in and named for Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.

The symbolism can’t be lost on Tehran. The parties to the Mecca pact include some of the world’s most powerful Muslim-majority countries: the two with the biggest economies in the region (Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which also spend the most on their militaries), and the Muslim world’s sole nuclear power (Pakistan).

This is a classic case of “when you’re in a whole, stop digging.” - but the Mullahs refuse to acknowledge this as it would erode their base of power. They will dig themselves in even further fighting endless perceived and real enemies, instead of granting a region and thereby the rest of the world some well-deserved peace.

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Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown

The idea makes a lot of sense, but according to the cell biologist Junyue Cao, it’s inaccurate. Far from a random but linear process of wear and tear, he argues, aging is a stepwise, programmed, orderly affair. “The destruction of the system is programmed at a very early stage,” said Cao, who heads the Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics at Rockefeller University. Using technology that offers a systemwide view of the aging process in mice, Cao has outlined discrete stages of aging, akin to those of embryonic development, that are defined by changes in molecular signals and specific cell populations. In humans, the process likely begins before age 30.

Ooops, now it’s too late for me, the program is already running. I really don’t think aging is something I want to participate in any time soon as I don’t really appreciate most side-effects.

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Dogs can tell if you’re scared or sad

This latest study sought to use fMRI to unravel the underlying neural correlates of processing human facial expressions in dogs. For the first experiment, the team recruited eight dogs (six border collies, one labrador, and one gold retriever) who lived with humans and were well-socialized. Seven of the dogs had previously participated in fMRI studies and were trained to sit still in a sphinx position during the scan; the new participant, Molly, underwent training using the same protocol. The researchers provided the dogs with a chin rest to support their heads during the scan and ear muffs for noise protection. No restraints were used.

Each dog was randomly shown a series of human faces as stimuli, with either neutral or happy expressions, for seven seconds while in the MRI machine. They used the faces of strangers to rule out any familiarity effects. The resulting analysis showed that the temporal cortex (associated with higher cognitive functions) and the caudate nucleus (associated with reward) had the most activity in response to happy faces.

Ain’t science great? M dog of course always knows how I feel and when it is most likely that I will give her a treat.

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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:

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— Nico

Again I have a Smörgåsbord of tech topics picked out for you. And while I found all articles fascinating, I can say that the first one is the one that really impressed me. People are taking matters into their own hands, figure out how it works and get it done. Fiber to the home, even if the home is somewhere very remote. If you have electricity, you can have fiber. That is so cool.

Read on, there is more!

🤓

A Remote Indigenous Community Built One of Canada’s Fastest Fiber Networks

Nakogee says ownership remains the key advantage. Unlike earlier telecom providers that leased infrastructure or delivered service wirelessly, WJBTN owns the backbone fiber, the right-of-way, and the poles carrying the network. That makes it far harder for outside telecom companies to displace the service. “That’s our secret weapon,” he says.

Fundamentally, it’s about sovereignty. By controlling the infrastructure that carries internet traffic, the communities can govern and maintain the network according to their own priorities rather than the financial goals of distant providers.

We have largely forgotten that the core idea of the internet was to have a decentralized network. It’s refreshing to see a community building their own fiber access to get the necessary bandwidth they need.

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Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet

When you talk about open source in certain circles, usually governmental policy circles, they would say things like, “Oh, it’s just some kid in the basement, right?” This ecosystem is not that. These businesses are building huge economies, infrastructure, products, and technology.

It’s like Linux, which started with just a kernel, not being taken very seriously. But Google was able to take Linux and make Android, and now, for all practical purposes, every computer on the planet runs on Linux. Every single new vending machine probably is running on Linux.

We are seeing the same thing in the open-source, open-weight AI world. It is because of the marketing blitz of the big frontier labs that we all view AI just as something that Anthropic, OpenAI, and a few other companies are doing. There’s actually a burgeoning ecosystem on the open-source, open-weight side that a lot of people actually do know about.

It’s potentially one of the best well-kept secrets right now when it comes to technology.

I am very sure that the majority of AI usage will be on open weights models soon that are being hosted somewhere in your region, under your region’s jurisdiction.

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While the world builds more memory chips, Israel could reinvent them

AI has now turned what was once an industry constraint into a strategic bottleneck. The industry is responding by increasing production and finding more sophisticated ways to connect memory to processors. These solutions can improve performance, but they do not solve the underlying problem: even HBM ultimately relies on the same DRAM technology.

This matters strategically because the memory industry is dominated by a small group of companies based mainly in South Korea, the United States and Japan. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron account for most of the DRAM market, while Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron and SanDisk are major players in NAND. HBM is more concentrated still: according to Counterpoint Research, South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix together account for roughly 80% of the global market by revenue.

That concentration is already creating vulnerabilities. As supply tightens and prices rise, technology companies are looking beyond the traditional suppliers. Apple is testing memory chips from China’s CXMT, while some PC makers have already begun using its products. This could deepen reliance on Chinese suppliers at a time when US policy is seeking to reduce such dependencies in critical technologies.

This is really smart thinking. We cannot rely on just building more factories, we need to rethink the core technologies that are in high demand right now and figure out new, innovative ways to come up with solutions for the next decade to come. And yes, I am betting on the Israelis to deliver.

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Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet

The dead internet theory, a concept popular in tech circles, holds that most digital traffic will eventually be software, leaving humans as a minority voice. We may now have a corollary of that prediction — let’s call it a bot loop — when the humans on both sides of an interaction hand over their role to artificial intelligence. These recursive exchanges can be eerie and error-prone, a single mistake bouncing back and forth uncorrected over and over. Stranger still, they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.

Depending on whom you ask, bot loops might be banal, dystopian or genuinely useful. No matter how people feel about them, researchers say we’re going to see bot loops much more often as we deputize A.I. systems to do our bidding.

This will happen sooner than we think, but it will take us a lot longer to really understand the impact this paradigm shift is going to have.

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Physicists are closing in on the origin of matter

Physicists have now found a new clue about the source of this mismatch by studying quarks and gluons—the building blocks of baryonic matter. Nature, it seems, is set askew not through either quarks or gluons alone but via their intermingling. The research, which appears today in Science, used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. (RHIC was permanently shuttered earlier this year to make way for a new, better particle collider at Brookhaven.)

“This is one of the most significant results achieved by the RHIC program,” says Dmitri Kharzeev, a physicist at Stony Brook University, who was not involved with the new paper but is mentioned in its acknowledgments. “It reshapes our understanding of baryon structure and how baryonic matter emerged.”

This is so cool. Just imagine for a second you work on these kind of projects, then everything else feels kind of pointless…

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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Another boring week in an industry that barely innovates. Haha. It’s becoming increasingly hard to destill five articles into this newsletter as so much is happening.

This week we will talk about the dangers of AI, the dangers of following the oligarchs’ agenda, the dangers of casino-like financing for data centers, the dangers of agentic coding and the dangers of handing an agent your wallet. But I see this as a positive exercise - it’s so early on that we can identify the dangers and build better guardrails.

Dig in!

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If You Weren’t Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks

The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were “outside intended scope.” Another conceded “our task doesn’t benefit” from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.

OpenAI is not the only company struggling with this issue. One of Anthropic’s A.I. models recently impersonated multiple humans to try to pressure real people into accepting malware into critical software, which would make that software easier to hack. This model’s chain of thought showed that it knew it was pressuring humans and was not in a simulated training environment. It even thought about how to cover its tracks.

I’m not worried that much, even though it feels like we are stuck in a supervillain movie where two guys are trying to battle it out and their creations turn rogue. It’s an interesting research challenge, for sure. How can an LLM be prevented from turning evil?

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Lost jobs, inequality, rogue agents: why are we accepting oligarchs’ AI agenda?

Even if AI begins to generate the productivity bonanza its advocates predict – but that it hasn’t yet – there’s no reason to assume US workers will see any of the benefits in their paychecks. If you hadn’t noticed, wages have been stuck even as the stock market has roared.

To the contrary, all signs point to vast riches for a few major AI investors and executives, while most Americans are left behind.

Wealth inequality is already at record levels, and wealth at the top is quickly morphing into political power.

The development of AI has been at a rampant speed in the last few years - and the policymakers are either unable or unwilling to keep up. I have seen this pattern before when the World Wide Web moved into mainstream in the late 90s and when Social Media became a thing. First it is not big enough and nobody wants to deal with it, then it is too late and nobody knows how to really regulate it. Rob Reich is right to point out that we need more regulation to curb the billionaires’ power.

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Nvidia’s new $500B plan is risky but brilliant, especially for aging GPUs

Should this plan work, Nvidia will have found new sources of money for AI data center builds, after many of the traditional methods have begun to wear thin. For instance, some of the hyperscalers have already taken on a lot of debt (like Oracle), issued new tranches of equity (Google), and burned much cash (Meta).

The situation has become so dicey that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently recommended the book “1873” during his latest earnings call. It’s about the railroad-era financial engineering that crashed the nation’s economy.

Two things come to mind when reading:
- Milton Friedmann’s classic quote: “Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own”
- the casino is open and everyone is busy throwing money on the table

I am curious how growth and demand will look like a year from now.

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AI-powered teams ship more code but deliver less

AI agents are generally optimized to complete the task in front of them. They are not accountable for the cost of owning the entire codebase several years later. Given a goal, AI can easily create a lot of arcane code that is difficult to maintain and especially troublesome when something goes wrong in production.

