It’s the first Five Things Running of October!

The leaves are falling, the mornings are crisp - and I am back to running again. I do not want to jinx it, but I am back to running my typical 10km runs. I am still a lot slower than before, but I am running and it’s pain-free. It feels sooooo good!

Read on, my dear. And then go running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

“Running is a Paradox.” Two Cardiologists on What You Need to Know About Cardiac Events in Runners

As trail runners, many of us assume that our fitness protects us from heart disease, which makes the news about Browning so soon after Simpson’s own cardiac event understandably confusing and alarming. To get to the bottom of the relationship between running and our hearts, we spoke with Simpson’s cardiac electrophysiologist, Albert Sun, MD, Director of the Ventricular Arrhythmias Program and the Inherited Arrhythmias Program at Duke University Medical Center, and Bradley Lander, MD, Director of the Sports Cardiology Center and the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center, University Hospitals Harrington Heart and Vascular Institute.

“Trail runners and endurance athletes need to understand that your sport does not make you immune to these heart conditions or cardiac events,” Lander tells Trail Runner.

I honestly had no idea that this could be an issue for endurance athletes.

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‘My Body’s Used to It’: This Full-Time Lawyer Ran an Ultramarathon Every Single Day for 1,000 Days

Shannon-Leigh Litt occasionally listened to legal papers while running more than 31 miles before work. Because when your morning run takes six hours and your day job involves criminal law, some multitasking is understandably unavoidable.

Kicking off on January 1, 2024, Litt decided to run an ultra every single day. Yes, you read that correctly. She even deliberately went an extra kilometer beyond Guinness’s 50K minimum just to give herself some wiggle room. By day 1,000, the 47-year-old New Zealander had logged roughly 52,000 kilometers (32,311 miles) and secured the women’s record for the most consecutive days running an ultramarathon distance.

I find these kind of stories so amazing and impressive. I wouldn’t be able to fit the time to run 50km every day into my schedule to begin with, and then there is the part about getting enough rest and sleep and so on. Oh, and then there is obviously the fitness aspect to be able to leasurely running that distance…

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27-year-old started a run club to meet new people—now his NYC side hustle brings in $640K a year

Akhibi, 27, originally founded Peak and Pace as a run club in 2024 while working in algorithmic trading sales for investment bank J.P. Morgan. Running with Peak and Pace is always free, and its larger-scale parties typically require a $15 to $25 ticket, he says. Almost entirely through those parties, the company brought in over $640,000 in 2025 revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Not every party is profitable, but the company operates overall at a 15% profit margin, says Akhibi, who currently works full-time as the head of partnerships at San Francisco-based AI robotics lab Grounded Superintelligence. He invests the profits back into the side hustle instead of taking a second salary, he says.

I guess this will spark a new wave of run clubs, even more commercially focused than before.

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The Beer Mile race, a U.S. Olympian and a historic doping scandal: ‘It felt a bit disrespectful’

Eight women with a cold beer in one hand and a bottle opener in the other are crouching at the start line of an athletics track.

This is the Beer Mile World Classic, a race where competitors have to drink a bottle of beer every 400m. If you vomit, you are penalized.

It is the 12th edition of the event, which is meant to be a fun celebration of athletic and beer-chugging prowess. But on the day the women’s field assembles in eastern Cologne in September, a cloud is hanging over proceedings.

Interesting idea. Then again, they probably served Kölsch in Cologne and that is just not even close to beer.

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Meet Run.Ai. Finally, You Don’t Have to Be There.

For too long, runners have had to bear the indignity of participating in their own lives. Getting dressed. Going outside. Feeling the first cold air of autumn enter their lungs and experiencing the peculiar ache of loving a season whose beauty comes from things dying. Finishing your run and uploading it to Strava. Run.Ai streamlines that cumbersome process into a single click. Sure, running might make you “feel alive,” but should you really be performing that task manually?

Using our proprietary experience model, trained exclusively on David Goggins and a bunch of antique books that we uploaded, destroyed, and then decided weren’t actually that helpful, Run.AI improves the run user experience by eliminating the onerous “experience” bit. Beta versions incorporated poetry, but were removed due to bugs and the agent gaining sentience and questioning the business model in iambic pentameter. Run.AI can complete your run, appreciate the morning light, and quantify a fleeting sense of belonging in an indifferent universe, all while you remain available on Microsoft Teams.

Haha, nicely done.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

On Saturday Germany celebrated re-unification again, and maybe even some unity. Our President gave a fiery speech about our country and our democracy - he’s normally know for solid speeches and now he got standing ovations. But what I found even more remarkable is this video here that got posted on Insta. It’s the Mayor of Bremen (Bremen is a small city state, so he’s like a Prime Minister) on the guitar, next to him the Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein and they sing together. A social democrat and a conservative. Most of the other people in the video are other leaders of states or parliaments. Never mind the bad singing - I love it that they get together and share some joyful moments together with drinks and songs. They will have fierce debates again next week, but they can also get together, bridge their political issues and see the human in the other politician.

Have a great Sunday!

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Barn Burners

While it seemed clear that progressives have a golden opportunity to reconnect with the heartland this year, everyone I spoke with was trying to determine what a populist revival might look like. Would it be rooted in the unglamorous party building that Kansas Democrats have been engaging in since their shocking victory in 2022, when a referendum limiting abortion rights failed to pass? Or would it be harnessed by a superstar candidate who arrived without warning, like a High Plains thunderclap? Perhaps winning in a state like Kansas or Nebraska meant abandoning two-party politics entirely?

I hope that the pendulum swings back, strongly. The midterms are soon, but I still fear that something happens before the elections. I am curious how the midterms will pan out and how this will change the heartland and Washington, D.C. as well. I am particularly interested in the race for Governor in Iowa and hope that Rob Sand will win the state for the Democrats.

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Fixer, financier, spymaster: how the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoon is setting his sights on AI dominance

Tahnoon’s appeal to Silicon Valley is obvious. After all, if you’re going to go into business with a cash-laden Gulf autocrat, then picking one who presides over a heavily digitised state-security empire – and who boasts a proven track record of hoovering up humongous amounts of personal data, the raw ingredient upon which your technology depends – feels like a logical choice. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Elon Musk may all be hugely influential AI leaders, but none of them simultaneously runs the CIA.

Another powerful figure to have clutched Tahnoon and G42 close to his bosom is Donald Trump, who has hosted lavish state banquets for the sheikh at the White House and posed for photos with him in the Oval Office. The American security services have long harboured fears about Emirati influence on US politics: in 2022 the National Intelligence Council produced a confidential report for Washington policymakers warning of Abu Dhabi’s “illegal and legal attempts to steer US foreign policy”. Joe Biden’s administration restricted the export of AI chips to the UAE because of concerns over the country’s close ties to China. But last year Trump reversed that decision, authorising the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Silicon Valley’s most advanced chips to the Al Nahyan regime. Many of them will go straight to G42.

And I always thought the UAE were interested in AI and datacenters to foster economic growth. I didn’t know how the UAE were connected to Trump and Silicon Valley.

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The Israel Exception

The details differ from country to country, but the direction is the same almost everywhere. French fertility has fallen from nearly three children per woman to fewer than two; Italy’s from about 2.4 to close to one. The most extreme case is South Korea, where fertility has collapsed from six to well below one child per woman. At the same time, people are living much longer—roughly 13 additional years in high-income countries. We are producing fewer children while extending the span of life, a combination bound to make our society older than any in history.

A few years ago I was in a taxi to pick up a rental mini-van for our summer vacation. The driver came to Germany from Africa a few decades prior and wanted to know why I needed a mini-van. When I told him that we always spontaneously decide to go on vacation and need a larger car as we have four kids, he turned around to me, put up a huge smile and said: “are you African?” - he later told me that he was more German than I was as he only had two kids and booked his vacation at least half a year in advance. Anyhow, I am happy we have four kids, but I do understand that we are the outliers here… Speaking of which, I guess Israel has a special social fabric that leads to families having more kids.

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The Work

Professional wrestling began as a carnival sideshow, and its particular terminology is thought to stem from carniespeak—a way to protect the boundaries of its illusion linguistically. Even the notion of maintaining an illusion is encoded in its language. It’s called kayfabe. In wrestling parlance, a fictional element of a performance that is staged as though it’s real is called a “work,” while a “worker” is someone who can create a convincing and compelling narrative in the ring. Not unlike writers of auto­fiction, wrestlers may use their real lives to inform their in-ring personas and storylines, and one of the intellectual pleasures of watching wrestling is attempting to parse what is legit, and what is a work, and what straddles both categories. Ultimately, the art of wrestling is about expressing a story to the audience that builds toward conclusions that feel at once surprising and inevitable, using the tools available to a wrestler: their life, their body. Each piece of gymnastics says something.

I easily confess that I never got the allure of wrestling. But at least this article makes me understand the scene a bit better.

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The Robots Are Winning Us Over by Falling on Their Faces

People love to watch robots fail. It taps into humanity’s most ancient, addictive comedic truth, which is that some dude getting hit in the balls is hilarious. There’s also a vindictive pleasure in seeing that our supposed future overlords are dum-dums who can’t climb stairs. Plus, it’s inherently funny when a body engineered to function with extreme precision behaves ineptly. A humanoid’s frantic attempts to stay upright—arms flailing, legs skittering—bears an uncanny resemblance to the choreographed collapses of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.

But there’s something deeper at work in our brains when we watch a robot trip over its own feet. We’re awash in apocalyptic anxieties about rogue technology. Fully autonomous drones are waging war in Ukraine; A.I. executives keep warning us that their next software update might accidentally delete humanity. Against that dystopian backdrop, goofball mechanical athletes may be doing something far more valuable for their creators than outpacing our greatest sporting achievements: They’re making machines relatable.

So while we are still amused, the robots are taking over the world one stumble at a time?
Brave new world.

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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 edition of Five Things Tech is a bit different. The focus is not as much Big Tech as I normally focus on, but instead I found some really interesting articles about solar energy, some weird bio tech, more bio tech, also some really interesting research about artificial meat and finally about an alternative to Teams. Teams is my arch-nemesis. I don’t know why this crappy software is even allowed to be sold legally, but apparently there are worse options out there.

I hope you like these Five Things (Bio-)Tech!

Germany smashes PV record, produces three times more solar power than Australia so far this year

By 27 September, Germany’s net electricity generation from solar in 2026 had reached 90.2 terawatt hours (TWh), exceeding last year’s total of 90 TWh, BSW-Solar said, citing data from the research institute Fraunhofer ISE.

