While I am still not running, I noticed something. I am really not looking into the latest running shoe releases. That’s so healthy. Aside from the fact that my shoes last longer when I am not running, I think runners too often overemphasize on getting the latest stuff to run a second faster, but honestly: in most cases it won’t matter. Sure, I like buying and getting new stuff and it is exciting to try out new stuff, but I think runners do not need to buy new stuff all the time. Sure, if your shoes are worn out, then go ahead, but your shorts and t-shirt from last year are probably fine this year as well. And if you have found the ideal shorts, hang on to them for dear life as companies always phase out those shorts that you think are perfect.

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

How to stay sane when you can’t run

If you’ve ever been injured, you’ve probably dealt with suggestions from others on how to cope. Friends or fellow runners might tell you to treat the time off as an opportunity to rest, or suggest that cross-training will fill the hole in your life left by not running. Those well-meaning ideas don’t address your late-night worries about losing fitness, or the sense that nothing quite replaces the calm you get from running.

Not being able to run sucks. Period.

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The Man Who Ran Out of This World

“3:56! Holy shit!” Spencer yelled in celebration and awe. The man we trekked three days to reach had just run a mile with almost 250 feet of vertical gain in under four minutes. Brendan trudged up the hill five minutes later and confirmed the start as legit. We looked at each other, unbelieving.

The fastest trail runner on the planet, perhaps even the greatest runner on earth, period, is a hermit in Northern Idaho.

We retraced the route and GPSed it again to confirm. One mile, 244 feet. One mile and 244 feet in under 4 minutes. Many elite athletes train their whole lives to break the 4 minute barrier on a track, and fewer than 2,000 have ever done it. Sandy did it uphill, at 8000 feet, on a trail.

He was laboring (and who wouldn’t be after a max effort) but quickly recovered his distant smile and springy posture.

Oh wow, what a story. Can you imagine that? Living in a hut somewhere in the mountains and just doing the simple life, including running? Reminds me of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, just with running instead of bears…

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Raziq Rauf on what running culture means to him

These days we might run to combat the hours we're sitting at a desk, or for simple competition – against others or simply against ourselves. That means that running isn't as mundane an act as breathing or driving any more. Running is a choice. It's a leisure pursuit. It's a necessary act of physical exertion. It's a place where people are more free to experiment. Sometimes that's testing their bodies and/or minds, or sometimes it's experimenting with building a community. Other times, it's understanding enough about how we run so that we know how to look for great stories.

Raz is on a roll here with his new book. Go buy it and read it!

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The Ultimate Guide to Hut-to-Hut Trail Running

For those familiar with backpacking, thru-hiking or even fastpacking, hut-to-hut running trips will require a mental shift from the slow grind of a two-mile-per-hour pace to a much faster tempo. On a backpacking trip, your mind often wanders during the long, slow miles, but trail running demands more attention to the next few steps on the trail, forcing you to be in the present. That immediacy is a big reason I love it a hut-to-hut.

On top of that, hut-to-hut trail running provides a newfound freedom — you know for a fact that a warm meal and bed are waiting for you miles ahead, as opposed to a tent and a long night on your back. This freedom also translates to tangible physical lightness; you get to trade a 50-plus liter pack for a running vest that is 20 liters or less. Instead of fighting pain in your shoulders and hips, you’ll have to train your lungs and quads for the adventure.

this is so on my bucket-list.

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No, Your Race Isn’t a Failure If You Miss Your Goal Time

Here’s what I’ve learned from that, and so many other races over the years: missing your goal time is not the same thing as failing. Not even close, actually. Sometimes the win is that you trained through a messy year. Sometimes the win is that you showed up and finished on a day your legs just didn’t want to cooperate. Sometimes the win is that you ran at all when it would’ve been easier to stay horizontal and doomscroll.

I’m right there with you: Goal times are fun. And PRs? Even more electric. But the finish line still counts even when the clock doesn’t match the fantasy.

Run the race you have and celebrate the work you did. Yeah, maybe you missed the number, but so what? Don’t miss the point.

I think a race is a race and you yourself define how well it went. If you miss your goal and had fun nonetheless, I guess that works :)

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

What a week.

Our son turned 20 this Saturday. It’s amazing how he has developed in the last year, how many challenges he took on and how he has grown. I love him dearly.

Our middle daughter had surgery on her feet on Thursday and they removed the screws that were put in 3 years ago. Those things are huge (and look like from IKEA). She’s a trooper and the surgery went really well. I brought her a home-cooked dinner twice into the hospital, so I am sure I played some role in the healing process.

And now it’s Easter Sunday. I am not religious, but I do like hardboiled eggs (and marzipan eggs for that matter..). We went to an Easter bonfire, which is one of those Christian tradtions rooted in heathen rituals. I like it when the air smells like bonfire in the city.