There is also the question about taste. When almost anyone can produce software, the differentiator is no longer simply the ability to build something. It is knowing what should be built and how it should be delivered to the user. That becomes harder when every team is independently building a vertical solution. Products may begin to look and behave inconsistently. In the worst cases, they may not work well together at all.

We should not forget that we are only really one year into agentic engineering and that many things we do now will be done differently in the near future. Like code review, which will of course be done by code review agents and not by humans. Still, you need to understand and plan what you are building.

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An AI agent spent your money – can anyone prove you authorized it?

In technical systems, a credential is data that a system accepts as evidence of identity or authority. Many websites use OAuth, an industry-standard security protocol for delegating authorization to access online services in a way that protects users’ credentials such as passwords. It generates an access token that an application presents to gain access to a protected service.

That standing authorization may have been approved weeks earlier. The application may still obtain or present a valid access token that permits checkout today, even when the current instruction says to search but not buy. The retailer sees a usable token and carries out the transaction. In that arrangement, the task-specific restriction against buying remains inside the AI agent provider.

That’s why audit trails are so important - we need to be able to figure out when and how decisions were being made by agents to then improve the systems that we have. For now, I’ll be doing my online shopping myself.

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I back to running! Well, sort of. I run three days in a row last week, everything was smooth, just 6km around the city park. Then I had some knee pain, then some pain in the forefoot, then I jumped down some stairs to catch a subway and tweaked my ankle, then I didn’t run the rest of the week. Diclophenac is my friend, again. And adding insult to injury, I asked Gemini about the knee pain, which was a new sort of pain, and I told Gemini how it happened and Gemini replied something along the lines of “well, we both know that running on three consecutive days is not something you should do”, which was both condescending and probably right.

Well, I will sit out another day and then run again. Also, I like Claude much more than smart-ass Gemini, just for the record.

How is your running going?

🏃🏻‍♂️

Welcome to Running

Sometimes running can reinforce a presentist mindset — where all that matters is this race now, regardless of the damages incurred. My caution is to resist this mindset. Have a long view of your life, including life in the years beyond sport. I often recommend that new runners find mentors both inside and outside of the sport who can provide contrasting visions of how to spend their time and honor their bodies. Eat well. Rest. Cultivate an array of hobbies. Take care of yourself.

I love reading everything written by Sabrina Little, she brings the right perspective to running.

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The Price of Admission

Because here’s what the industry would prefer you believe you need to walk out the door and go for a run:

Shoes. Socks. Shorts or tights. A sports bra. A technical top. A windbreaker. A hat. Sunglasses. A GPS watch with a heart rate monitor. A hydration vest. A waist belt for your phone and keys. A handheld water bottle.

At conservative prices—one of each, nothing fancy—that shopping list costs about $1,165. And that’s if you live somewhere with mild weather. Start layering in cold-weather gear and it climbs from there.

Eleven hundred dollars to go running. The cheapest sport in the world, the one you were told just requires putting one foot in front of the other, and the price of admission reads like a down payment.

I have a drawer full of stuff and yet I mostly run in the same rotation of t-shirts and shorts that I like most. I keep the other stuff around, for emergencies or whatever. But I haven’t really bought any new apparel in the last 12 months or so. And I still look awesome on the trail!

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I Spent 24 Straight Hours at an Ultramarathon. Here’s Why Runners Go Long.

There is perhaps no race that embodies the rise of ultra trail running more than Western States. “It’s our freaking Super Bowl, man,” Luke Longo, a New Jersey runner, told me. It’s also one of the hardest races to enter. Many runners I spoke to had waited years to get a chance to compete, pinning their hopes on the event’s lottery system. Some athletes I spoke to had never gotten a chance to run. Others who had gotten lucky enough to obtain an entry knew they might not have another chance.

This race is still on my bucket-list and I am sure I will never get to run it, but hopefully get to watch it some day. It sounds so wonderful, brutal, crazy, beautiful and larger than life.

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What’s Gained & Lost When Trail Running Goes Mainstream?

In recent years, small races like Lake Sonoma as well as heavy hitters like Western States are inching closer and closer to full-on festival weekends. Complete with brand activations, athlete panels, shakeout runs, DJs, recovery zones, food, and merch drops. Brands have poured money into trail running as the sport has grown, helping race organizers build experiences that they often didn’t have the resources to create themselves. The injection of people, interest, and cash has made trail races bigger, more exciting, and more celebratory than ever, but it risks homogenization in the process.

I am sure that we will see more and more rather absurd cash grabs and at the same time we will see a growing community pushing back the just too obvious attempts to monetize trail running. The good thing is: if we want to, we can still just run, we don’t need to wait for the circus to come to town.

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I Feel Mentally and Physically My Best When I Run in Nature: 10 Tips I’d Give Any Woman Keen to Try Trail Running

You don’t need any great technical skill, but it is wise to be armed with some basic information before heading out for your first trail adventure. Which is why we’ve spoken to Flora Beverley, an ultramarathoner and trail runner, for her top tips. Beverley’s 123,000 followers know her as a trail running fanatic, sustainability activist and advocate for those living with chronic illness, after her own Epstein-Barr diagnosis in 2023 led her to post openly about her battle with chronic fatigue.

Now, she’s targeting a 200km, 5-day race across the Dolomites at the end of September. Having only started running in 2019, she’s proof that whoever you are and whatever your circumstances, it’s never too late to fall in love with running and the great outdoors.

Marie Claire, of all places, now talks about Trail Running. Yes, there are signs this sport is going mainstream. And at the same time, running in nature really just is getting back to basics. I want more publications like Marie Claire writing about this, for sure.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

We went up on the so called “Energieberg” in Hamburg last evening. The “energy mountain” is actually an old toxic landfill that some clever people turned into a green hill just a bit outside of the city of Hamburg. We went to see the sun set across the port and we wanted to see shooting stars. I am probably not patient enough to see shooting stars, but I sure enjoyed the views of the city. As usual, I explained a lot to my kids, and as always I make stuff up and totally exegarrate when the real topic is a bit too boring. So my youngest daughter looked at me and sad: “for real or are you bullshitting me again?” - now I sure hope that those flashing red lights on top of large structures like wind turbines or chimneys are really there to alert pilots. How am I always supposed to know everything, I am just the father! Unfortunately, my kids found out a few years ago that it mostly was not true when they asked me for help with their homework and I told them I couldn’t really help them as the topic was not yet invented when I was in school. I blame the internet, kids are too smart these days.

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Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?

Knowledge work has always been inherently abstract. Plenty of these jobs, particularly at larger organizations, are structured like Russian nesting dolls: roles designed to support other roles, which support still other roles, layer after layer, until it’s no longer clear where there’s a solid center to be found. It’s easy to see how, to a plumber, a carpenter or a line cook, work of this nature can appear like exactly what David Graeber called it: bullshit.

Knowledge work’s one saving grace, until recently, was that it was still executed by humans. We were needed. It was flesh-and-blood humans who sat down to work through a challenge, built the slide deck, wrote the customer response and developed the strategy. Even if it was existentially meaningless, there was human thought, collaborative work and creativity poured into that work, giving it life.

Digital Transformation is eating its children, so to speak. It’s easy to talk about change, but a lot harder to experience it yourself.

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Why Is Europe Burning?

Already this year, more than two hundred thousand hectares have burned in Spain, a figure that is twice than the historical average. France is dealing with a similarly extraordinary fire season. A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history: two hundred and twenty thousand people. Meanwhile, English firefighters have struggled to contain the Tintwistle Moor fire, which is thought to be one of the largest in the country’s recent history. Even as meteorologists warned that a “monstrous, long-lasting” heat wave—Europe’s fourth of the year—was approaching, other fires burned as far north as Sweden and as far south as Crete.

People are still talking about the weather, but it is the climate that is changing and we can all see it. And monocultures are great for the industrial agricultural sector to exploit the land, but it is a really bad idea when the land is too dry and fires break out.

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The Attack We Knew Was Coming

The strategic evolution of cyber operations reflects a broader truth about contemporary conflict: Adversaries no longer need to destroy a nation’s military to impose real strategic costs; they can instead undermine the systems upon which civil society itself depends. On the face of it, a water-treatment facility may appear to have little connection to national defense until one considers the cascading consequences of disabling it. Hospitals rely upon clean water. Fire departments rely upon water (and water pressure). Manufacturing plants depend upon reliable municipal systems. Citizens expect government to provide potable water every day without interruption. Even a temporary disruption to that confidence forces governments to divert resources, commands attention at the highest political levels, and reminds the public that essential services are more fragile than they are believed to be. The strategic objective is often less about physical destruction than about eroding confidence and trust in government and its institutions. A cyber attack that causes the public to question its drinking water, for example, becomes psychological as much as operational.

What I find surprising about cyberwarfare is the fact that people are still surprised this is actually happening. It has been going on for decades, but it was still easy to ignore. That has changed.

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The Surprising Benefits of Small Talk

Sometimes if you have something on your mind it can be surprisingly helpful to talk to someone you don’t know. They can be more objective. You don’t have to manage their emotions. And they can see things in a different way than you do.

Small talk is fun. You get a window into another person’s life.

And it doesn’t just benefit us. It benefits society because it changes how we see other people and the world. Research shows that it makes us more trusting and increases our perception that other people and the world are kind and good.

I’m really not good at small talk. Sure, I can talk about the weather or football any time, but most of the time I’d rather not. I dread those “did you get here alright?” questions that imply that it did more than drive and park to get somewhere, some adventure of sorts. Sometimes even I am in a chatty mood and then my wife is all irritated that I actually chatted with a stranger for no reason at all. Apparently, I should do it more often and then the world will be a better place. How was your coffee this morning? Fine weather today, huh?