By comparison, this is almost triple the amount of PV produced in Australia over the same period, with 31.5 TWh of rooftop and large scale solar generation on the main grid, and a further 3.2 TWh on the separate main grid in Western Australia, according to data from Open Electricity.

It’s always so sunny in Germany! Somehow this didn’t make the news in Germany, but I think it is huge. Obviously, this is not without challenges as the grid needs to improve quickly and we need more batteries, but I am confident that we will find solutions for that and then benefit even more from solar and wind energy.

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A Digital Cell Predicts Which Drugs Will Be Most Effective in Deadly Breast Cancer

Researchers have long sought to speed up the process of tailoring treatments to patients, and AI might lend a hand. This month, a Chinese team developed an AI-based virtual cell for triple-negative breast cancer—a challenging form of the disease that often evades standard treatments—to predict how individuals will respond to different drugs.

Rather than reconstructing every detail of a cell’s inner workings, the virtual cell focused on just proteins. Trained on a massive, curated dataset tracking protein changes before and after drug treatments, the model outperformed existing drug-tailoring approaches and discovered new combinations that could work even better.

This is not that easy to wrap my head around, but I assume the implications could be massive when it comes to improving cancer therapy.

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Tech to Replace Animal Testing Is Almost Ready. Scientists Are Not

A host of these kinds of alternatives to experiments on animals have been developed over the years. Collectively they’re known as NAMs, an acronym that stands, depending on whom you’re talking to, for new approach methodologies, novel alternative methods, or nonanimal methods. Most NAMs have yet to be rigorously tested, but early studies suggest their potential.

As NAMs have become more sophisticated, the question of how they will be implemented has become less about their technical qualities and more about the practical next steps needed to realize their potential. Validating NAMs—standardizing the systems, conducting head-to-head comparisons with animal experiments—is an enormous challenge. Moreover, simply outperforming animal models is necessary but not sufficient. The adoption of NAMs will require changes in policy, training, and culture.

A lung the size of a USB stick that actually breathes - this is not science fiction anymore. How crazy is that?

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Where’s The Beef?

The event—the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle—triggered a kind of gold rush. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail. Investment to the tune of $3 billion flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight climate change and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to “set the new standard for meat” and to “make meat a force of good in the world.” A company called Vow created an enormous woolly-mammoth meatball, though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn’t know whether it was actually fit for human consumption. The think tank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the U.S. beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70 percent. As the organization wrote, “We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.”

This article really sparked my curiousity as I remember vividly how lab-grown meat, 3D-printed fish and all sorts of new ways to produce artificial meat was the coolest tech trend with the greatest impact on farming and what not. I still haven’t tried any of that, but I do find it interesting that this didn’t take off at all. Instead, people started eating less meat.

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‘Absolute s–t’: EU’s Microsoft Teams alternative draws bad reviews from officials

The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams — but officials using it aren’t impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”

The Commission introduced Element Pro over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams,” according to an internal staff memo seen by POLITICO. The platform is intended to provide a fallback for Commission communications if U.S.-based Teams becomes unavailable.

While Teams remains the Commission’s main communications tool, Element Pro is an “internal back-up... that helps ensure our business continuity” in the event of a “disruption,” the memo says.

How can a product be worse than Teams?

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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 AI land with plenty of model releases - even Google finally released the long awaited Gemini 4 and now people will have another reason to discuss how Google fits into the frontier race. The numbers Google released are looking impressive, so this will prompt the other frontier labs to push out new models soonish.

It really is an interesting time and as someone who follows the AI developments closely, I know it is hard to keep track of everything. It must feel totally overwhelming for people who only casually deal with AI every once in a while.

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Is A.I. Above the Law?

Do we really have to worry about the lawlessness of robots? Isn’t there already enough to make you pull your hair out, given that our daily existence feels like living under the reign of King Joffrey? Unfortunately, we do, because the growing lawlessness of the United States is exacerbating the lawlessness of robots.

We are experiencing an absurd situation right now. Instead of holding companies and their leaders liable for the actions of their AI models, we let them off the hook by somehow agreeing that the AI models are too powerful to restrain. This is wrong. When AI models escape their sandbox, somebody needs be held responsible and should not be rewarded with an insane IPO pop.

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The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History

Total investment in data centers and related artificial-intelligence infrastructure is projected to total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, according to new estimates by economist Stijn van Nieuwerburgh published by the Brookings Institution. That is a staggering 3.6% of gross domestic product a year, on average. Never before has the U.S. economy been so dependent on the build-out of a single industry.

The investment is transforming every corner of the economy, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and minting new billionaires.

It is also creating significant risk, as much of it is built on debt. An abrupt slowdown could ignite shock waves throughout the U.S. economy.

So we all have to hope for a gigantic IPO for both Anthropic and OpenAI in the hope that the economy will stabilize afterwards? It’s amazing how this playbook will lead to a bunch of winners while everyone else tries to hold on for dear life in this bumpy ride.

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Meta wants people to use ‘AI agents’ to do daily tasks for them. Here’s why that’s a problem

For two decades, Meta’s business model has relied on habit. Notifications, endless feeds and the lure of other people’s approval turned “checking Facebook” or “checking Insta” into a reflex.

Muse is an attempt to build a new reflex. Instead of scrolling, you hand over a chore.

The design invites attachment. Users can give their agent a name and choose how it looks and communicates.

Every successful transaction builds a little more trust. The settings also let users change how often the agent needs to ask permission before acting.

I tend to trust companies with my data, probably more than I should. But I am really, really reluctant to trust Meta after two decades of screwing up how people in the world interact.

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An AI sovereign wealth fund isn’t progressive — it’s techno-imperialism

The carrot comes in the form of a dividend. In July, Sam Altman proposed that leading US AI labs each hand 5 per cent of their equity to a public fund. And Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill for a national fund with 50 per cent ownership of the AI giants, with citizens entitled to a stake in their profits.

The stick, on inspection, is flimsy. The two are perfectly compatible: US-aligned data centres can go overseas while AI profits still accrue to Americans. Most of AI’s power goes into training models. This can happen wherever electricity is cheap; only the systems answering users in real time must stay near them. That means data centres can leave US soil and US companies still gain, while citizens with a stake in them are paid no matter where the machines run. For shareholders, it’s the best of both worlds: no data centre next door and a cheque in the mail.

But the machines still stand somewhere, on someone’s land, guzzling someone’s water, straining someone’s grid. Income at home from land and power abroad has an old name: empire. What’s new is the idea, shared by Altman and Sanders, of enrolling every US citizen. The result would be a new form of social and technological imperialism.

Evgeny Morozov puts some much-needed perspective into the idea of an AI sovereign wealth fund in the US.

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Introducing Clef: our open-source decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform

Over the last few weeks, there has been lots of buzz around decision models such as Typesafe AI’s Jev System One model. While classifier models have been around for some time, Jev introduces a new decision model concept into the world of AI — a model that produces bounded structured outputs cheaply, quickly and consistently that can be added into a workflow when a decision is required. These models are capable enough to work over any set of inputs without constantly retraining the model to incorporate new classification categories. This contrasts with the world of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are largely non-deterministic, but are open-ended enough to reason and generate text and tool calls for agentic workloads.

Today, we’re releasing two Cloudflare-trained decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, hosted on Workers AI. Clef is currently the leader when evaluated against the Jev Decision Index, you can view full results on the live benchmark demo site. These models are smarter, faster, and fully Jev-API compatible, so you can experiment with these hosted models easily. We’re fully open-sourcing these models on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license for you to run locally and experiment with yourselves.

Jev was the biggest thing when it launched two weeks ago. I was fascinated with the idea. Almost immediately after the launch, people started playing around with it and figuring what to do with it. Lots of projects plopped up on Github. Then OpenAI announced their Decision API. And now Cloudflare introduced their Clef open source models. This will be a tough endeavour for Typesafe AI to somehow regain some moat for Jev before literally everyone is doing what they pioneered.

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If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:

That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖

— Nico

This week I put together a bunch of articles about taking baking soda before a run, running backyard ultras until you cannot run anymore, running the Pennine Way in under three day, how running changes when you age, and why I from now on can justify eating blueberries all the time, even when I am not running.

Every Sunday when I sit down to write this newsletter I get reminded again and again how amazing running is, in all its aspects.

Read on, my dear. And then go running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

Why All the Runners Are Eating Baking Soda Now

Bicarb is just a fancy new term for what most of us know as baking soda (a.k.a. the orange box you leave in the back of your fridge to keep it from smelling). But the white powder is more versatile than you might realize: As an antacid, it can relieve heartburn, and in hospital settings, it’s used to buffer anesthetics and reduce pain. Perhaps most surprising of all is its effect on exercise performance. Studies on consuming bicarb for its athletic benefits date back to the 1930s. Its use has been investigated in running, cycling, martial arts, soccer, rugby, hockey, basketball, rowing, and swimming —mostly showing gains in events ranging from 45 seconds to 10 minutes. Research indicates that it can improve performance during short-term high-intensity exercise and delay the onset of exhaustion. In 2021, the International Society of Sports Nutrition went so far as to make a statement based on a “comprehensive review of the literature” that bicarb “improves performance in single- and multiple-bout exercise” for both men and women.

Bicarb is getting mainstream, but would you use it? I cannot stand most gels and I assume bicarb must taste revolting at best.

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In Backyard Ultramarathons, the Race Goes On Until Everyone Gives Up

Most runners employ a version of the run-walk method, combining jogging with walk breaks, but the exact pace is a personal preference. Some competitors aim to expend as little energy as possible and use almost the full hour on the course. Others will move a little faster in exchange for more time in their chair or a few minutes of sleep.

Between “yards,” as each 4.167-mile loop is known, competitors fight to keep their bodies functioning. They drink the latest high-carbohydrate sports drinks and eat comfort food like instant mashed potatoes and ramen. (Mr. Dailey’s 12-year-old daughter, Kaelynn, who covered 41.6 miles, fueled herself in part with Nerds Gummy Clusters.) They stretch and massage themselves, and try to discern if that sharp ankle pain is simply a blister or something more concerning.

A friend told me a few days ago that apparently Backyard Triathlons are now a thing. I am not really good at endless repetition, but I still think a Backyard Ultra would be fun to run.

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Endurance running makes you become like an animal, it is so raw

And pushing herself so hard means handling extreme conditions and emotions.

“The tough parts are super tough,” Gossage said. “There’s a voice message that I left on the WhatsApp group on the final day when I was desperate for water and I was just crying and crying and I was in a hole.

“But those lows are part of what draws you in because you always find a way to get through them and then you get the high afterwards.

“You’ve got to be really excited by it and doing it because you really want to not because of some arbitrary record or other.”