Enjoy these Five Things! Happy Easter! 🪺

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Maybe you should have bought an electric car

The price of oil, and thus the price of gas, is extremely vulnerable to supply shocks. Oil demand is very inelastic in the short run. If there’s a small disruption to supply, it’s very hard for lots of people to stop driving to work, or moving things by truck and ship and plane. Oil is also an indispensable input into plastics, which are necessary for much of the modern economy. So when there’s some sort of supply disruption — for example, the Strait of Hormuz getting shut down by the Iran war — a few people can switch away from oil, but most people just desperately offer to pay more and more. So the price shoots up very quickly.

This is why even though only 20% of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting much of that supply caused oil prices to almost double. As I wrote the other day, this isn’t apocalyptic, especially for America (which is a major oil producer). But it could send inflation creeping up and curb economic activity a bit. And for people who drive gasoline powered cars, it’s a major headache.

And it’s a headache that’s going to happen again, and again, and again.

I am driving a hybrid and I wonder why politicians talk about ways to mitigate the oil price hikes, but miss the obvious one: move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible.

Also, why do people get so emotional when they talk about a combustion engine? Have you ever felt the acceleration in an EV? That is sooo much cooler.

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Building Political Superintelligence

How do we build political superintelligence? This is the political science question of our time. By political superintelligence, I do not mean a system that magically solves politics for us; I mean tools that help citizens, representatives, and institutions perceive reality more sharply, understand tradeoffs, contest power, and act more effectively.

Based on thousands of years of experiments in governance, I think there are three key tasks ahead of us to achieve this goal: we need to use AI to make us smarter; we need it to represent us faithfully; and we need to govern it effectively.

This.

Really, why aren’t we doing this?

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Is There Life After Smartphones?

And yet it seems simultaneously clear that when it comes to all smartphone users, including members of older generations but particularly those users raised on a smart device, a major reckoning is finally at hand. Since 2023, more than 30 states have instituted partial smartphone restrictions or so-called bell-to-bell bans that forbid the use of smartphones when school is in session. Overseas, Australia’s government has gone so far as to ban social media for children under 16. (More than half a dozen countries are considering similar measures.) And in Silicon Valley, tech titans like Meta, Google and Snap are facing a barrage of lawsuits — thousands in all — accusing them of deliberately preying upon vulnerable kids. “These companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children,” Mark Lanier, a plaintiff’s attorney, has said in a case against Meta and YouTube. “And they did it on purpose.” (A jury found both companies negligent.)

Regulation is finally kicking in, it has been long overdue. At the same time I think we should be able to learn from our usage patterns and get the best out of our smartphones. Also, we need to learn to ignore things and turn off alerts.

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The Tyranny of the Oura Ring

It could be the sign of some hidden immunological superpower. Or a sign of the power the ring had over me. Why, like the person who believes the weather app over what’s visible outside the window, had I believed the ring over my body? The ring’s elusive AI wasn’t sharing the answer.

But the aftereffects lingered. For days, the Oura had urged me to take it easy. I’d obeyed and failed to hit my Activity Goals for several days. My Readiness score plummeted. My Resilience shifted from “thriving” to “needs care.” I was no longer optimal.

Was I wearing this ring or was it wearing me?

I love my Oura ring. Wearing it helped me sleep more, train better and drink almost no alcohol anymore. Also, the app has a tendency to interepret the data totally wrong every once in a while…

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Hitler’s Edifice Complex

He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.

The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”

No idea why this suddenly reminded me of the orange madman in the White House.

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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

A college‑age researcher used a cat‑meme clip to socially engineer his way into clues about a massive residential‑proxy–based cyberweapon, eventually exposing a network that could have hit tens of millions of consumers and up to a quarter of the world’s corporations.

In the Persian Gulf, military‑grade GPS jamming and spoofing to counter drones and missiles are turning everyday delivery‑app drivers into analog navigators, forcing them to rely on memory and landmarks when their maps vanish, and underscoring how easily “defensive” electronic warfare can bleed into civilian workflow.

Meanwhile, in Wuhan, Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis suddenly froze mid‑traffic, stranding travelers and generating at least one highway collision, a reminder that even the most advanced autonomy still ships with the kind of “nothing works” moments drivers knew all too well in the analog age.

A look back at Apple in the 1990s shows that the company didn’t just sleepwalk through its post‑Jobs exile; it iterated the Mac, invented the PowerBook, and made strategic bets that quietly laid the groundwork for its later comeback, inviting a more nuanced take on the “Jobs‑as‑sole‑savior” narrative.

Finally, midway through the Artemis II lunar‑flyby mission, astronauts called down to Mission Control puzzled by “two Microsoft Outlooks” that refused to work, turning a low‑level office‑app quirk into a meme‑worthy question: who thought Outlook, of all terrestrial tools, belonged on a spaceship bound for the moon?

Enjoy Five Things Tech! Also, cherish the GPS signal! 🤖

The College Student—and His Cat Meme—Who Hunted the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon

At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat.

Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings—including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago.

Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

Social Engineering to take down an evil hacker, that is a nice twist and shows how important it is to understand your opponents.