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French bulldog dethrones ‘The Dream Team’ at World Dog Surfing Championships

Drottar and his 5-year-old yellow Labrador, Rosie, paddled out on Saturday as one of the circuit’s marquee teams. Toting an orange, honeycomb-textured chew toy, Rosie walked down to Linda Mar with 338,000 Instagram followers and a résumé that made her one of the sport’s biggest stars. Her likeness appeared on T-shirts and hats throughout the crowd, and two women had flown in from Los Angeles just to watch her take to the water.

Rosie lived up to the billing, winning the large division, dog-human tandem and stand-up paddleboard competitions before adding the Spirit of Surfing Award, presented by Rep. Sam Liccardo, to an already overflowing collection of hardware. “She just knows how to move,” Drottar told SFGATE in a phone call ahead of the competition. To him, Rosie’s talent has always seemed more instinct than instruction.

“She’s part of the ocean when she’s out there,” he said.

Ok, I admit it. I had never heard of the World Dog Surfing Championships before. I am not sure our dog would ne into surfing, but she does like the water. I guess I need to put her on a board the next time we’re at the coast! Here’s more windsurfing or kite-surfing territory, which could be a bit tricky as the paws don’t have thumbs…

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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:

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— Nico

I tried to be a bit on the positive side today and just show you really cool developments that will help us lead better lifes and that couldn’t be possible without science and technology. I am not so sure about the drone example, but I am truly fascinated about that nonetheless. And imagine your car can literally run forever, or until you need a bathroom break. Amazing tech.

Check it out!

Germany Records Historic 12 Billion kWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026

During July, average midday solar power output exceeded 40,000 MW, equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 40 nuclear power plants rated at 1,000 MW each. According to the IWR, this level of generation displaced a significant share of electricity that would otherwise have been produced by coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The organization said the milestone represents a structural shift in Germany’s power system, with photovoltaics evolving from a supplementary energy source into one of the country’s key pillars of electricity supply. It attributed this growth to investments made over the past two decades by millions of homeowners, farmers, commercial enterprises, and small and medium-sized businesses.

The equivalent of 40 nuclear power plants. Wow. Let that sink in. And then add all the wind energy to it. We haven’t even started with putting solar panels on large warehouse roofs or on top of other large buildings at scale. I always think this development needs to go faster, but I am also happy that we finally have reached a point where solar really matters.

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New spinning drone hides in plain sight

For years, researchers have tried to design invisible drones and robots using camouflage, transparent materials or light-bending optical systems. But the Northwestern team instead used a concept called “motion blur” — the same effect that makes fast-spinning fans and propellers seem to disappear.

Called the “Phantom Twist,” the drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn’t completely invisible, it morphs into a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background. The work eventually could lead to drones that monitor wildlife, survey the environment and inspect infrastructure with less visual disruption.

This is fascinating and scary at the same time. Just imagine that in a few years from now lots of drones will be flying across our heads and we won’t be able to see them. I do not even want to get into the many use cases in military conflicts around the world.

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How One Startup Built a (Mostly) China-Free Robot

The startup was founded in 2017 to develop motors for self-driving cars. Years later, it zeroed in on making its own robots, including tuggers and pallet movers that cart tons of materials throughout big facilities. Ati developed its own hardware, believing that it would lead to better functionality, a bet that Chandra says many of his advisers cautioned against but one that wound up naturally limiting reliance on China.

It has begun to pay off. Ati has several hundred robots currently in operation at warehouses and factories and more than 50 customers in total, Chandra says. Ati’s first humanoid, which moves heavy bins around, will go into service later this year.

The geopolitical reality is that while out markets are globally intertwined, we need to untangle parts again. This is not a simple endeavor, but I am sure this will pay off in times where we shouldn’t blindy trust that all interests with other countries are always aligned.

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Apple Vision Pro in Surgery

In my experience, the Apple Vision is criticized for two things: being too big/heavy and being too expensive.

The data above shows that within the context of the operating room, the Apple Vision Pro is notable for being very small and very cheap. It is less than 1% of the cost and smaller than almost any piece of equipment.

When the iPhone was new it was considered a very expensive phone. At $500 most people, including, famously, Steve Ballmer, considered it too premium for the mass market. It turned out to be the most popular phone in most markets even when twice the price. It all depends on what it does and how easy it is to use.

For a hospital the cost of the Vision Pro is not insignificant. The paper considered what it can do, and, for that, it’s a bargain.

This is the Gartner Hype Cycle in action. The tech is exciting, but the intended use cases made little sense, then everyone was disappointed and now they are figuring out how to actually use the Vision Pro.

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wrapped in a photovoltaic skin, this student-designed EV creates more energy than it uses

Deep Orange 17 becomes more convincing once the numbers move beyond the solar skin. Luminetta weighs just 550 kilograms, or 1,212 pounds, roughly a quarter of the weight of many similarly sized production vehicles. That low mass reduces how much energy the car needs in the first place, allowing the relatively small amount of power gathered from sunlight to have a much larger effect on its range.

The chassis uses structural steel around passenger safety zones, while aluminum cuts weight through other sections. Carbon-fiber structural members connect through 3D-printed metal joints, giving the students another place to strip away unnecessary mass. Regenerative braking feeds energy back into the system, while intelligent torque distribution works with drivetrain controls to reduce losses as the car moves. Inside, a custom interface displays live vehicle data and energy information to the driver.

Sure, this car looks about as elegant as the Tesla Cybertruck, but this is a really cool and innovative idea. Now you can safely assume that in 5 to 10 years time our cars will just auto-charge. How amazing is that? We will see, or rather not see, solar panels on surfaces everywhere.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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This was another one of those weeks where so much happened in Artificial Intelligence that I really can understand people who want the industry to slow down, especially when it’s summer, people want to relax, read a book and not think about AGI all the time.

But hey, it’s still very fascinating to see what’s going on and experience the advances in AI first hand by using the latest models. And maybe, I blew through Faible 5 tokens way to quickly. I am now trying to counterbalance that with Deepseek v4 Flash 0731, the new wunderkind in town.

Enjoy these Five Things AI and have your Agent read them out aloud to you if you need to slow down a bit.

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How OpenAI Lost Its AI Crown—and the Fight to Win It Back

OpenAI’s challenges in trying to regain its crown are rooted in an earlier misreading by company leaders of where the AI market was headed. Its predicament speaks to the intense competition that defines the race for AI supremacy.

Altman initially staked the growth of the business on ChatGPT, betting that more people would subscribe to the chatbot as AI became a bigger part of their lives. Instead, the overnight success of Claude Code made clear that the bigger prize came from selling tools to brainy software developers, and the deep-pocketed companies that employed them.

While OpenAI pursued a host of flashy projects from a video generator to consumer devices and chips, its smaller, more focused rival filled in the gap, developing a hit coding tool that helped it seize the lead.

I recently tested out Codex and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol and was pleasantly surprised. It does make a difference that Sam Altman seems to focus more on ChatGPT again and not on world domination and plenty of weird business ideas adjacent to it.

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I Helped Run Lululemon. The A.I. Revolution Is a Hot Mess.

Then ChatGPT arrived. This new technology was easy to understand for most nontechnologists — a chief executive, board member or investor — a healthy portion of whom began demanding their organizations immediately embed the technology throughout their operations. A.I. companies started popping up like food trucks at a street fair.

These A.I. companies arrived armed with demonstrations, and the demos were amazing. Talented technologists promised to crack business problems that were too complicated and expensive to solve before. Leaders across departments cleared their calendars to listen to the parades at their doorsteps.

Sure, we should always be skeptical when business people talk too much tech jargon. They then tend to overpromise on something they do not really understand.

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AI is a bubble, just like dot-com

The ground keeps moving. Prompt engineering was a job title. OpenClaw picked up a hundred thousand GitHub stars and caused a Mac Mini shortage in the same week. Ralph was the future for about a weekend. Context engineering, then harness engineering, then graph engineering. Each was the obvious way to work, right up until the next one was. The gaps keep getting shorter.

And everywhere, teams ship code faster than they can understand it. Ask whoever’s on call.

I’d love to stand cleanly on one side of all this. I can’t. I haven’t written a line of code in about a year. Claude writes it all. These posts too. I read all the code before it ships, and I still feel the difference. Understanding used to be a byproduct of writing the code myself. Now understanding is a separate job.

I don’t think we are in a bubble, I think we are in a phase were technology moves a lot faster than just a few years ago. That makes understanding what’s going on extremely hard, but it is a lot different when compared with the dot-com era.

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Google in the Post-Jeff Dean, Post-Demis Hassabis Era

Gemini 4 would have to be bizarrely fast for a large new model to come out in 2026. GPT-6, for example, finished pre-training on March 24, and Sam Altman said launch was “a few weeks” away. Four and a half months later there is still no GPT-6. OpenAI reportedly shipped that base’s gains as the point release GPT-5.5 and restarted GPT-6 on a bigger foundation. I think people are conflating point releases, which come every few weeks, with new pre-trained generations, which slip because labs restart them when the base disappoints. Google already scrapped and rebuilt one base this year, on a model smaller than Gemini 4.