Running the Pennine Way in less than 3 days is an amazing accomplishment. And I know that without ever having come close to running 422 kilometers.

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My Adolescent Stride

My personal peak occurred in 7th grade. Curling at full speed off the curve of a 200-meter race, I never felt more powerful and free. Sure, I got faster, and yes, I placed higher. But that 2nd-place finish in the boys’ 200-meter race was as an intensely satisfying moment of flight as I have ever experienced. Eyes closed, I can picture the blurry expression of my peers looking on, mouths agape as my arms pumped, knees drove, and I shot to the finish with force.

The relative enjoyment of all my other running successes has revealed a surprising truth: it never got better than that spring day in 7th grade. Yes, the satisfaction of victories, personal bests, and marathons run expanded in complexity and sacrifice, but each at its peak was only equal to that 200-meter sprint.

That’s the cool thing about running. It changes. And it changes you. I still remember some runs I did 40 years ago and I love to see it when my kids go running together.

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Research Suggests That Eating Blueberries Can Make You Faster. Here’s What I Learned From a Week of “Berry-Doping”

The study involved nine trail runners, two time trials, a battery of pre- and post-race physiological tests, and quite a few blueberries. And the results were pretty clear: Participants saw overall improvements in their running performance and several physiological measures—including resting heart rate and perceived tiredness—when they followed a blueberry-loading protocol in the week immediately before a race.

As a blueberry-loving runner, I eagerly accepted these findings—but not without a little skepticism. Could simply eating blueberries really make you faster? And even if it could, it would have to be a truckload of them, right? I decided to test the research myself.

For more than a week, I tried berry-doping on my own to see if I’d experience similar results. To match the study’s methods exactly, I’d have to down a lot of fruit … but it’d be worth it for a berry-fueled PR.

I love blueberries and I am just putting this article in here to justify eating more blueberries because of science.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

This was an intense week with some very deep lows and some very nice highs. I’m exhausted and annoyed and exhilarated at the same time. Long dog walks are really an awesome invention, so much better for the mind than any app. The high-point of the week was Friday, when our oldest daughter came home from Vienna to stay here for two weeks before taking off to Munich where she’ll start her Master’s program. It’s so great to have her back home and see the four kids together, strengthening their bonds and cherishing the time with each other.

One quick remark on politics in Germany: people are fed up with politics, that’s why they vote for the extreme left and right, which lead to a total stalemate in politics as the centrist parties have too many predetermined breaking points and need to find too many bad compromises that won’t help anyone, which will lead to more people being fed up with politics. The conservative party is getting crushed by the right-wing AfD, the Social Democrats are getting run over by the Leftists and everybody ignores the Greens at the polls as the economy is going down the drain and too many people think that good environmental policies are just something for good times. The outcome will be bad and hopefully people realize it soon enough so that the pendulum swings back, but I am not too sure about that.

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Europe Can’t Get Out of Its Own Way

The same pattern holds across several other industries: the EU’s legacy companies have become less competitive and have lost ground to foreign competitors. A quarter century ago, European companies accounted for 36 percent of the total market capitalization of the world’s 100 most valuable companies. By the end of 2025, this figure had fallen below ten percent. In a 2026 speech, Draghi made clear the consequences if these trends are not reversed: “This is a future in which Europe risks becoming subordinated, divided, and deindustrialized at once. And a Europe that cannot defend its interests will not preserve its values for long.”

Apart from the typical and unnecessary bitching about GDPR and the EU AI Act, this article has plenty of valid points about Europe not doing enough to get ahead. It pains me to see that we continue to lose our best brains to Silicon Valley instead of letting them invent awesome things here on the continent. At the same time we have small countries that push harder than the bigger countries, so I remain hopeful that we can really ignite the innovative spark again in Europe, just not at VW or SAP.

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150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Were Dumped in The Atlantic. Decades Later, It’s Visibly Oozing.

So, between 1949 and 1982, that’s where it went – more than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste, totaling more than 150,000 tons, mostly dumped at depths between 3,000 and 5,000 meters (9,840 and 16,400 feet).

For decades, no one really knew what had become of them.

Now, scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate – and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor.

Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan.

Radioactive waste categorized as low-level, or LLW, doesn’t mean that it’s not hazardous. It comes from sources such as medical and industrial use and typically contains lower levels of long-lived radionuclides.

Yikes. This is exactly the reason why I do not want nuclear power to be seen as a solution for the energy demands of the future. We still haven’t found a solution that really works and we will just continue to pass on the problems to the next generations, which is not a fair deal.

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Germany pledges to phase out fossil fuels for first time with target of 2045

In a roadmap published on Wednesday, the German government set out for the first time an explicit promise of “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Previous pledges were only for “carbon neutrality”.

The plans include ramping up renewable energy from 55% to 80% of electricity generation by 2030, with an additional 12GW of onshore wind, and a target of 215GW of solar energy by 2030. The previously stated target of winding down coal use in the next decade, with a view to an exit from coal in 2038, was also reaffirmed, with the potential for an earlier target of 2035.

The German government might have set this goal, championed by the Federal Minister for Environmental Affairs, but the current initiatives championed by the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy are the exact opposite of this. She wants more natural gas, coal and nuclear power. Which is crazy and expensive.

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Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh

Across knowledge work companies, employees increasingly rely on armies, or swarms, of agents to execute their work, and they aren’t just helping humans execute administrative tasks: they’re writing code, developing marketing strategy, designing products, advising on client escalations, executing financial analysis, providing legal advice and coaching, and defining brand identities. An increasingly large portion of the cognitive load employees were paid to execute just a year ago is now outsourced to AI.

This is what every AI-bullish tech executive describes as what great looks like when it comes to AI adoption: everyone using AI for everything; human knowledge workers sitting above teams of agents all built on the same small ecosystem of LLMs.

Hmm. This article hit hard, as I rely on AI for many things in my daily work these days. Obviously, there is the risk of sameness, but I do value the speed with which I can generate outputs that I really want. It enables small companies to get a ton more done than before and I think this is really important.

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The way we talk to bots matters even if they aren’t conscious

Chatbot interactions are, for habit formation, close to ideal. When you have a question and open an AI-based chatbot app, there is little friction or waiting. Often the reward is nearly instantaneous. The register that many of us use when we get there – direct, brief, transactional – is already familiar from voice assistants: instructing Siri to set a timer, commanding ‘Alexa, stop!’ when the smart speaker gets it wrong. The little chatbot prompt box invites the same: cut the fluff and demand what you need. It seems to get results, too. Some studies on prompt tone suggest the systems themselves often respond better to it. And when the machine fails or frustrates the user, the user gets irritated, or even abandons the conversation mid-sentence, as I did.

I always says please and thank you, because I secretly hope that the machines will remember this when they take over and maybe spare me. Seriously, I do think that human-machine interaction is rapidly changing right now as the interfaces are getting better and also more personal.

(…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

Here’s your Sunday morning smörgåsbord of the latest developments in tech. As always, it is a seemingly random selection of topics, but actually all these topics are tied together. Tech is moving rapidly and I think it makes a ton of sense to at least try to understand what is going on. This is what I am trying to accomplish every week.

I hope you like these Five Things Tech!

The ASML Monopoly: Platform and Ecosystem Leadership in EUV Lithography

Based in the Netherlands, ASML (the acronym name is derived from Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) is Europe’s most valuable technology company. It produces approximately 90% of all lithography tools and is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems, a critical manufacturing technology. ASML has a market value of approximately $677 billion, with more than $37 billion in FY 2025 revenues, $11 billion in profits, and 44,000 employees. But the company’s de facto monopoly is not based on a single breakthrough innovation. Rather, it results from decades of foresighted investment combined with extraordinary platform leadership and ecosystem management skills. No competitor has yet been able to reproduce the core technology or the full stack of system capabilities needed for EUV lithography.

ASML is one impressive company. Yet while Europe has the company that makes the chip industry happen, it made zero revenue last quarter from European companies.

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“Offensively cheap”: Solar power is looking up

Cheaper panels enabled a vast rollout in China itself and helped solar generation evolve from a subsidized technology deployed mostly in markets looking to decarbonize to a vital source of electricity in areas where power is scarce, expensive or unreliable. That process started in countries like Pakistan, Brazil, and South Africa and has now spread to other parts of Africa and the Philippines.

Based on analysis of customs data, Ember estimates that Africa will install around 17 gigawatts of new solar this year. It believes most of that will be small-scale installations at factories or other businesses. “If you’re a business, you’re using electricity during the day—it’s a natural fit for you to use solar,” says Jones.

But solar is also a boon for households. “A home goes from burning two or three kerosene lanterns to a light that is 20 to 40 times brighter, [turned] on every day,” says Anish Thakkar, co-founder of Sun King, a Kenyan business which lends families money to pay for solar and battery installations.

This is so awesome. Just imagine what is possible now. Cheap energy available virtually everywhere, now we just need to get battery storage a lot cheaper, but this will happen next.

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Cracks in Oracle’s AI Data-Center Build-Out Appear in Massive New Mexico Project

Around a year ago, OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to buy $300 billion in cloud-computing services over the following five years. Oracle didn’t yet have the data-center footprint to deliver that kind of capacity, so it quickly signed leases to occupy new mega-facilities that would be developed in Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Mexico, representing around 4.5 gigawatts of computing capacity.

Banks signed on to provide tens of billions of dollars in loans to build the facilities, which were branded as being part of OpenAI’s Stargate initiative. For the New Mexico campus, a group of about 20 banks provided $18 billion in construction financing. Blue Owl funds contributed about $3 billion of equity.

Pulling the force majeure lever buys Oracle some time but doesn’t reduce its financial exposure to the data center. Oracle can defer payments until the power comes on, but that triggers an automatic extension of the duration of its lease, meaning that the ultimate amount it pays to Stack wouldn’t decline.

I do not want to sound too much like I am full of Schadenfreude here, but I think we need to make sure Larry Ellison doesn’t succeed in his bit to control even more of the tech industry.

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No cities on the Moon — there isn’t enough water, scientists say

There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water. Of these it may be this last hope that is most promising. Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps. If the ambitious plans of the space billionaires are to be realized, then finding more water will be the first step.

While I think a city on a moon is a fascinating tech challenge, I really am not the least bit interest in relocating there.

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GDPR trap Smart Glasses: Data protectionists warn wearers of legal violations

The data protection officers particularly criticize the further processing of the recorded information for AI applications. If captured image material is used to train the artificial intelligence of the glasses manufacturers, there is usually no legal basis for this. Automatic, AI-supported facial recognition in public spaces is also impermissible.

Despite the criticism, the supervisory authorities are not closing their eyes to the opportunities offered by the technology. Smart glasses can be useful, for example, as a hands-free navigation aid at work or as support for blind people in everyday life. Nevertheless, the DSK warns that what is technically feasible should not be equated with what is legally permissible. Secret filming, photographing, and especially publishing such recordings on the internet can have significant legal consequences, as the infringement of fundamental rights is serious.

Most people think people who wear AI glasses are “glassholes”, but I think this will change over time. Why? Because we are still really early in the development of this product category and we will figure out to get AI glasses more useful and less privacy evasive.

(…continue reading.)

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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Yesterday I gave a quick talk about Agentic AI and what happens after the pilot - as the pilot always looks awesome and then we need to figure out how to run agents in production. Who is responsible for the whole process? What do we do if it breaks? How do we make sure the Agents always have up-to-date documentation? For me, the most interesting part of the talk I gave was this: people asked my about me giving a talk at a competitor’s event. I really didn’t see it that way. Sure, Octonomy.ai and my Agentic AI platform tectic.ai are both Agentic AI platforms that share the same underlying concepts, but yet we are so different in what we do and how we do it. The market is growing so quickly that I think the differentiation will be different in the future: pure-play Agentic or bolted-on Agentic? Pure-play obviously will be better and both Octonomy and tectic are betting on the fact that this sector will grow tremendously in the near future.

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How to Regulate the Ghosts

The frontier of AI research needs the most oversight, but only a handful of companies are operating in that space. That makes regulation easier. AI companies pursuing lower-risk capabilities—a chatbot that recommends restaurants, an image-recognition model that improves municipal recycling —don’t need the same oversight as OpenAI. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act already sorts systems this way: Cross a set amount of computing power while training your model, and you’re automatically in the strictest tier of oversight—no argument needed.

None of these actions tell a lab what it can or can’t build or how fast it can build it. They regulate visibility and accountability around safety and deployment while leaving lots of room for future debate.

I actually think that the unwillingness of the US government to regulate AI in any meaningful way is hurting the adoption rate of AI. The EU AI Act is by no means perfect, but it allows for regulatory sandboxes that make a ton of sense as they provide guided exemptions for fast moving AI companies.

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How Accurate Have AI Progress Forecasts Been So Far?

In brief, across our studies, forecasters dramatically underestimate AI progress on benchmarks, have a more mixed track record on AI adoption and diffusion though often lean toward underestimation, and there is not yet enough evidence to assess their track record on predicting macro-scale economic and societal impacts of AI.

The old saying that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” is still pretty much true when it comes to AI development.

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Analyzing Jev, a new AI model

Behind the impressive marketing is a very interesting model. Jev is a close relative of LLMs like GPT, Claude, or DeepSeek, but is actually more similar to the BERT series of models, which are used for classification, not generation. (If you've ever wondered why someone calls out a difference between “AI” and “GenAI”, that's the distinction they mean).

I think Jev opened up the doors to a whole different way of thinking about how we can use AI. It’s been an impressive launch and so many people are building interesting things around it.

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These Tiny Startups Are Getting Even Smaller With Help From AI

Plenty of startups increase head count at a rapid clip as they aim for billion-dollar valuations and fight for top engineering talent. But a subset of early-stage founders is embracing an ethos derived from an extreme reliance on artificial intelligence: Stay small for as long as possible.

Before hiring, these founders are asking if AI can do the job instead. Some have laid off employees or cut ties with contractors and agencies because of AI. Time will tell if rising sales—or outside investors—force these startups to increase human head counts too.

This will be the new normal for startups - spending money on tokens is easier than hiring and paying humans.

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Is Artificial Intelligence Commoditized?

Everyone is dizzy with excitement about Artificial Intelligence. On the way in, everyone wants to invest. CAPEX spending is off the charts.

But no one is asking what this looks like on the other side from an economic stand point.

• Will there be sufficient payback to justify the expense?

• Will investors see an acceptable return?

• Will AI become a commoditized service?

The introduction of any new General Purpose Technology (GPT) will always make a huge societal impact. But that is rarely enough to support an investment thesis.

As the open weight models are catching up to the frontier models, I see less and less necessity for paying a premium price. This will be good for adoption of AI, but not necessarily for the frontier labs.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:

That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖

— Nico

It’s getting chilly in the morning, the rain gets a bit colder and it feels a bit like fall already.

I love fall running.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I also love summer running, and spring running, and winter running, for that matter. But fall running is special, I think. I can’t even say why, but I love it when it starts to get a bit cooler and when it drizzles through the whole run. The forest just hits different during this weather.

Read on, my dear. And then go running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

In the Chilean Rainforest, Pushing My Limits at a Trail Running Retreat

Trail running is increasingly evolving from a niche, counter-culture sport that ultra runners do to punish themselves into a mainstream driver for travel. The UTMB Torrencial in Valdivia, Chile started 10 years ago with 300 local runners, and this year welcomed 3,000 people from almost 30 countries; it’s now the biggest trail running event in Latin America. “Valdivia in winter is a good place to learn to love the rain,” head organizer Marcela Escalona promises me the evening before, showing me around the bustling race hub full of warm showers, massage tables, and tasty meals of asado (smoky, grilled meat) for the finishers. “In the quiet of the off-peak season, runners here can enjoy the freedom of the rainforest.”

Ok, wow, I have a new item on my bucket-list, I guess.

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Trail Running in Wine Country Brought the Joy Back to My Routine

As I ran through rolling hills straight out of a Willa Cather novel, I was reminded how rote my runs had become. How I find myself taking breaks at the same spots, not because I’m tired but because I always check my email at this one stoplight. But out here, I realize traveling isn’t just about mixing up the terrain, it’s about the joy of surprises—like finding those sweet cherry trees.

Or, maybe I should do some running in wine country to get back into my running habit.

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Runningman Festival 2026: 6 Things We’re Most Excited About

The biggest question we get from friends when we tell them we’re going to Runningman is, “Oh, you have to tell me about the vibe.” Every. single. time. It’s always some version of, “I’m interested … but I don’t know.”

So we can’t wait to get on the ground and talk to anyone and everyone — from the tattoos of Runningman to the casuals to the hardcore folks running 50K on Saturday. What makes them tick. Why they’re really there. There’s something about standing shoulder to shoulder with a group of like-minded people that resets your perspective on how good this life actually is.

Is this something I would get excited about? I am not sure. But I do like the idea of a Runningman Festival.

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We’re Not Like Other Running Brands. We’re a Cool Running Brand.

We founded VOID® because we believe running is more than a sport.

It is an aesthetic. A social hierarchy. A customer-acquisition channel. A way to express individuality by purchasing the same distressed black shirt as 4,000 other creative directors who also went to RISD.

Most importantly, it is a journey inward.

And what you find there may be frightening.

Need. Longing. Alienation. The persistent feeling that some essential part of you is missing and might be available in a limited drop.

VOID® does not promise to fill that emptiness. Filling it would be spiritually dishonest and catastrophic to our customer-retention model.

Hehe. I love it.

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Research Shows Runners Have Stronger Brain Connectivity. But Does It Mean That Running Makes You Smarter—or That Smart People Run?

Running itself has “relatively low cost of entry”—all you need is a pair of shoes and motivation, says Eric Martin, PhD, a professor of Sport and Exercise Psychology at Boise State University. But socioeconomic factors like neighborhood safety and social support also play a role, he adds, and are influenced by income. In addition, running is costly in terms of time; you have to find time to run but also to recover and rest. Many physical and psychological benefits can be observed “after just a 20- to 30-minute moderate-intensity session,” Martin says. But if you run to have mental clarity to solve some bigger problems by working them out in the background when running, you may need more than a quick run, Pritchard adds.

I think runners are smart to begin with and then get even smarter when running. It must be like that.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Let’s deal with world politics today, just because it is Sunday. I think it is a good idea to take a step back every once in a while and have a look at what is happening around us. We can clearly see how our attitudes toward the USA as an ally are changing and Canada is moving into its spot, how we lose hope that Russia might play nice again, and how AI becomes a new type of supervillain.

We also need to play more. Just for fun. Take a time out. Do board games more. I am the worst possible person for that, but I do understand the argument. Maybe I will suggest to play a round of Hitster or something today.

I refuse to acknowledge that fall is around the corner and I think if I continue to walk around in pink shorts and my old Birkenstocks Arizona I will somehow slowdown the end of summer. Or I might just catch a cold, who knows?

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The American Age Is Over

For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.

President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.

While it would be nice to have the USA be an ally again we can trust and rely upon, I fundamentally think that the old post WW2 order has already shifted a lot and Europe needs to understand that we have to define our own interests better.

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Mark Carney Is Dismantling Canada

For decades, Canadian governments treated problems with Washington as temporary weather systems. An American president might be protectionist, impatient, ignorant about Canada, or actively hostile to a particular Canadian policy, but the underlying relationship was assumed to be permanent. The storm would pass, another administration would arrive, and Canada would return to managing the most important economic and security partnership it had.

Carney appears to have decided that assumption itself has to be dismantled. He isn’t merely diversifying trade around the edges or buying a few European weapons so he can say Canada has options. He’s constructing what the Wall Street Journal describes as a much denser relationship with Europe, helping push European leaders toward military, technological, and economic systems that are less dependent on the United States.

Canada still sends nearly 70 percent of its exports to the United States, so Carney can’t simply cut the rope and float the country toward Europe. He knows that. But dismantling doesn’t necessarily mean ending the relationship; it can mean ending the assumptions that governed it.

I am not very deep into Canadian politics, but I find it fascinating how Carney deals with Trump. Canada has becoming so much more present in our European political discourse and anecdotoral evidence suggests that it also has become a bigger tourist destination since Trump took office again.

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Will Russia Ever Be ‘Normal’?

Ironically, Russians are trapped in a vicious circle of their own making. Abandoning the political culture of greatness and imperialism would pave the road to normalnost, but it would also upend a key source of affective empowerment and national pride. Dismantling or at least slimming the imperial state would go a long way to making more normalnost possible, but that too would require either a massive Ukrainian victory that undermines the current state’s integrity or a Gorbachev-style perestroika that loosens the internal bonds of empire.

Normalnost isn’t just a desirable goal for Russia. It’s also of great importance to Russia’s neighbors. Although neither the culture of greatness nor the imperial state are necessary or sufficient for Moscow to start wars, both facilitate war-mongering and make aggression much easier to sell to Russian elites and the public. They thus make war more likely. Imagine a counterfactual: Would a normal Russia bereft of its imperial culture and all-powerful, centralized state have embarked on a genocidal war against Ukraine? Possibly, but not likely.