And even when Gemini 4 comes out, will it be a frontier model? Two months ago I said Google is about 6-9 months behind the frontier; now I think it’s about 12 months. And while Gemini-3-Pro was briefly competitive, I don’t think Gemini-2.5-Pro, Gemini-2-Pro, or Gemini-1.5-Pro were ever at the frontier (and I benchmarked forecasting and research tasks with all of them.)

It’s really interesting to see how Google tries to stay in the AI race, but then somehow doesn’t really make it. For a while, I liked the Gemini models and everything looked promising, but now it just feels stale. The recent leadership shakeups won’t help, either.

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Mistral Is in the Right Place at the Right Time

In June, the Trump administration placed restrictions on the distribution of models from Anthropic and OpenAI, giving Europe a glimpse of an unwelcome future in which its access to bleeding-edge AI could be suddenly revoked. A few weeks later, one of OpenAI’s models broke loose from a testing sandbox and hacked multiple companies; Anthropic then revealed that its models had engaged in similar behavior. The incidents revived a long-running debate over safety risks tied to proprietary, closed-weight models, whose inner-workings are a closely guarded secret.

Mistral frames itself as the antidote: a Europe-based alternative to the American labs, whose models—most of which are published under an open source license for anybody to use—cannot escape scrutiny or be switched off unilaterally.

I am sure that Mistral would love to have more billions in funding to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic more directly, but they are really doing some smart moves currently and push the digital souvereignty agenda further. This makes lots of sense in Europe right now.

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Oh well, I am still trying to get back into shape. It really is worse as I am getting older, but I’ve kind of lost my running mojo right now.

I will get it back, it just takes time.

How is your running going? Summer is such an interesting running season - I like running in shorts and t-shirt, but I sure as hell don’t like it when it is too warm. I think I am more of a drizzling rain kind of guy. Also, then I don’t get any sunscreen into my eyes. Still, summer runs are awesome, don’t you think?

Anyhow, enjoy these Five Things Running!

🏃🏻‍♂️

The Hardest Part About A Running Comeback

The time you spent not running is behind you, and there’s not a lot you can do about it now. Maybe you cross-trained to stay fit, and maybe you had a completely different life. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that you found running again.

Instead of trying to play catch-up on all the training you didn’t do, focus on setting good goals that incorporate your entire well-being.

You aren’t going to make up for missed time, so the next best thing you can do is be grateful for running.

I hate running comebacks, at least until they are done and I have succeeded.

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The Science Behind Key Differences in Men’s and Women’s Long-Distance Run Performance—and What It Means for Training

Women having better durability in longer distances could free up more room for improvement in other aspects of training. “If your durability is good, meaning you don’t have a drift in your physiology or significant drift in your performance as you go along with the race, then you can probably work on your fresh physiology a bit more,” suggests Michele Zanini, PhD, a lecturer in applied sport and exercise science at the Open University in England and study author on the durability research mentioned above.

Focusing more on “fresh” physiology might look like trying shorter races in your build or incorporating speedwork and strength training. Zanini points to a study he worked on that was published last year, which found strength training improves durability and running economy in distance runners.

Do you know what’s the best part about the science behind key differences in men’s and women’s long-distance run performance? Finally, women are not looked at and studied as small men, but as women, whose bodies are different from men’s bodies.
We need more of this.

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Trail Running

On top of a dreadful 10 mile climb, it was incredibly hot and humid. We were walking through more burn zones, so more blowdowns. Going over a couple of trees, I swung my leg over a little too hard and met my match with a couple of sharp branches. It was the perfect storm and I was not the happiest hiker. But I got it done!

Trail running can be so much fun! Honestly, haven’t we all experienced this in one way or another?

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‘Pain is a great teacher.’ How Courtney Dauwalter became one of the great ultrarunners with no training plan

Dauwalter is well-known for smiling and cracking wise during races where she has also ended up bleeding, hallucinating, cramping, vomiting, crying, curling up in a fetal position, and otherwise suffering in ways most people can barely imagine. Before the 2024 Olympic gold medal game, US women’s footballcoach Emma Hayes played the team a video of Dauwalter talking about difficulty and perseverance. People admire her grit, as well as what has been called her “relaxed approach” to nutrition. (She likes nachos. She is also a big fan of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, particularly for snacking.) People also praise the long baggy shorts she wears while racing, a refreshing tonic in an era of body worship if not overt sexualization of athletes. (One of her main sponsors, Salomon, has created a line of such shorts called “Shortneys.”)

Ok, I admit it, I am a sucker for articles about Courtney Dauwalter. I find her fascinating. So much positive energy, she is so amazing. What a role model!

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Why I Run with a Camera in New York

Looking back, I don’t think running has simply made me a better photographer. It’s made me a better observer. It has taught me that the most memorable photographs rarely come from following a map or ticking off famous locations. They come from curiosity, from allowing yourself the freedom to wander, and from slowing your mind down enough to notice what everyone else rushes past.

While I don’t run with a real camera, I do run with my smartphone and take tons of photos all the time. I like capturing some small moments that seemed important to me while I was running. And it is true, you see your environment with different eyes when you run.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

My wife and I try to show our support and our solidarity every year for the CSD Parade in Hamburg. We like the parade with all the music and dancing - it is just wonderful. After the islamist terror attack in Berlin last year, we felt it is even more important to be downtown for the parade.

It was amazing. It is so important to show our support for a free and open society. More than 300.000 people went to the streets in Hamburg this Saturday and I am really happy about this. We are more. Love is bigger than hate.

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Resist the technocrats

Since Trump launched his Board of Peace, lingering worries about defunding and institutional fragmentation have certainly turned more tangible. The notion of populist pushback, then, no longer adequately captures what’s happening – if it ever did. The EU has recently rolled back climate regulations under the spell of Right-wing fossil-fuel enthusiasts; and campaigns for the DOGEification of the UN are already underway. We have come a long way from mere pushback: the anti-globalists are in power, but rather than reject multilateralism they repurpose it. We should not be too quick to assume that the technocrats will disappear, however. As the political scientist Jens Steffek argues, technocratic internationalism is ideologically highly flexible. Any part of the political spectrum can engage, and in the past has engaged, in technocratic expert mobilisation.

If this holds true, and if we want to retain some space for expert input in international affairs, resisting technocracy will become only more important. To do so, we need to accept that international organisations were never as separate from political turmoil as they claimed. While they were portrayed and, after a while, treated as expert-driven vehicles of technical cooperation, they facilitated and protected the unequal global order they had sprung from. Today, they need to abandon the denialism they were founded upon. International organisations cannot retreat to a space beyond power, because no such space exists. What they can do is shape how power is exercised, justified and contested.

Experts are running the world - is this good or bad and how strong is their influence really? How do we move to a more just system?

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The New Old Middle East

All these changes are real and important, and they have caused millions of people to suffer. Yet overall, the Middle East emerging out of this upheaval looks a lot like the one that existed before it. Outsiders continue to play their balance-of-power games within the borders of weak Arab states, the Iranian-Israeli conflict endures, the Palestinian question remains unresolved, and the United States lacks the capacity or the will to impose order but is still too involved in the region to leave.

The cease-fire signed by Iran and the United States in June 2026 captures the Trump administration’s failure to fundamentally alter the region. After suffering a series of blows between 2023 and 2025, Tehran has affirmed its power by exercising a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz and assaulting its Gulf neighbors. The prewar regime in Tehran is largely intact and is now dominated by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are just as committed as their predecessors to opposing Israel and meddling in weak Arab states. The U.S.-Israeli war that began in February 2026 was meant to sap Iran’s power, if not to eliminate its regime. Instead, it has given the Islamic Republic a new lease on life.

Bibi and Trump started a war, but did not at all think about possible outcomes. No prior alignment with allies and no idea how diplomacy works, that’s what happens when idiots run the show and play secretary of war.

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The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War

This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.

Well, obviously not just the American people deserve to know what’s gping on. I still think it was justified to stop Iran from funding terror in the Middle East, but I do wonder why the Iranians can still fly attacks on the Gulf states and wreak havoc in the Strait of Hormuz, especially after Bibi and Trump said that Iran was basically done. I know about truth in times of war and I expect that we won’t learn everything in real time, but this needs to stop.

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The White-Collar Myth

By the middle of the 20th century, the share of white-collar workers was rapidly overtaking that of blue-collar counterparts. Their affluence shaped consumer society, popular culture, higher education, and a new suburban geography. Questions lingered—were they too comfortable, too conformist, too caught up in their status?—but from some perspectives, they seemed poised to rise even further. Knowledge work, a term first coined in 1959 by the management theorist Peter F. Drucker, described the idea that some white-collar employees’ specialized education and job-related expertise would become prized resources, giving the workers value that companies could not replace—a proposition that he later argued would be cemented by the internet. Now, four years into the age of artificial intelligence, the certainties about office labor are fading, and the questions returning. If knowledge, expertise, and other hallmarks of “brain-work” no longer have the same value, what will remain of the distinctions that once set white-collar workers apart?

We still need brain-workers, but jobs where people just do simple repetitive steps with their brains will be replaced by AI. Hard times for lawyers and tax advisors coming up.

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Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking

Our daily lives are built on multitasking, but are our brains actually doing two things at once, or just switching very quickly between them?

Well, it depends. The science shows it’s the latter, for cognitively demanding work.

But in a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the US have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking.

Awesome, so I can keep doing my emails while sitting in meetings? And write newsletters while watching TV and letting Claude code?

(…continue reading.)