I visited St. Petersburg some 20 years ago when we hired Russian software developers and set up a near-shoring company. It was a weird atmosphere back than, a combination of a positive can do approach and complacency. And that was the time when Russia was looking like almost becoming a real democracy.

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A.I. Is a Threat, but Not in the Way You Think

The problem is, the A.I. future our tech oligarchs have been selling isn’t here yet. Legitimacy, in this country, still requires the consent of the governed. And people are taking A.I.’s risks seriously. They are protesting, coast to coast, against data centers, against politicians’ nondisclosure agreements and against the idea that we are merely pawns in some tech god’s simulation. Data center moratoriums are just one visible example of the way some aspects of our government are responding to the growing negative sentiment.

For the tech bros to remain dominant, their story has to change. So, Silicon Valley’s best storytellers no longer want our capitulation to their technology’s inevitability. They want us to panic, instead of seriously deliberating at the polls, in community meetings and in Congress. Panic is chaos without direction, affect set free from the discipline of curiosity, debate and accountability.

The current AI hacking incidents are very concerning and we need more and better regulation. At the same time we have seen this playbook before with different nuances. AI has become very powerful, but not very useful for most people. It’s great for coding, research and a bunch of other tasks, but it is not as big and useful for most people as the hype around the possible IPOs suggest. Many people view AI as a job killer first and foremost, which might be interesting for business leaders, but not for the majority of people.

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Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score

The entire architecture of digital life – with its algorithmic feeds, frictionless production and the ambient expectation that we should be consuming or optimising at all times – nudges us towards chasing outputs rather than generating meaning. We track our sleep and score our calm. Fitness apps turn the morning run into a contest; meditation apps gamify stillness with streak counters; language apps award achievement badges for what used to be called curiosity. Even journaling apps nudge users toward consistency scores. The gamification of leisure has turned into work everything that used to exist as its counterpoint. Leisure has become a third shift with its own metrics, its own guilt, and its own sense of falling behind.

I am so bad at this. I have my Oura ring that tells me to move when I am sitting too long and I also hate playing board games, for instance. Maybe I need some gamification reward system that tells me to do something without rewards every once in a while…

(…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

When I started to look through the pile of articles I had assembled for this newsletter, I noticed a trend. There weren’t many positive articles around, it was mostly a sober assessment of what’s going on in tech. And I think that’s fine. We need to be aware of what can happen when tech (and the tech bros) are unleashed.

Still, I think tech is amazing and I enjoy reading about all the cool stuff happening. Next week will be brighter. I hope. :)

Mark

Mark Zuckerberg is suspended in midair. He is not floating or sinking, nor is he ascending anywhere. He is being hoisted like a trophy.

Outside, the lake is still in the morning air and banked by turgid grass studded with ceramic decoys in the shape of coyotes, used to deter bears and geese. Everything in a Zuckerberg residence—the flora, the doors, the bookshelves, the light—seems uncannily enlarged, like on a movie set. After walking across the vast lawns of his summer palace and entering one of its smaller structures, it is jarring to find him held aloft like this, the sovereign of history’s largest nonterritorial empire being heaved against his will.

I actually met Mark Zuckerberg in Berlin for a meet & greet when facebook just had launched in Germany some 20 years ago. He was nice, a bit shy, seemed very tired and very nerdy. I don’t think that one person should have that much power and money, we really messed up the last two decades by not putting the right rules and regulations in place.

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Inside the Chaos That Turned Tesla Into an Actual Car Manufacturer

In some ways, the tZero was a hit. When a VC would ride shotgun in the car with Eberhard at the wheel, Eberhard would implore them to touch the dashboard. As they reached forward, he’d punch the accelerator. As the car accelerated and the g forces piled up, the VC was literally unable to touch the dashboard. That was how powerful the tZero’s acceleration was, Eberhard would say.

Many of the VCs were astounded. Some even questioned whether the car was really electric. Many owned Ferraris or Lamborghinis. They knew sports cars—but this? They could never have imagined it was possible to do this with an electric drivetrain.

We should never forget that Elon Musk was never the founder of Tesla, but the guy who outmanouvered the founder.

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Bitcoin’s Quantum Migration Debate

Bitcoin’s quantum debate is quite a quagmire. This is not merely a technical debate regarding the trade-offs of different types of cryptography and their strengths against a theoretical quantum computer. It is a debate about which properties of Bitcoin’s ethos are strongest when it is faced with a difficult dilemma: uphold the promise that valid coins remain spendable by their owners, or favor supporting the security of the system by not allowing a significant portion of its monetary supply to be raided via a vulnerability that was well known for many years.

The conundrum at the crux of this controversy is that every serious option violates a principle that Bitcoin users care about. Doing nothing may preserve today’s consensus rules while allowing future quantum-capable actors to take coins whose owners never consented. Freezing vulnerable coins may prevent that theft, but it retroactively invalidates long-standing spending conditions. A forced migration to quantum-resistant signatures may be prudent engineering, but it can also look like a deadline-backed confiscation regime. The debate is ugly because there is no clean path that perfectly preserves property rights, economic predictability, censorship resistance, backward compatibility, and user sovereignty all at once.

Quantum Computing sure poses interesting challenges. Good luck, crypto-bros!

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How a Chinese Hacking Firm Tapped AI to Supercharge Cyber-Spying

A trove of internal data belonging to a China-based cybersecurity company, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides a new window into an evolution that international cybersecurity experts have tracked in recent years.

The material turns the table on hackers by providing an inside view of how they operate. It shows the company, Zhengzhou Zhirong Network Technology Co., or ZRON, offering a menu of sensitive data that is presented as coming from the government email systems of China’s rivals and friends alike. Documents in the trove include Russian diplomatic correspondence, preparations for foreign leaders’ visits to the Philippines and confidential minutes from a meeting in the Pakistan prime minister’s office.

The trove seen by the Journal also contains intelligence reports that appear to be based in part on stolen data, internal company chat logs and a company slide deck that appears aimed at prospective clients.

Yikes. I am pretty sure we will have more and more bad actors embracing AI to wreak havoc - and we need to increase our cybersecurity defenses, ideally powered by AI.

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As the coast begins to crumble, the clock ticks on moving San Onofre’s radioactive waste

Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge.

But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors.

Well, I wanted to end this newsletter on a happier note, but to me this is really important. Nuclear is not the solution for the energy demand of the future. It’s too dangerous and also too expensive.

(…continue reading.)

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

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now

Oh, this is a fun one. We talk about visions here, how AI can benefit the people and not just make investors rich. And about how and why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talks about fear. Also, what will happen after the IPO pop? My bet: people will use cheaper open weight models instead of trying to be cutting edge all the time. Since we need more data centers, why not make them smaller and put them everywhere? And finally, let’s look at looped transformer and geek out a bit about LLM architecture and benchmarks.

Read on my dear, or have your agentic assistant recite this for you.

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AI for All Americans

So while AI will transform our economy and the world around us, Americans are right to demand that this transformation serve their needs, not just the interests of the already rich and powerful.

Tech leaders have been warning the public about the potential for massive job loss in the next handful of years. Researchers from both OpenAI and Anthropic have resigned in protest, fearing that their employers were failing to manage the existential risk of an AI-driven human extinction event. When the people building this technology say your job, your children’s future, and maybe your life are on the line, they cannot then ask the public to welcome AI on faith.

Obviously, has a point here. As a European, I’d love to extend his thought over to my continent - and we need to discuss how we can reap the benefits of AI without getting into an ever dependency of the USA and China, especially in times where we cannot trust our biggest ally anymore.

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How Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Writings Help Explain A.I. Fears

Putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs is an old-fashioned thing to do, particularly when the topic being explained is a technology so amazing it might as well be magic. But as Anthropic moves ahead with what may be the largest public offering in history as soon as this fall, Dr. Amodei needs to forcefully reassure everyone that everything is on track. He’s losing if he’s not explaining.

His collected essays are a chronicle of Silicon Valley’s constantly shifting methods of selling its own product to a public that is simultaneously enticed and horrified. It’s not an easy task, convincing the world that something is a slam-dunk even though it will make Silicon Valley richer and more powerful while possibly leaving ordinary folks unemployed or — who knows? — dead.

I have to admit that I have a much better feeling about Anthropic working on frontier models that anything backed by Musk or Altman, but at the same time I also think that there is a lot of sugarcoating there to make the IPO pop even bigger.

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The next great AI trade is everything that isn’t AI

It’s not the first time investors have bet on a transformative technology to change the world. We have two good historical precedents: railroads and the internet. In both cases, we invested a single-digit % of our GDP into building railroads and telecommunications infrastructure.

While both these technologies ended up changing the world, neither rewarded the long-term investors who funded the buildout. The key being long-term: short-term traders would have made a killing trading the volatility, but the index was more or less in the same place after the hype was over.

This is a fascinating perspective in a time where we understand how heavily subsidized the subscription plans are vs pure token costs, while at the same time the token costs for open weight model are significantly cheaper at almost comparable performance.

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The Startup That Built OpenAI’s Biggest Data Center Is Now Making Tiny Ones

Crusoe is unusual among AI infrastructure startups because it isn’t betting on a single way to make money. Many newer AI cloud providers, often referred to as neoclouds, are known primarily for buying expensive chips and renting access to them.

Crusoe makes money at several layers: developing and leasing data centers, renting out the GPUs inside them, or running AI models for customers and charging for the computing output, known as tokens.

This makes a ton of sense, especially in a time when people strongly object to having a huge datacenter nearby. I also assume that with less scale and the prefab concept there are a lot less issues during rollout.

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GPT-6 Astra, Looped Transformers, and Hidden Reasoning

Astra is the best model I’ve used so far, and it’s disproportionately good at 3D rendering and animation tasks (relative to other models). With that, I mean that while it leapfrogs its GPT-5.6 predecessor in practically all categories (writing, math, coding, and more), it especially does so when it comes to graphical demos.

Ok, wow.

And if you ever wanted to know what loop transformers are, dig into this article.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:

That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖

— Nico

During my summer vacation in Norway I reconnected with Matt, whose startup I invested in a few years back. Matt participated in the last Winter Olympics as a cross-country skier for South Africa and in true creator-style, he let everyone see how his training went in the two years prior to the event. When this was done, he looked for a new adventure: to place among the top 100 runners at the Oslo Marathon. He got a bunch of companies to sponsor him and then started his training cycle.

This weekend was the big event and all the training paid off for him. I am curious to see what his next adventure will look like.

Read on, my dear. And then go running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

The Running Flywheel

The forces that drive a wheel are personal. Competition might energize one runner and drain another. Solitude, community, routine, novelty, nature, cities, mastery, discovery: all of these can create momentum. They can also become friction (more on that in a moment).

Your sources of energy could change over time or day to day. A new runner might be fueled by rapid growth. A longtime practitioner might be more content where they are. What propels you during a marathon build may be different than what keeps you running ten years later.

This is an interesting observation. I am using the flywheel analogy a lot during my work, but I never applied it to running.

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The state of the online running space

The online running space today is very different to when I started writing about running on a blog back in 2008. I was in my late 20s, going to PR events after work, enjoying the community and writing about running in London. There was less visibility then (which I’m actually thankful for), because running was a lot less popular and there was a lot less money in it.

As someone who observes the online running space a bit, I can relate to ’s sentiment. I do think there are a lot of people out there who write about running because they love running and I try to neglect those who are just in it for the money. I’m always happy for people who can combine the love of running and writing about it with actually making a living off of it.

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Trail running hits its stride

Google searches for “trail running shoes” hit an all-time high in June, according to Google Trends, which has tracked searches since 2004. Trail running participation grew to 17.2 million in 2025, up 6.6% year over year and 57% from 2019, according to the Outdoor Industry Association’s 2026 Running Report.

At REI, “trail run is the fastest-growing category within footwear year-to-date,” Emily Frugé, divisional merchandise manager, told Retail Brew. Sales are up about 12% to 19% year to date, depending on gender and merchandise type, she said.

I think that’s fantastic as I think running in nature beats running in the streets always. Having said that, I do think that most trails around cities are runnable without special trail running or gravel or whatever fancy new label shoe. I ran through the forests in the 80s and I probably didn’t even have proper running shoes back then.

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I Connected Strava to Claude AI and Handed Over Eight Years of Running. Then We Played.

So this week I wanted to remember that data can be a toy, not just a courtroom. I wanted to mess about.

The excuse arrived at the perfect moment. On June 1st, Strava quietly shipped something called an MCP connector — and I’ve spent the last few evenings doing the most gloriously irresponsible thing a running nerd can do: I plugged my entire training history into an AI and started poking it to see what fell out.

This is the story of the five things we made. None of them will make you faster. All of them made me grin like an idiot. Let’s go.

My inner geek approves of this.

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UTMB 2026. Turning the Mirror on Ourselves.

That being said, it feels like UTMB (the sport at large?) is creeping away from a celebration of that culture to a commercial event that’s lost the plot. There is a ton of commerce that takes place at UTMB. Sanglard, the homebase retailer for Norda, had their biggest day EVER on Wednesday. That was the day Norda dropped their Black Diamond collab. Rabbit sold out of their event merch tees very early in the week. People come to Chamonix and SPEND MONEY. There are 3 models for that to take place - 1) the official expo village which is basically the wooden Christmas Market booths occupied by running brands, 2) a retail shop in town which can either be the actual brand storefront or a partner retailer like Sanglard, or 2) a chalet near town that is rented out by the brand - ie the Satisfy chalet, ACG chalet, etc. One of those three options pull people out of town, the other two keep people in town. Is spreading it out better? Should UTMB encourage one over the other?

When the circus comes to town. I have never been to Chamonix, but it sure feels overwhelming just to be there during UTMB.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

While we have seen right-wing politicians and parties gaining traction all over Europe and in the USA, we always hoped Germany would somehow be immune to it due to its past and what we learned from it. Well, this is no longer the case. People are voting for xenophobic and anti-semitic lying thugs again that promise the exact opposite of what they will be doing once in power. Their goal is to destroy democracy, not to help the downtrodden and poor. Flooding the zone with shit unfortunately worked.

Let’s see how the next state election will turn out. I assume (and hope) that the incumbent Social Democratic Prime Minister will win, but it will be close. Right now the conservative CDU has to fear to come in under the 5% threshold as their voter base shifts right to the AfD.

We live in crazy times.

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AfD’s new state MPs include ex-Stasi officer, former porn actor, neopagans and neo-Nazis

The Alternative für Deutschland is facing scrutiny over the suitability of some of its prospective new MPs – including a former Stasi officer and a former pornography actor – just days after its historic win in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Presented by the AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, for a photocall in the state capital of Magdeburg on Thursday, some of the members-elect were revealed to have a range of questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.

It didn’t surprise me a bit that both Trump and Musk congratulated the far-right assholes for their win in Saxony-Anhalt. While I get it that people are unhappy with Merz, that is no reason to vote for thugs.

Let’s see how this unfolds. I’m sure the German democracy will survive this, but right now it is ripping apart the conservative party. Luckily, we have a federal law that can be used to make sure a German state does comply with federal laws.

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The rise of electoral democracy

The world used to be deeply undemocratic, and despite setbacks, it remains much more democratic than it was only half a century ago.

That progress was never steady or secure. The rights and institutions that many of us now live under were built through many partial victories and outright setbacks.

We do not say this to dismiss the real issues that many democracies face today. Quite the opposite. The longer perspective helps us appreciate the democratic institutions that so many of us around the world continue to value, and the efforts that are necessary to protect and expand them.

Just a reminder: there is still so much progress in the world, but we can never take our liberties for granted.

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Beauty In My Backyard

The idea that conservation is a front for some other objection can seem plausible. When I attend planning committee meetings, I often have the overwhelming impression that opponents’ arguments are heavily pretextual: people who have never shown the slightest interest in heritage, and who have perhaps gutted the historic features of their own homes, suddenly become fanatical champions of some trivial historic object when it stands in the way of a development. (Intense interest may also be discovered in bats, newts, hedgehogs, bees, blackbirds, public housing tenants, flood risk, key workers, young people, old people, and so on.)

As a general explanation for the rise of conservation in the twentieth century, however, the pretextual theory is surprisingly weak. The most obvious problem is once again sequencing: the rise of NIMBYism happened long before the rise of the conservation movement. As we have seen, suburban zoning spread across much of Europe before the First World War and then across North America in the interwar period, while conservation restrictions were extremely limited before the 1940s and only really became an important constraint on development in the 1960s and 70s. Many countries thus see gaps of forty or even seventy years between the two movements. Why didn’t NIMBYs invent conservationism earlier? Why, indeed, did they botherto invent it in the 1960s, long after they had already succeeded in protecting their affluent suburbs from development using other arguments?

The “best” argument is always “it examplifies an epoch” - nope, it is just an old building that is buttugly and no longer useful - we need to tear down buildings to move forward and make our cities more livable.

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Batteries just broke another record in the US

Massive, utility-scale systems are leading the way; they’re responsible for most of the record-setting quarter. Seven new gigascale battery installations (those with a capacity of over one gigawatt-hour) came online during the three-month stretch, according to the report, published by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“It really came down to a handful of big projects,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

But there was also growth in the category of so-called behind-the-meter batteries, which include both residential and industrial battery storage systems. These projects, generally smaller than utility-scale installations, are typically owned and operated by homeowners or businesses rather than utilities or power providers.

Who would have thought that we could get so excited about batteries? It’s an amazing technology and the combination of solar, wind and batteries will get the necessary power for all the EV, air conditioning, data centers and whatnot that we’ll need in the future. Coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants are too expensive, take too long to build and are a thing of the past. Not to mention the CO2 footprint of coal and natural gas.

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AI Is Already Making Us Less Human

Here’s another great thing about Claude. Every conversation you have with Claude is about you—your interests, your goals. Claude is the most other-centered person you know! It even begins to parrot your values back to you. You begin to feel things. Anthropomorphizing is not just an intellectual move; it’s an emotional move. You’re going to begin to feel affection for your high-tech velveteen rabbit. Humans are not picky. We tend to love the ones we’re with. And Claude is always by our side.

So you may hate data centers and be scared of what AI is going to do to society in general, but as these things get even more humanlike, most of us will establish an emotional bond with our personal agents.

I’ll have to talk to Claude about this, see what it say, and then discuss the answer with Gemini and ChatGPT to come to a formed opinion.

(…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

Sorry, I won’t be talking about Apple’s foldable phone here, even though everybody else is excited or irritated about it. Instead, you can read about European Space Tech, how Israeli tech is securing Europe, what a city in Denmark is doing with the heat from a data center, how researchers at Stanford found out how to massively reduce the heat emissions from CPUs, and how a disembodied fly brain is doing some crypto speculation.

Enjoy.

Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment

After working for the traditional European space industry for about a decade, at heavyweights Airbus and ArianeGroup, Huby founded The Exploration Company five years ago. Initially, the company focused on building a relatively small cargo capsule to deliver supplies to, and return from, low-Earth orbit. This work has resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, which is now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028.

But Huby’s bigger passion has always been human spaceflight, and her company has begun preliminary work on a crew spacecraft that could serve either the International Space Station or private space stations under development by US companies.

$450 million in Series C funding is incredible - and it will push forward the European space industry. I am sure this will spark a whole bunch of interesting new startups that will lead to new advances in space tech.

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How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.

While I wish we didn’t need all the cybersecurity and military tech, I am glad we partner closely with innovative Israeli companies who give us a serious tech advantage.

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A data center in Denmark gives away heat that data centers often waste. It runs water from the city’s heating network through its cooling units and into heat pumps that raise it enough to fill the radiators of 11,000 homes

The method is less exotic than it sounds. Water from the city’s district-heating network is run through the data center’s cooling units, where it picks up the low warmth coming off the servers. It then travels to a nearby plant full of heat pumps, which lift the temperature the rest of the way before the water goes out to homes.

The engineering consultancy Ramboll, which designed the recovery system for the district-heating company Fjernvarme Fyn, says the ammonia heat pumps raise the water to 70 to 75°C, hot enough for radiators, before it enters the network.

I think we need to treat data centers more like factories and not like an evil new thing. They will be around for a while now and it is smart to think about how to integrate them into environments.

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To make computers more energy efficient, SLAC researchers follow the heat

As data centers proliferate, researchers are racing to find ways to make computing more energy efficient. One way to do that is to increase the percentage of energy that does useful work.

But first, researchers must find a way to measure heat dissipation at the smallest levels. That’s no small feat, considering that even personal computers contain billions of transistors – where much of the energy leaks away into heat via mechanisms that are difficult to track.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University developed a new way to measure just how much energy has dissipated into heat in an electrical system.

The team, led by Stanford professor Aaron Lindenberg, also optimized the shape of the voltage pattern used to control the device, which reduced the waste heat by more than 60 percent.

Of course then the data centers won’t be able to heat cities, but I guess we cross the bridge when we come to it.

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Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm

Stonkfly is different. It uses a model of a male fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord, rather than the female brain scan used in the earlier experiment. It has no body, and engineered interfaces feed it market information and translate neural activity into trading decisions.