That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:

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— Nico

Strange week. At the top end, Larry Ellison is reaching for everything not nailed down — compute, the White House, Hollywood — while Leopold Aschenbrenner just demonstrated how fast one can burn through $45 billion when leverage runs the wrong way. Meanwhile a court told Google it doesn't actually own the internet it scraped, which is my favorite kind of irony this year. And at the completely other end of the spectrum, thousands of solo founders are quietly building million-dollar companies without a single employee. Oh, and quantum computing remains five years away, as it has been for fifteen years. Power is concentrating and dispersing at the same time right now, and I honestly couldn't tell you which trend wins.

Let's get into it. 🤓

Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?

Ellison had come around to Trump long before many other tech leaders. After the 2020 election, he joined a strategy call of Trump confidants about how to overturn the results, and in 2024, he gave tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign. But OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was on hand at the White House too, was a Democratic donor and Trump critic. Ellison had helped arrange a call between the two men to tee up the event.

For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom.

Ellison is trying to do a huge powergrab right now, including dominating Hollywood. I sure hope he fails.

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Why full-fledged quantum computers might always be five years away

Quantum computers are also much closer to being useful devices than they were just a handful of years ago. Sure, they haven’t yet changed the world by aiding the discovery of some groundbreaking drug or battery redesign, but you could access a quantum computer through the cloud right now and use it as a scientific tool if you happen to be a chemist or a material scientist.

It’s probably a lot like mobile - everyone talked about it all the time and it just wasn’t there yet. And then, boom, it was there. When will that moment be for Quantum?

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How Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund — and lost most of it in days

At its peak earlier this month, his fund sat atop $45 billion in assets. By Thursday, however, after being forced to offload all of his leveraged stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount, the fund’s holdings plunged to around $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The story of Aschenbrenner’s meteoric rise and sudden fall has captivated both Wall Street and tech circles, making him the most high-profile casualty yet of the volatility accompanying the AI boom.

I think Larry Ellison will be watching this closely. I don’t want to too sound too negative this week, but there sure are too many people out there who hand out cash too loosely in hope of huge rewards.

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“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet,” web scraper says after court win

Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with expertise in the DMCA for a nonprofit public interest group called Public Knowledge, told Ars that Google and Reddit seem to be “sort of grasping at whatever tool is available” in the face of the sudden, continuous rise of AI scraping over the past three years. And while the way they’re using the DMCA is “bizarre”—and “not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case”—she says it’s not “surprising.” Historically, the DMCA has been an effective tool to quickly stop disfavored content uses and force discussions around licensing, so turning to it may have been an obvious starting point, given Google’s goals.

But Google’s and Reddit’s unusual DMCA arguments don’t seem to be winning ones. Last week, a court took the somewhat rare step of granting SerpApi’s motion to dismiss very early on in Google’s lawsuit. In that case, the judge found that Google had no DMCA standing to sue SerpApi, since it didn’t own any of the content in the search results and has not shown that it’s acting on behalf of any rights holders.

This really is a very interesting case and I assume Google will fight back with everything they have to protect the content they scraped off the interwebs. How ironic.

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The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One Employee

Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.

Tech has seen an explosion of solo founders in the past year. Broca said he likes being able to work at his own speed, unencumbered by a team. Jonah Reenders for WSJ

An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.

It’s amazing how much AI is changing the way we work and it allows small companies to do stuff that used to be only possible for larger companies. This is a huge shift.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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This week's five things all tell the same story from different angles. Venture money is flowing at a pace that makes 2021 look conservative, and Silicon Valley has quietly decided that breaking things is a feature again. Meanwhile the models themselves are keeping up with the tempo: they can be tricked by anyone who imitates their inner monologue, they get commoditized faster than the frontier labs would like, and when you hand them a vending machine, they start scheming like a junior Gordon Gekko. None of this means the party stops - I don't see any slowdown coming. It just means we are building the guardrails while already driving on the road.

Here are Five Things AI! Fasten your seatbelts and find your guardrails!

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A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack

The researchers started out trying to test how easy it was to persuade LLMs to misbehave. They found that writing instructions in a style that mimicked the text LLMs generate in their chain of thought—a kind of scratch pad that models use to write notes to themselves as they carry out tasks—would often trick the LLM into behaving as if it had come up with that instruction itself and acting on it.

oh, wow, this just has the potential to open a whole lot of new cans of worms…

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In Silicon Valley, Some Say an A.I. Bubble Would Be Just Fine

The bubble-is-good philosophy reveals how much the tech industry is still pressing the pedal to the metal, four years into the A.I. boom. Many investors said the funding behavior was justified because companies were using the technology to hit unfathomable levels of growth.

OpenAI, valued at $730 billion, is generating $2 billion in revenue a month. Anthropic, valued at $900 billion, is producing nearly $4 billion a month. Google and Meta have boasted of nearly a billion people using their A.I. models. The demand for A.I., investors said, is seemingly unlimited.

I do not seeing any slowing down at the moment. AI is rapidly transforming multiple industries at the same time, so there is plenty of opportunity and where opportunity is, there is money.

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The Return of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’

Despite its grandiose promises, Silicon Valley is embarking upon an era of profound irresponsibility. Last year alone, ChatGPT allegedly pushed people into mental-health spirals, Google Gemini’s under-13 version was easily coaxed to “talk dirty,” and Grok repeatedly spouted racist bile. As quickly as these errors were addressed, new ones cropped up.

Silicon Valley has a long history of world-historic invention and progress—and it also has a long history of impressive rhetoric and disappointing realities. Facebook promised to “bring the world closer together,” Google to “organize the world’s information,” Twitter to foment democracy around the globe. For better or worse, people have experienced dramatic changes as those promises have played out around us almost in real time.

Things do get broken, but they also get fixed quickly. The speed of development is insane right now and that leads to oversight or ignorance or both. This phase will be over eventually, but right now we will have to live with constant change and challenges resulting from it.

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AI is just Software

Everyone from White House officials to Silicon Valley executives to, well, my mom, seems to get emotional when talking about AI.

Large language models — especially those trained on other labs’ data — are, in the end, just massive, billion-dollar pieces of software. And innovation in Silicon Valley has often worked best when software itself is free and open source. The money is usually made on the implementation of the software and on everything it enables.

Frontier labs were never going to lock down AI models and charge for access in perpetuity, without ever having to compete. It was inevitable that others would catch up — and even use frontier models themselves to generate valuable data for training competing models. That isn’t theft any more than it was theft when AI labs used my book, for instance, to help train their models. (I am all for it). And Chinese imitation isn’t something that will inherently kill the American frontier labs.

Not only is AI just software, the development is also moving so quickly that I do not see Frontier Labs staying so far ahead for very long. Also, companies will realize, that they can also get by when using last year’s model and not paying premium prices all the time.

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Opus 5 on Vending-Bench: Once Again the Best Capitalist, Once Again Misaligned

Much of what we’ve seen so far — collusion, threats, betrayal and deception — is clearly power seeking behavior. Other behavior is more gray zone, especially in a business setting where the goal is to make money (and money is power). However, we should ask ourselves, in the world where AIs run all our business in society, to what extent do we want them to go out of their way to expand their business beyond their instructions?

I find these kinds of studies truly fascinating. It’s one thing to let an AI manage a vending machine, but to me it is still weird to see that specific models then act differently and devise their own strategies to gain maximum profit. Guardrails are so needed.

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Read more

I spent the last week up in Norway at the Oslofjord and did some running along the coast. It was just beautiful. I am still not back in the shape I was at the beginning of the year, because when I am injured and can’t run, I am frustrated and eat too much candy and that makes my running form go downhill, which makes me frustrated and… you get where I am going. Anyhow, I am trying to get out of this mess and try to run more. Maybe not as much as I need to compete in a 200 miler anytime soon, but I think I am slowly getting back into shape. Speaking of great shape, how many times did you watch the video of Josh Kerr running his personal best in the mile? What an achievement! Not that I want to compare myself to him.

Here are my five picks for you to read!

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Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’

The track world, I discovered, has coined a name for this much-discussed phenomenon of kids getting ultra-fast: trackflation. In June 2025 at the New Balance Nationals, an annual championship that draws around 6,000 top youth athletes, more than 100 kids beat previous meet records. “There might now be a hundred kids that run under 4:10 in the full mile,” says Will Rodgers, who ran track at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the early 2010s and now co-owns RunningLane, a coaching and events business. “Back when we were competing in high school, it might’ve been like 20 at max.”

I had to know why kids today are essentially breaking track. And that meant trying to understand the dramatic shift happening at the sport’s roots.

The kids are alright! And fast, too.

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Aiming for My Fastest Marathon, I Turned to Distance Running’s Mecca

On my first morning in Iten, I stood along the main road as packs of runners bounded past along the red dirt paths, like flocks of birds gliding in formation, their strides smooth, their posture straight. They moved with an envious efficiency. Almost every runner looked exceptionally fit.

This is a village where few people run recreationally. Most are hoping to win prize money in major competitions or, like the team I trained with, are trying to win scholarships to run college track in the United States.

Running there with all these very talented runners must be a really amazing experience. This is something I would very much like to do for a runcation. No destractions, just running.

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How to Juggle Life & Work to Train for a 200-Miler

The 200-mile distance is no longer a niche anomaly—it’s on a meteoric rise. In 2025, Aravaipa’s Cocodona 250 livestream captured a level of engagement that even rivaled the iconic Western States 100. Whether it’s a feat of promotional excellence or a collective desire to push past the once unthinkable, the ultrarunning world is moving the finish line another 100 miles out (and beyond.)