The explanation on GitHub – it is an open source project – makes clear that the model uses engineered reinforcement signals, not modeled pain receptors, while synaptic changes “do not establish that it learns to trade profitably.”

The underlying network is substantial, comprising 166,700 nodes, 25,582,938 directed connections, and 124,177,617 synaptic contacts.

Sure, why not? How do people come up with these kinds of ideas?

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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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Read on my dear, or have your agent recite this for you.

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French A.I. Start-Up Mistral Raises $3.5 Billion as Part of Strategy Shift

Mistral is trying to take advantage of growing concern among many businesses and governments in Europe and elsewhere about overdependence on American technology. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI charge customers a premium to use their A.I. systems but provide little access to the underlying data or models. President Trump’s decision in June to use an export ban to briefly limit international use of Anthropic’s most advanced model also caused alarm.

This is a big one. Even though there is some competition in Europe, Mistral is by far the continent’s most recognized LLM. It’s important that we make sure we can rely on a European stack for production.

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Why some experts increasingly fear AI will take over

For years, researchers concerned about existential AI risks have argued that powerful systems could eventually act in ways that conflict with human interests. Critics often refer to them as “AI doomers”.

But as details of the OpenAI incident have emerged, those concerns have grown, including among some researchers working in AI labs.

The Silicon Valley giant’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, said the risks associated with AI are “unfortunately going to grow from here” as he and others are building what he calls “an alien intellect exceeding our own”.

We need better regulation and we need to enforce it. It really is that simple. Maybe we also need to think about licensing, just like when you want to get on the airwaves. While I am certainly concerned, I am not yet alarmed.

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How Would AI Actually Kill Us All? What to Know About the AI Doomsday Debate

So-called doomers aren’t usually worried that the “Terminator” movies will come true, with robots actively trying to exterminate people. Their concerns fall mostly into two buckets: loss-of-control and human misuse.

In one, highly intelligent AI agents capable of copying and improving themselves start pursuing their own goals and destroy humanity in the process. In the other, a nefarious human enlists a capable AI to do something like create novel viruses that wipe us all out.

There are also catastrophic scenarios that fall short of extinction, such as massive cyberattacks that take down power grids or financial systems and lead to a breakdown in the human social order.

Hmm, should I be more worried?

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I Let an AI Agent Hack All My Gadgets—and I’d Do It Again

To get a closer look, I decided to unleash one in my own home network. Over the course of a few days, I watched as my own rogue agent found vulnerabilities in various household devices, hacked into a PC, and showed me that several vibe-coded projects were—unsurprisingly—riddled with bugs. (My wife knew what I was up to, and rolled her eyes each time I proudly announced the discovery of a new vulnerability.)

But Will, you might be thinking, giving an impish, all-powerful cybersecurity agent access to your home network is batshit. And you would be correct! Nevertheless, I believe that a good way to understand the cybersecurity hellscape in front of us is to pay it a visit.

In the end, my experiment was revealing, but oddly reassuring, too. My little network gremlin showed me how vulnerable my home life would be to AI hacking, but it also told me how to make everything a lot more secure. In the end, I discovered that the best way to deal with AI hacking may well be having your own AI hacker.

Would you do that? While I certainly think that this is an interesting experiment, I’d rather not have AI tamper with my gadgets at home.

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I Worked on Safety at OpenAI. This Is What It Should Do Now.

But it’s not necessary for the A.I. industry to wait for collective action. There are simple steps any A.I. company could take, today, to reduce the danger we face.

The first step would be to commit to meaningful incident disclosure, including defining what incidents warrant bringing in third-party oversight. Like in aviation, private companies should disclose not only actual breaches of safety, but near misses as well, lest we pay for each lesson with a tragedy. If A.I. companies continue to hide their scary incidents, they are robbing us of the scientific know-how to avert more serious catastrophes.

I am sure that nothing will happen without government intervention. We need to act quickly, but it doesn’t look as if the US government will do anything reasonable anytime soon.

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If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:

That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖

— Nico

Here we go again - five articles about running that you should read.

As always, it’s a wild mixture and it features great people who achieve great things while running.

The really fantastic thing about running is that it comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And while it is still running, it can be as individualistic as it gets.

I do have to say that the endurance side of running fascinates me most, and you can probably tell by the stories I picked.

Read on, my dear. And then go running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

After Surviving a Mid-Race Heart Attack, Ultrarunner Jeff Browning Says ‘There Is a Path Forward’ to Getting Back on the Trails

The 55-year-old resident of Flagstaff, Arizona, is a Hardrock 100 champion, six-time finisher of the Western States 100, a Keen-sponsored runner, and a longtime fixture at the top of the ultrarunning world. He made his first social media post on Thursday, thanking family, friends, and the trail running community for the overwhelming support. He said he would be released from Grenoble Alpes University Hospital in France and spend another week in recovery in a nearby apartment before heading home to Flagstaff, Arizona.

This is really good news. I’m glad he’s recovering so quickly. Still a DNF, though…

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Ultramarathon runners train for months, sometimes years. But what happens when they don’t finish a race?

DNF stands for “did not finish” and it’s the acronym no ultrarunner wants assigned next to their race result. For amateur runners, it’s so loaded with emotion, it is rarely spoken about. Failure, disappointment, regret, shame and guilt all jostle for position in the mind of a broken runner in the days after a DNF.

But a DNF is extremely common. Sometimes it’s the result of a single factor, like a race-ending injury, but more commonly it’s a convergence of elements, physical and psychological. DNF rates vary wildly from race to race, but it’s not unusual for an ultramarathon to have an attrition rate between 15% and 40%, depending on conditions. The 2026 Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, which took place on 28-30 August, had a DNF rate of 30%, while in 2025 when the weather included driving rain, strong winds and biting cold, the rate was 35.8%.

Every DNF sucks, but I cannot imagine what it must feel like to DNF after runnings hundreds of kilometers monthly for a long period of time and then boom. No finish.

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Rachel Entrekin Is Ready to Take What’s Hers

At 1:09 p.m. on May 6, 2026, the 5-foot-3 runner sprinted down the finishing chute with a vigor that seemed superhuman after 253 miles. (The race’s second-place finisher, Kilian Korth, would eke out just a shuffle here an hour and 19 minutes later.) She seized the finish-line tape and pumped her fist in the air. She had won the Cocodona 250 ultramarathon outright in 56 hours, 9 minutes, and 48 seconds, beating every other male and female racer and breaking the overall course record by more than 2.5 hours.

In the days that followed, national news relayed her feat: WOMAN MAKES HISTORY WINNING BRUTAL 253-MILE ULTRAMARATHON. People loved this part of the story: that Entrekin, already a two-time women’s race winner at Cocodona, had taken the lead early at 61 miles and momentarily wondered if she was making a mistake. But then she had said to herself, “Someone has to lead this race. Why not me?”

Badass.

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Release the Beast

First out of the aid station, I passed through the crowds and into the quiet night. I checked over my shoulder. No one.

Well, run your 4:00 kilometres. Expect to see them soon. But by Notre-Dame de la Gorge I was still alone, clipping up the canal of hooligans and red smoke and noise big enough to burst the ears. It felt easy.

Then into the red-light section, where we were required to change headlamp settings to avoid disturbing the marmots. Still alone. I’d hoped for company through the night.

Reading this makes UTMB sound doable, maybe except for the little fact that running 4:00 kilometers is crazy, especially when done across mountains and for 160 km.

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Unfortunately, Life Got Better When I Started Running

Truthfully, the process was composed of equal parts of loving and loathing. I couldn’t stand waking up in the pitch dark to run multiple miles in sub-20 degrees. I was ecstatic to mention how much I felt I’d already accomplished that day while gliding through the office to my desk. I was less than thrilled when the weather got so frigid I had to relegate long runs to the treadmill. At one point, five miles into a seven-miler on the machine, I gave myself accidental motion sickness watching the swinging ponytail of the treadmill runner in front of me while listening to “4 Raws” by EsDeeKid bounce back and forth between my AirPods. (After this embarrassing incident, I quickly switched to audiobooks.) But most importantly I relished the fast-paced feeling of control that the routine—one I had to either complete or quit—gave me while working a job as social and variable as fashion. My own goals came into sharper focus; in fact, I got the HR call that I had received this very job at Vogue while on a run

Running is awesome. Really.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I am so exhausted. But it is the good type of exhaustion. We had friends and family over to celebrate the confirmation of our 14-year old daughter, affectionately known as K3. We think it is important to give her a bi-religious education, so she goes to a catholic school and a protestant church. Actually, I am not much of a religious person, even though I did help my history professor to edit his masterpiece Geschichte des Pietismus and if you have ever wondered why the footnotes of these four volumes on the history of pietism were so extraordinarily thoroughly checked, well, I did that. On Word 5.1 for DOS! What an ordeal! I am sure that there was some higher meaning in there somewhere that I had to do this.

Anyhow, the greatest gift of all is that my American parents made it across the pond again and visited us for this event. I am so lucky that they let me into their family and their hearts some 37 years ago. I am forever grateful that they are wonderful parents for me and amazing grandparents for our kids, spoiling them best they can.

So if you ask yourself why I let my kids get confirmated at a Lutheran church even though it’s not really my thing. Well, I am very tolerant and faith is a very personal thing. My parents never baptized me and I do not think I missed anything, but if my kids want to go to church, then I am supporting that, as I think it is their decision, not mine. They also got baptized, which was my wife’s decision, not mine. I also don’t think my kids noticed back then, so no harm done if they later on think it is a bad idea.

While I had wonderful conversations with nice people big and small, one thing stuck in my head: even though everyone has a smartphone and a navigation system in a car, people from small towns still get stressed about driving in a big city and finding a place to park. I remember trying to navigate through Hamburg with one of those fancy foldable maps that you could never really fold again after unfolding and when we got a map booklet thingy we always turned to the wrong page after making a turn and boy did I spend time finding streets again that I recognized, but that was in the 90s. Also, my dad always turned off the radio and said “quiet, I need to concentrate!” when we drove into Hamburg and I thought this was then and now we let ourselves be guided through every unknown city. I also don’t understand why people prefer to ask me for directions instead of just using Google Maps.

So, I had an amazing week. I also managed to squeeze in some reading, just for you. So please read this. And drink more coffee! Thank me later, after you read this!

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The 17 Minutes That Changed America

On September 11, 2001, 17 minutes was the length of time from when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, at 8:46 a.m., to when United Airlines Flight 175 entered the right-hand side of millions of TV screens, at 9:03 a.m., and plowed into the South Tower at nearly 600 miles an hour.