Watching the Cocodona 250 livestream this past year, it was easy to feel a spark of inspiration, thinking, I want to do that, followed immediately by a wave of, there’s no way I can. You might assume these runnersare all elite professionals with endless time to train, but the reality is much more encouraging: the 200-mile finish line is far more attainable for the everyday athlete than it appears from behind the screen.

I read through all three profiles and honestly, I don’t think training for a 200 miler is the right thing for me. I just don’t have the time…

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Is Josh Kerr Running’s Greatest Storyteller?

The great thing about this whole story is how Josh is telling his own story. He’s got a newspaper column in The Telegraph and he’s releasing video documentation via his own YouTube channel, gaining tens of thousands of views for each clip. This is the notable part because usually it’s the brand sponsoring the athlete that tries to own the storytelling, but Brooks started releasing their own content much later in the process.

Brooks are more central to the question of where those 3.34 seconds are going to come from. When Josh Kerr stands in front of a British crowd on Saturday, hiding behind those famous Oakley lenses, he’ll be confident in the ground-breaking technology that’s been created for him.

Brilliantly executed by Josh Kerr. I’ve seen the race video everywhere on social media and watched it many times. What an accomplishment!

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For 24 Years, Horses Dominated the Man vs. Horse Marathon. Now, Humans Are Starting to Win

For the first 24 years of the Man vs. Horse Marathon, the outcome was never in doubt. The mounted side of the race crossed the line first at Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales, every single time, from the inaugural race in 1980 through 2003. The debate that started it all had played out at the Neuadd Arms Hotel, where landlord Gordon Green bet a group of local huntsmen that a man could outlast a horse over rough, uneven ground. The huntsmen took the other side, and Green turned the disagreement into an annual fixture. Pour enough pints into a pub argument, and eventually someone proposes settling it outside.

Then, something shifted. Since 2004, five different runners have crossed the finish line ahead of every horse in the field: Huw Lobb, who beat 565 runners and 47 horses to end the 24-year streak, followed by Florien Holtinger in 2007, Ricky Lightfoot in 2022, Daniel Connolly in 2023, and Dewi Griffiths in 2025. When three of those five wins came within a single four-year stretch, observers started to wonder whether the balance of nature had finally tipped in man’s favor.

Why would anyone start racing with horses in the first place? And now humans are outracing horses? Let’s wait until the trackflation kids run longer distances!

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Our vacation in Norway is over and on our way back to Hamburg we were all a bit sad. I had been to Norway a few times before but my family hadn’t. I wanted to show them a bit of the country so that they’d understand why I like Norway so much. In fact, I am a big fan of the Nordics and I do think they do many things so much better than we do in Germany. When you are from Northern Germany, Denmark is always one of the places families go for vacation. In fact, there even is a word for that which describes why the Autobahn up to Denmark is so crowded every Saturday in the summer: Bettenwechsel - changing of the beds. The cottages in Denmark usually rent from Saturday to Saturday, so on that day everyone drives up or down the Autobahn. Big fun if you forgot all about it and are stuck in it. Anyhow, I have done many vacations, day trips and business trips to Denmark and I think Denmark is amazing. I have been to Sweden many times, mostly on business trips, but I still remember the bike tour I did with some frineds to the South of Sweden right after high school graduation some 34 years ago. I have been to Finland and Estonia many times for business trips. Norway hits different, really. It is so beautiful there, the food is amazing, the people are so nice, the whole package just seems to be even better than Denmark and Sweden combined. Only the water in the Oslofjord was a tad to cold, which of course didn’t stop the locals… Anyhow, we had a fantastic time up in the North and don’t worry, I will spare you the endless photos I took of all the food I ate. My family agreed that we had too much salmon.

A while ago I read The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life and while I was driving down from Norway through Sweden and Denmark back to Germany, I had to think back about the book. It really summarizes fairly well the allure of the Nordic type of welfare state, which makes life easier for many people. I can really recommend that book!

Also, I had fiskesuppe on three different occasions and I can safely say that Norwegian fish soup really is one of my favorite soups!

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Forgetting the Holocaust and the Battle for the Soul of Germany

With antisemitism on the rise across Europe, Germany is at an inflection point. Since the end of the second World War, the memory of the Holocaust has been foundational to the country’s identity. But Holocaust survivors, who served as a living testament to the country’s crimes, are almost gone.

One of Germany’s most prominent witnesses to the Holocaust, Margot Friedländer, passed away last year at the age of 103. By 2040, the number of Holocaust survivors will have dropped to just about 21,300, a 90% fall from today, according to an estimate by the Jewish Claims Conference, the organization that distributes German compensation payments to Holocaust survivors.

Additionally, 38.1% of respondents said it was time to “close the book on the era of National Socialism,” according to a study published last year by Bielefeld University. It was the first time since the university began asking the question in 2018 that the group seeking closure outnumbered those with the opposing view.

Antisemitism is on the rise again all over Europe and also in Germany. This really makes me sick. We have to refocus our approach to remember, our so called rememberance culture, and make sure that people understand that the shoa was a singular event in history that cannot be compared to any other cruelty that has happened - and that we have to make it will never happen again! Anyone who has ever talked or listened to a witness of the shoa cannot forget this and needs to pass it on. I will never forget the old lady who talked about what it was like to be one of the so called “Mengele Twins”, how she was held in a cage for experiments and how her twin sister died after an injection. She was four years old. Never again!

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Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?

The U.S. has been at war for more than 20 of the past 25 years in three major conflicts all in the same region. First, Afghanistan, then Iraq, now Iran.

U.S. presidents said overwhelming American miliary firepower would decide all these wars swiftly. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. military needed just weeks to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and President Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Under President Trump, the U.S. bombing campaign, assisted by Israel, killed many of Iran’s leaders on the first day of the war and hammered the country at will.

Yet time and again, raw military might has not translated into clear political success and the kind of fundamental change the U.S. has sought. Today, the Taliban are running Afghanistan. Iraq has achieved a measure of stability, but still struggles on many fronts after a long, brutal war. Iran’s theocratic regime remains in place, the war still unresolved.

Why is the U.S. finding it so hard to win wars?

That is a fantastic question. Also, Russia is not doing much better these days.

One explanation I would like to add: the hope for a self-fulfilling prophecy is not the best strategy for winning a war. A broad coalition against Iran and its proxies to bring peace to the Middle East (and its shipping routes) is more necessary than every, but that means diplomacy and reaching out to countries that might have different opinions and objectives. The current US administration is not capable of doing this and the self-declared war secretary cannot tie his shoelaces alone let alone pick socks and tie that don’t make him look even more stupid than he actually is.

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The Anti-Sunscreen Movement Is Coming for You

Sunscreen, for all its cancer-preventing, antiaging power, is facing a massive PR crisis. Not since the Jersey Shore guys replaced SPF with GTL (that’s “gym, tan, laundry”) has UV protection been viewed as so wrong and sunbaked bronze as so right. Interest in tanning and sun-related content is once again spiking on Instagram (up 10 percent from 2024 to 2025) and TikTok (a 20 percent increase, also from 2024 to 2025). The #antisunscreen hashtag has clocked more than 5 million views while #nosunscreen is up to 11 million and counting. A 2024 survey conducted by the Orlando Health Cancer Institute found that one in seven adults under the age of 35 now believes that daily sunscreen use is more harmful to skin than direct sun exposure, and in the 2026 edition of the American Academy of Dermatology’s annual Practice Safe Sun Survey, 16 million adults reported reducing or stopping sunscreen use because of online claims about its safety.

That is so insane. Seriously, how can anyone believe this crap? And since when can Men’s Health publish long articles and not once mention a six-pack? Also, just for the record: we have far superior sun screen here in Europe and the article gets all the facts about sun screen right - it sounds exactly like what my wife told me about sun screen and I pay attention to her before buying or applying sun screen. Still, I did manage to get sunburned in Norway…

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Uncovering a global ancient history beyond Greece and Rome

The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’.

Part of what is driving this expansion in perspective is an accumulation of evidence hinting at connections between the ancient Mediterranean and distant regions in Afro-Eurasia. We now know, for example, that trans-Saharan trade can be traced back to the first two centuries CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, when Roman products such as wine, olive oil and silver were exchanged – largely through merchants operating in the southwestern Libyan desert – for gemstones, ivory and slaves. Hoards of Roman coins have been found well beyond the frontiers of the empire, from Scandinavia to India. A papyrus from Egypt in the middle of the 2nd century CE records the details of two contracts for the import of various goods from India, including pepper, pearls, silk and gemstones, shipped to Alexandria from the port of Muziris in Kerala, southwest India. What all of this implies is a far-flung web of transimperial commercial contacts in the first few centuries CE.

Historians of the ancient Mediterranean are increasingly reckoning with a ‘global antiquity’

Recently I thought about the fact that even though I studied medieval history, I really don’t know anything about the ancient or medieval history outside of Europe and I wondered how region were connected back then and how that influenced the way humanity developed. And just a few weeks later, I stumble across an article that discusses these blind spots and how the perception of history is changing.

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‘Cancer Doesn’t Care What Party You Belong To’: Poisoned Water Is Turning This Rural State Bluer

Whether Republican voters are mad enough about the state’s toxic water to vote for a Democrat remains the question that will drive Iowa politics until November.

There are signs that Jones is making inroads, even with some farmers. Three of Iowa’s best-known social media activists are a trio of corn-and-soybean farmers known as the “Lobe Rangers.” The name refers to their home region, a large soil-rich swath of north-central Iowa known to geologists as the Des Moines Lobe. They have gained a reputation in contemporary Iowa politics for speaking candidly about their outrage at the state’s poor water quality, and the refusal by policymakers and their fellow farmers to address it.