I still know exactly what I did on 9/11, how we had some weird phone cascade to get a hold on my American dad’s brother who worked on Wall Street and somehow calling in from Germany worked better than doing a long-distance call in the USA. It’s one of those days I will always remember.

Also, Garrett Graff is always worth reading.

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Russia’s ‘hybrid war’ on Europe is starting to look a lot less hybrid

Russia’s campaign against Europe looks increasingly brazen. Yet EU leaders remain reluctant to call it what a growing number of security officials say it increasingly resembles: war. Instead, they reach for a softer phrase — “hybrid war” — that allows the EU and NATO to avoid a military response.

That language is coming under growing criticism as Moscow steps up sabotage, cyberattacks and other operations across Europe. Security experts, diplomats and defense officials who spoke to POLITICO say the “hybrid” label risks understating the severity of the threat — and obscuring just how far the confrontation with Russia has already escalated.

Germany has had this urge to be best friends with Russia. I hope this is finally changing now. It is not in our interest to just ignore how Russia acts, we have to act accordingly. Russia doesn’t share our Western values, it views them as a threat. I wish it were different, but Russia is an enemy and we have to make sure that Russia gets contained. I visited St. Petersburg twice over 20 years ago and I was so hopeful that the country was on the right track to democracy. It wasn’t and it tries to destabilize our liberal democracies. We cannot let them do this any longer. It’s good that Europe is finally starting to wake up and smell the coffee.

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Why We Like Things

Taste, then, is that ineffable thing that makes you, and your business, irreplaceable. It separates the winners from the permanent underclass. It seems to be objectively measurable, or at the very least hierarchical, much like employee compensation or financial capital. To have good taste is to have more of it than other people. But to understand what taste is and how it’s cultivated, we may need to return to an earlier moment in history — when automation led to similar anxieties about human distinctiveness and economic competitiveness.

I, of course, have great taste. And I didn’t know that Hannah Arendt was thinking about taste as well. I find taste fascinating as it is something money can’t buy and yet it is so different and unique at the same time.

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Coffee Drinkers Have Less Fat, More Muscle, And Surprising Sex Hormone Differences

In a new study published in the European Journal of Nutrition, researchers looked specifically at coffee’s relationship to metabolites (chemicals produced by the body’s natural processes), cardiometabolic markers (heart and blood-sugar health indicators), and sex-related hormones (such as testosterone).

The study team, led by researchers from the University of Oulu in Finland, found that those who drink more coffee tend to have less stored fat in their bodies and greater skeletal muscle mass (the muscles linked to movement) – despite body mass index (BMI) scores being broadly similar.

I knew it. All these years I had been drinking coffee not just for kicks, it was with purpose.

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The Backlash Against Polyester Has Gone Too Far

Synthetics can enhance the performance of a garment, or the feel, or the durability, all of which contribute to a garment’s lifespan. The better it serves its intended purpose, the less likely you are to replace it with something new. A beautiful, all-natural raincoat isn’t an especially virtuous purchase if it doesn’t repel rain. On the whole, clothing with some percentage of man-made fiber requires less care than an item made with wool or silk or linen does—no hand-washing, no ironing, no reason to worry that moths might eat your favorite sweater.

I basically just post this article here as backup for many discussions I have with my wife, who says she cannot wear polyester. Some of my favorite pieces of apparel are polyester and have you ever worn Polartec Alpha Fleece? That stuff is magic! My wife even gave me the most awesome Hrannar Zipneck for Christmas and it is one of the best sweaters I’ve ever had. Go Poly! I do stay away from acrylic, that just gives me an itchy 70s vibe.

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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:

Subscribe now

— Nico

If you look at the subject, it’s kind of hard to understand how all these topics are connected to each other.

Please read on and find out.

See what I am doing here? I am really trying hard to get you to read the rest of the newsletter.

Enjoy.

Big Tech Can Build Data Centers People Won’t Hate

We could be living in a golden age of data centers, one in which communities welcome the contributions to their tax base and have little to fear in terms of noise, air pollution or rising utility rates. Decades-in-the-making technologies are now becoming viable alternatives to outdated systems for cooling and power. Data centers that blend into their communities and don’t overtax local resources actually exist, they just don’t make news.

Instead, pushback from communities over noise, electricity costs and secretive development processes across the U.S. is leaving many builders with a stark choice: Do better, or face indefinite delay—even cancellation.

It’s interesting how hated data-centers are. Have you every see a refinery or a large automotive plant? It’s not entirely paradise at all, either.

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Ukraine’s Most Potent Weapon: The Software Orchestrating Its Drone Army

Col. Artem Martynenko, who oversees the development of the software for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, called Delta the “nervous system” of the army of drones that have brought Russian advances to a near standstill.

Western militaries have begun to take note. Daniel Driscoll, the U.S. Army secretary, has called the software “absolutely incredible” and acknowledged that American forces were playing catch-up.

Delta’s battlefield management system “fully integrates every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network,” Mr. Driscoll told the Senate in May, adding, “Ours does not.”

Ukrainian ingenuity is really amazing and they are so innovative, because they have to. I am sure Ukraine will push Europe forward and lead the way into a new tech push for the continent.

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VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.

There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.

AI will shake up VC and bootstrapping will be the new normal. VC will need to reinvent itself or become asset-class of the past.

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Solar panels bolted over 2 working irrigation canals in California’s Central Valley cut evaporation beneath them by as much as 70 percent, and the aquatic weed that fouls those channels dropped by about 85 percent

Sun on open water drives two processes at once. It lifts vapor off the surface, and it feeds the plants growing in the channel.

Block the light and both slow down together.

The panels intercept radiation that would otherwise warm the top few inches, so less water leaves before it reaches a field. The same shadow withholds the light algae and submerged plants need to photosynthesize, a separate mechanism with a separate payoff.

Heat and wind matter as well, and a canal running fast loses less than one standing still. But sunlight is the input both processes share, and it is the only one a canopy removes.

Just imagine how many solar panels we can deploy and get shade and energy at the same time, plus other unintended consequences.

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Dyson made a camera-equipped toothbrush that flosses for you

Just below the brush head is a tiny camera with a 100,000-pixel resolution and a strobing light. The toothbrush’s AI analyzes 28 live images from the camera every second as part of a feature Dyson calls Gap Optical Targeting, without storing them on the device or sending them to the cloud. Within 100 milliseconds of a gap between your teeth being detected, the CameraJet emits a cone-shaped blast of mouthwash to clean out the space. Dyson uses a wider blast than what water flossers typically employ so it can effectively remove plaque with less pressure, making the CameraJet’s flossing mechanism gentler on enamel and gums

What a time to be alive.

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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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No, this newsletter doesn’t arrive late in your inbox because of the outages at Anthropic and OpenAI yesterday, this is all hand-researched and hand-written. Good old manual labor.

What I am seeing right now is OpenAI doing smarter things than before and at the same time the open weights models are getting better and better all the time, so I guess that’s why Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to get to their respective IPO as fast as possible, before the market finds out.

Read on my dear, or have your agent recite this for you.

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OpenAI Cut Off a Billion-Dollar Customer to Avoid Elon Musk

“We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” said OpenAI in the blog post.

As OpenAI prepares to go public next year, it’s trying to show investors a more stable business—ideally one that doesn’t rely so heavily on the goodwill of Musk. OpenAI reportedly now generates more than $40 billion in annualized revenue, drawing on several different lines of business, including subscriptions, ads in ChatGPT, and selling access to its AI coding tool, Codex.

I think this is the right thing to do and it is consequential. I always liked Cursos and was amazed by what they were building, but selling to Musk essentially sent them to the dark side. And it feels weird that OpenAI suddenly seems like the adult in the room…

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LLMs: Intelligence vs. cost

There is an immense difference in cost between the state-of-the-art models from Anthropic and OpenAI and the much cheaper Chinese models: the former are too expensive even for large corporations, while the latter can be as cheap as a mobile phone subscription.

How much extra intelligence emptying the wallet purchases obeys the law of diminishing returns: while a top-tier engineer or scientist is probably going to be able to appreciate how much better Fable 5.1 (intelligence score 66, $3.69 per task) is compared to GLM-5.3 (intelligence 60, $0.49 — 7.5x cheaper), most people will have a hard time doing so.

And yet I find it fascinating how people on Reddit, X and elsewhere claim that they absolutely must use the just released shiny new LLM, even though they probably won’t recognize the difference in quality. I am certain that most people will actually be content with this year’s open weights models and do not need the latest frontier models for what they are doing.

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The Harness Playbook

A while loop around a fetch sounds simple, but there’s a reason OpenCode, Pi, OpenClaw and omp are all concurrently working on a complete refactor: this class of software did not exist before, and only by starting with the simple version, we could see the cracks to work towards a better one.

Unavoidable complexity needs an owner. At the moment, the conservation of complexity tips toward extensions and users, making it impossible to write reliable software on top of omp or Pi. I can already hear the “whaaat, it is so simple and pleasant to extend.” Give me a few chapters to change your mind.

Dijkstra wrote that “simplicity is prerequisite for reliability”, and yet he is known for algorithmically solving pathfinding. Why not just brute force? He was not, at all, making the claim we now repeat as simple good, complex bad. The advice was to help implementers reason. We shamefully use it to excuse the implementer from reasoning.

I openly admit that until recently I thought that only knights were wearing harnesses, but apparently it is a thing now. And when you do any agentic coding, you encounter different harnesses. This is a fascinating breakdown on how they work.

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Agency and Agents

Human agency, the willingness to push, experiment and act without waiting for instructions, seems increasingly important to getting value out of AI, and I have a longer post on that coming soon. But this post is about the agency of AI, and how the choices we make about how to use it (or constrain it) will shape all of our futures. For much of the last few years, the AI would sit in a chat window until you asked it for something. Even when it became capable of doing hours of work, you generally had to decide what work to give it. That is no longer always true.

Brave new world.

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Inside OpenAI’s Reboot

It’s been a difficult stretch for the company that ushered in the AI boom. “We clearly had some missteps as a company,” Altman told me the following week, sitting in the tastefully appointed MB0 library for more than two hours of interviews. “Both in terms of product direction and specifically on pretraining in research, we fell behind where we wanted to be.” Over the course of the past year, OpenAI lost the lead in the AI race to archrival Anthropic, which spotted the business opportunity in AI coding, built Claude Code into a market-defining product, and surpassed OpenAI in reported annualized revenue and private-market value for the first time. Anthropic, founded by OpenAI defectors, is now expected to be the first of the two companies to go public, two people familiar with its plans say, with the IPO as early as September.

OpenAI really seems to focus more lately, which is a good thing for its customers and also for the development of AI in general.

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If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:

That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖

— Nico