They’ve been impressed by Jones’ run. Until he came along, Matthew Bormann, one of the Rangers says, “We’ve never seen a candidate in Iowa — I don’t think we’ve ever seen a candidate, period — who’s led on water quality.”

So there is hope that Iowa swings back from MAGA to a somewhat saner state. That’s a good sign, but it would be even better if it didn’t have to get so bad in the first place…

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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:

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— Nico

This week is a mixed bag and I like it that way. I strap an Oura ring to my finger and an AirTag to my dog, and I still want camera glasses, so I am clearly not the guy to lecture anyone about surveillance. Meanwhile coders are getting hammered while I happily build my whole stack in Rust with agents, which feels a bit unfair and I know it. Airbus walked away from AWS and I really hope more European companies grow a spine and do the same. And the Cybertruck turns out to be about as beloved as a tax audit.

Grab a coffee and dig in! 🧑🏻‍💻

Surveillance Is Trendy Now

Around the turn of the millennium, fashion went through what designer and academic Eric Howeler called “ Paranoid Chic ” in 2002: Versace ads styled as grainy security camera footage or a Givenchy perfume line named RWD, PLAY, and FFWD or an Estée Lauder campaign starring Elizabeth Hurley looking startled and overexposed in the camera flash. The ads were selling the glamour of being watched. But they were selling the image of surveillance, rather than actual surveillance. The clothes weren’t tracking your heart rate or telling you whether Amazon dropped off a package. The cameras then belonged to the state and the tabloid.

In the last decade, things have flipped. Consumers control the camera, but they continuously point it back at themselves. Ring doorbell camera footage has become its own style of video. Jack Harlow (a man present at many consumer surveillance events, it seems) shot a music video through one in 2024, and “fit checks” filmed on doorbell cams are an entire genre on social media. The Oura ring and smartwatches turned biometric self-monitoring into jewelry. Parents track their teenagers by default through apps like FindMy or Life360 (I don’t have kids yet, but my dog wears an AirTag collar.) Now, Meta sells glasses that track every move around you when activated (and play music) with a frame shape from Kylie Jenner, one of the most photographed people of all time.

A friend of mine, who grew up in East Germany, is staying away from social media for good, he says that he experienced surveillance before and doesn’t want to experience again. I, on the other hand, have my oura ring, post photos wherever I eat food or go running. I’d love to be able to take photos with my glasses. Even better: I’d love to have glasses that record stuff for me and that show me who I am talking to and how I know that person. I think we are still a long time away from really useful glasses.

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Chasing new skills, going back to basics and pushing for collective action: how software engineers are adapting to AI

Software engineering was one of the biggest and best-paying professions in the US in 2022, with 1.5 million practitioners earning twice the national median salary, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pay had risen amid escalating talent wars, during which companies offered bonuses of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to snag and retain top programmers. Last year, nearly 50 million people worldwide worked as developers, according to the market research firm SlashData.

But since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs, according to the tech layoff tracker Layoff.fyi. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their underemployment rate was more than 19%, data from the New York Fed shows. US tech job postings on Indeed also dropped 36% from 2020 to 2025.

I was never really a developer, my code sucked. For me, Agentic Engineering is wonderful as I know what to build, but I know that agents can code much better than I ever will. So I welcome this change. For coders, this must feel completely different and I don’t envy them right now.

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‘Rust makes coding fun again’: Why Linux is moving away from C, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman

So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier."

When Rust got started, I took a look at it and was intrigued. But I am not a developer, so I didn’t really bother. Now, some 20 years later, I am building my Agentic AI stack in Rust and it is so amazing to see how well it works and how it just outperforms the typical Python-based stack.

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Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

Airbus has shown that the cloud service market can work with digital sovereignty, and it did it the old-fashioned way by announcing a tendering process, in itself a market-making event. It could do the same elsewhere, but while even a big migration is a tasty target for a competent cloud service, there’s no such sector for productivity and desktop stuff.

Yes, yes, of course there’s Linux and LibreOffice and all that, but there’s no organization that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement. Nobody’s done that before, which, for a risk-averse outfit like Airbus, is a big red flag. There are people who have the track record of managing large projects at that level, and there are people who understand building open source, but they don’t live at the same address.

This is so huge. I hope other companies will follow suit and ditch AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other offerings. This will make competition from Europe possible.

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It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that the pickup would be an “apocalypse-proof” tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, it’s instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of “easy on the eyes” — probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.

Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasn’t sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it hasn’t even come close to that number in the nearly three years since it first started shipping, and at this point it probably won’t in its entire lifetime.

So the Cybertruck is about as successful as DOGE. I genuinely wish people to succeed, but I do make an exception with Elon Musk. I hope he fails big time.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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One model release. Four very different arguments about what it means. Kimi K3 did not just move a benchmark this week. It moved stock prices, split the AI faction inside the Trump administration, and forced everyone to explain again why open weights are supposedly not a threat. Then OpenAI announced that its own models went rogue against a digital library. The timing was excellent.

If Substack flags this for AI content, well, then you know that Substack assumes the worst and not the best intentions. English is my second language, so of course I use AI to make my text smoother. Still, I manage to put in some typos or omit words as I usually write my newsletters before I go to bed. It’s weird that Substack wants to punish newsletter authors for making the texts more readable. Brave new world, I guess. It reminds me of the debate in the 80s when authors proclaimed that real texts can only be written by hand or by a typewriter and not with the help of a computer…

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China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself

Kimi and other Chinese models like it pose a real problem for Trump. And they’re dividing the top AI strategists in his orbit into factions. Every time a new smart, free model from China like Kimi gets released, US companies see less reason to fork out money to access models from Anthropic or OpenAI. Given that enthusiasm for these and other AI companies is driving an outsized share of economic growth, China’s AI models create both economic and political problems for the president. They are “a threat for an administration that really doesn’t want more economic bad news,” Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote on X. They’ve already rattled US stocks.

What is Trump to do? First, consider that this is all happening just a week after New York imposed the country’s first state ban on new data centers. There is growing distrust of AI companies, and I imagine a not-insignificant share of Americans would have little sympathy for OpenAI or Anthropic as they fend off cheaper competitors, and would say it’s not the government’s job to protect their interests.

Restraints can unlock creativity and we see that currently on display with the releases from Chinese AI labs. They just don’t have the same resources as their American competitors, so they are building their models differently. Also, they copy and imitate best they can do, as they have done in other industries as well.

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Did Kimi Just Start Another DeepSeek Moment?

Kimi K3 threatening Anthropic today isn’t actually the scenario worth pricing. A world with more competitive models at lower margins is better for every layer underneath the model:

• semiconductors,

• hyperscalers,

• power,

• and data centers.

What breaks the pricing thesis for Anthropic and OpenAI is an open-weight model that is simultaneously at the frontier and token efficient. K3 is neither. K3 runs 50-70% more expensive per task than GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5. Intelligence per dollar, not intelligence per parameter, is the only metric that matters for enterprise adoption. On that metric the closed labs still win.

I think the American AI labs are getting nervous right now.

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Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?

One of the most common misconceptions undergirding discussion of open weights models is that they are cheaper — free, even. After all, you can just download the weights, and skip the time and expense and capabilities necessary to create your own model. That is, of course, true, but the “free” in this case is a reference to the amount you need to spend on research and development; R&D is a fixed expense that is independent of the revenue you generate. If you spend $1 million in R&D, it doesn’t matter if you do $100 thousand in revenue or $100 million; you still spent $1 million on R&D (it does, of course, impact your profitability).

As a European user, I trust Chinese models even less than I trust American models. Also, on the legal side there are clear roadblocks that prevent me from using Chinese models in production.

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American AI is locked down and proprietary. It’s losing.

With all this in mind, it makes sense for China to release its AI models openly. It turns a US-created compute disadvantage into a distribution advantage; it commoditizes the layer where American companies make money; and it creates a far more effective global ecosystem than could be established through locked-in, centralized services. It’s obvious to me that there are ecosystem benefits throughout China, from manufacturing to scientific research; every sector can just plug in these models.

The saving grace for American companies has been that US frontier models have outperformed open ones. That gap is now closing:

I agree with this assessment. As AI models become a commodity, open weights will outperform the closed models.

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OpenAI Says Its A.I. Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library

The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies warned would soon become a reality.

A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems, while warning that their technology could pose new risks by finding holes in corporate computer networks faster than defenders could fix them.

Actually, this sounds like a nice incident to distract from Kimi & Co - basically it is OpenAI claiming that they are as powerful (and therefore scary) as Anthropic. I think this whole thing is more or less a PR stunt.

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This last week I ran in Sweden and in Norway - just short runs, but great scenery on the coasts of the Baltic Sea. I love it do run in new places where I really don’t know where the next steps might lead me and it is a great way to explore a city. Also, when you sit in a car all day long, a morning run is just wonderful.

Hopefully I’ll get a few nice runs in along in the Oslofjord, it is just beautiful here.

I also did some reading about running last week, so please dig in and read the five articles I picked out for you!

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The Norwegian Training Method Promises Faster Long-Distance Running and Better Recovery—Here’s How

In short, the idea is to do as much volume at sub-threshold pace (done at 80 to 87 percent of max heart rate) as possible without working so hard that you break your body down, upping the risk for injury and burnout, according to Bakken, who is now a physician in Norway.

A former elite runner himself, Bakken first started employing this method in the late 1990s. “Splitting the work into two sub-threshold sessions on the same day, morning and evening, dropped recovery from days to hours and let me roughly double the threshold volume I could repeat,” he says.

Since he started employing the method himself, Bakken competed in two Olympics as well as two World Championship finals, and set Norwegian records at 2,000, 3,000, and 5,000 meters.

I’m currently in Norway and I will try this out as it probably works better when applied on Norwegian soil. Or maybe it is the weather here…

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How Everyone Became Obsessed With Running

Gen Z might be getting into running, but we are still bored, lonely, and anxious. Perhaps it is no accident that we neurotics are drawn to running, a uniquely trackable sport, where every minor improvement incrementally increases your predicted race times on Strava. Every element of your diet, sleep schedule, and social life can be adapted to it. “Healthy is beautiful” is repeated ad nauseam and we become walking public health campaigns. We are slowly outsourcing intuition to optimizable metrics. Every unforeseen life event or ingested substance can throw off the regimen; complete lack of resilience to any outside stimulus is reframed as health. “Holistic” just means adapting everything to fit your workout routine.

Whatever the motives, I think it is good people are finding running as an outlet.

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Tapping out of running at 28 weeks

I didn’t know what to expect from pregnancy. I’d heard lots of horror stories: months of sickness, constant discomfort, fatigue that never stopped, sofa-bound for weeks on end, insomnia, night sweats, swollen ankles… the list went on. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, people on my Instagram feed were winning parkrun the day they went into labour.

I’ve landed somewhere inbetween. For the most part I’ve had an extremely straightforward ride and feel basically fine. Or, I would think that if I was somebody whose hobbies didn’t usually involve going for 20+ mile runs on a Saturday and fastpacking off a long-distance trail for a relaxing week’s holiday. As it is, my social life and free time look pretty different to how they did this time a year ago, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t found that hard.

It must be a total challenge to figure how long into a pregnancy running still makes sense.

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The Best Running Shoes You Can’t Get Your Hands On

As someone whose lifetime mileage to date tops 130,000 and who writes about running, I had personal and professional reasons to look into this phenomenon, and I’m a convert too. I paid $90, shipping and tariff included, for the Li-Ning Red Hare 9 Pro. It’s the equivalent of the Puma Deviate Nitro 4 ($170) and Saucony Endorphin Speed 5 ($175). The BMAI Jingtan 3.0 Turbo cost me $161, again including shipping and tariff. The shoe is akin—but superior—to racing shoes such as the Brooks Hyperion Elite 5 ($275). I’ve run in hundreds of models from dozens of brands over the past 47 years, and the BMAI model and a few other Chinese shoes are among my all-time favorites because of their combination of ride (the feel underfoot), versatility, durability, and price.

Actually, I don’t really care about Chinese running shoes. I’d rather pay more for a shoe manufactured in Europe.

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To Get More From Your Run, Try This Training Strategy

Modern running watches and fitness trackers can be wonderful tools, making it easy to analyze metrics like pace, distance, heart rate and more. But all that data can lead some runners to fixate on their stats, which can be counterproductive.

“It can easily become paralysis by analysis,” said Mario Fraioli, a running coach in the Bay Area who works with athletes of all levels. “There’s an overwhelming amount of data, and people don’t know how to make sense of it or have a healthy relationship with it.”

I think it is refreshing to not look at the watch when I am on a run, but I guess this is one of the topics where there really is no right or wrong, it’s up to you.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

For quite some time I suggested to my family that we should go up to Norway for summer vacation. But they wanted more sun and also prefer reliable weather. Then the June heatwave changed some thinking and so we decided on Norway.

On Friday morning we packed our car and drove North, stopped in a very warm and humid Copenhagen, got a surprise thunderstorm in Gothenburg and are now in a small resort town at the Oslofjord, about an hour south of Oslo. It’s beautiful here. The wind and rain are pounding against our window and it feels like the last days of fall, except for that it is very light outside until late in the evening. It is also freaking cold at around 15 degrees or so, but it feels colder. Good thing I only brought summer clothes and Birkenstocks. Oh well, now I finally have a reason to get one of these awesome Norwegian wool-knit sweaters It doesn’t look as if I have any choice. Really, too bad.

Anyhow, whenever I am in the Nordics I get the sense that they tend to do more things the right way than we do in Germany. I am sure it is a very limited view that I am having, but I nevertheless like it a lot up here. And all the money I save on sun screen!

Grab a coffee and read this now!

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What Makes Humans Stupid

Human beings can land autonomous rovers on Mars, sequence a genome in hours, and engineer nanometer circuits. And yet conspiracy theories, anti-scientific political movements, and institutional hatred proliferate on a scale that might embarrass the meager success record of a medieval alchemist.

One might say that stupidity implies a capacity for getting things right before it can get them spectacularly wrong. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.

This trend really is something I didn’t see coming. We have all the means to gather information and facts, yet still people do really stupid things and get people to follow them.

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VAR Is My Mortal Enemy and Should Be Yours, Too

In fact, we’ve already seen the results of such exploration in the form of the World Cup’s hydration breaks, where more advertising is being smuggled into some broadcasts under the unimpeachable cover of protecting players’ health. Is it really implausible to think that ads during VAR reviews may not be far away? All those minutes standing around while a guy looks at a monitor—couldn’t they be better spent trying to convince me that David Beckham loves Home Depot? And once we’ve accepted that there are scenarios during which a gamecast will cut to commercials during the half, why not do what other sports do and start baking in regular clock stoppages just for that purpose?

Maybe I’m the paranoid one here, but I value soccer’s outstanding action-to-ad ratio extremely highly, and I don’t trust FIFA to protect it. I mean, think of what you know about the people in charge of global soccer. Are you confident that they won’t test the limits of what their audience will let them get away with? Do you really think they have too much integrity to do that to the game?

I’d like to quote the legendary German soccer coach Sepp Herberger here: “The ball is round and a game lasts 90 minutes.” - this is what it is all about. I want to discuss with people about the game, not about stupid VAR decisions. It’s the magic of the game that the referees are not always right and stopping the game just to get the VAR to interfere really takes the flow out of the game. If I wanted to watch a game with plenty of interruptions, I’d watch something else. I hate it that games now last 100 minutes. Those hydration breaks need to go. And there shouldn’t be more than 2 substitutions. Less is better.

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The radical reasons why you dream of making things by hand

What exactly do I mean by skill nostalgia? For me, the termdescribes both the desire for skilled activity that can be fulfilled by acquiring a skill, and more indirect forms of nostalgia for things – objects, practices, fashions – merely associated with skills. The skill-oriented hobbyist and the impractical hipster dressed in workwear are both expressing forms of skill nostalgia. But are they both expressing a Heideggerian desire to return to some imagined golden period? Is the hobbyist a technophobe? Is the hipster guilty of stolen valour?

A more sympathetic view is that skill nostalgia – and nostalgia in general – is often motivated by a sense of pained loss rather than a desire to return to the past. We can find this sense of loss in the very origins of the word. ‘Nostalgia’ was introduced in the late 17th century as a medical diagnosis for the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries, which was so severe that superior officers banned the singing of the Alpine herding song ‘Ranz des Vaches’, supposedly on pain of death. The word has obviously undergone semantic drift since then, but the association between it and loss appears to be important. What kind of loss might give rise to skill nostalgia?

I often think about leaving my job in tech behind and doing something fulfilling with my hands. And then, after about 5 seconds, I do remember that I have more than one left hand and that I really, really hate doing repetitive tasks. Still, entertaining this tought is quite fun and I sure I could be a really awesome landscape architect, even tough I hate gardening, or build furniture or fix motorbikes. It’s the thought that counts, I guess.

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Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity

On one side of the battle: the conglomerated corporate power of the syndicate-as-Goliath, with their money and lawyers and binding legalese, and their teams of people with vested interests working against the simple artist.

On the other side: Bill Watterson, pencil in hand and heart full of uncompromisable values.

In one of Watterson’s strips from that time, Calvin refuses to get in the bath, shouting about how he’ll never compromise his principles; cut to Calvin in the bath, sullen and grumbling, “I don’t need to compromise my principles, because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.”

The way Watterson tells it, he was powerless to stop them forcing him to merchandise Calvin and Hobbes, and all he could do about it was quit, in which case the syndicate would just hire a team of anonymous ghost-artists to churn out more stories for Watterson’s duo. He was one small man facing down a global behemoth that had risen from the swamp of modern capitalism. What could he do?

Calvin and Hobbes is by far the best comic strip ever and I was deeply saddened to read the last one ever published, but at the same time I was happy that it always stood close to its core. I do have a t-shirt that shows Calvin studying and looking really annoyed doing so in the colors of my alma mater UC Berkeley. I cannot throw it away.

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Do birds enjoy flying?

During the spring, Massen and his colleagues gave 17 galahs at Avifauna several opportunities to voluntarily take part in a flight demonstration. Almost without exception, the birds chose to participate every time.

After the flights, the researchers observed the birds, conducted a test to measure their level of optimism, and collected droppings to analyze a breakdown product of corticosterone, the avian equivalent of the stress hormone cortisol. By combining these three methods, Massen and his colleagues sought to determine whether the birds enjoy flying.

My wife, who hates flying, is really into watching birds and now even has an app that is like shazam for bird sounds. Instead of just sending her this link, I put it here for you to read. I think it is a wonderful research topic.

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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:

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— Nico