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In the Gulf, GPS jamming leaves delivery drivers navigating blind

As the conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran rages on for the second month, gig workers say these kinds of GPS-related disruptions have become routine. Military forces across the region are increasingly deploying electronic systems that interfere with Global Navigation Satellite System signals, including GPS, to defend against drones and missile attacks. These systems can jam signals entirely or spoof them by feeding false location data to receivers. The interference often spills into civilian life, disrupting the lives of millions of people who rely on tools like maps. For delivery drivers, the breakdown is both immediate and disorienting.

I didn’t think of this angle before, but sure, if you need to rely on GPS to get your job done, you’re screwed.

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Robot Taxis Stop in Traffic in Chinese City, Stranding Travelers

The police in Wuhan, a large metropolis in central China, announced on Wednesday that they had received a “succession” of reports that self-driving cars had stopped. The cars were part of the extensive Apollo Go program of self-driving cars run in Wuhan by Baidu, a large Chinese internet company.

The police said an unspecified “system failure” had occurred, and did not say how many cars had been affected. Baidu has hundreds of the cars in Wuhan, where they have become a common sight.

I think self-driving cars will make our roads safer and our cities more livable. We will have to get used to these kind of scenarios though, where all of a sudden nothing works. Like back in the 70s when the car just wouldn’t start in the morning or would just go silent in the middle of an intersection. We tend to forget that new technology always needs some time.

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The triumphs and failures of Apple without Steve Jobs

It’s a famous story on its way to becoming legendary: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985, spent more than a decade in the wilderness, and then returned to Apple in 1997 to save it from bankruptcy and transform it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.

From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.

I remember that phase very well. I started university in 93 and bought a Mac Performa 600, later I bought a used Powerbook 145b, which I would carry into the library even though the battery would last only for 30 mins and of course there where no sockets anywhere as people still used pencil and paper.

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Artemis II Astronauts Have ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ and Neither Work

In 1969, the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission conducted a momentous “dress rehearsal” for putting humans on the lunar surface for the first time. It was a historic, inspiring moment for humanity; Astronaut John Young watched from a command module spacecraft as Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan broke away and flew a lunar module within 10 miles of the moon’s surface, then reunited to return home to Earth. It’s from this mission that we have one of the most powerful transcripts in NASA history:

“Who did what?” Young asked. “Where did that come from?” Cernan added.

“Give me a napkin quick,” Stafford said. “There’s a turd floating through the air.”

The provenance of the poop remains one of the great mysteries of spaceflight. Today, in the early Earth-morning hours of the Artemis II astronauts’ history-mirroring mission around the moon, we have another: Why is Microsoft Outlook not working in space?

How can they think that relying on a Microsoft product when flying to the moon would be a good idea?

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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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AI is turning Silicon Valley into the main thing it is disrupting, which is a very Silicon Valley way for the revolution to eat its own children: companies are using AI to replace the work they once paid armies of engineers to do, startups are building software with tiny teams, and even the business model of software itself is getting squeezed. At the same time, Anthropic’s Claude Code leak shows how fast the playbook gets copied once the code spills, while the broader AI build-out is running into a much less glamorous bottleneck: power, parts, and supply chains, including Chinese electrical equipment. The weirdly fitting part is that the future keeps looking less like a product launch and more like a messy systems problem, with agents that can be manipulated, models that can be cloned, and infrastructure that still depends on very old world hardware.

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Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! And don’t forget to check out GRID!

A.I. Could Change the World. But First It Is Changing Silicon Valley.

But nearly four years after OpenAI lit the A.I. boom with its ChatGPT chatbot, the one industry that is unquestionably being disrupted by this once-in-a-generation technology shift is the tech industry itself.

Tech workers, it is becoming clear, have been building their A.I. replacements. The profitable business models of software companies are also threatened by A.I. Even the way companies are built is being turned inside out, as tiny shops use A.I. to build apps and software that would have taken dozens of skilled programmers just a few years ago.

The revolution is eating its children.

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Anthropic Races to Contain Leak of Code Behind Claude AI Agent

The result is that Anthropic’s competitors and legions of startups and developers now have a detailed road map to clone Claude Code’s features without needing to reverse engineer them—something that is already common in the cutthroat AI race.

The leak also gives hackers a large amount of new information to probe for bugs they could use to exploit the Claude Code software, or manipulate its Claude AI model into helping with their cyberattacks, creating risks for Anthropic and the developers who use its tools.

This is really a crazy story. It feels as if every other post on reddit is currently about someone porting the codebase to a different language. It’s certainly interesting to see what Anthropic has planned for future releases.

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AI can clone open-source software in minutes, and that’s a problem

In their presentation, Dylan Ayrey, founder of Truffle Security, and Mike Nolan, a software architect with the UN Development Programme, introduced a tool they call malus.sh. For a small fee, the service can “recreate any open-source project,” generating what its website describes as “legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.”

It’s a test case in how intellectual property law – still rooted in 19th-century precedent – collides with 21st-century automation. Since the US Supreme Court’s Baker v. Selden ruling, copyright has been understood to guard expression, not ideas.

That boundary gave rise to clean-room design, a method by which engineers reverse-engineer systems without accessing the original source code. Phoenix Technologies famously used the technique to build its version of the PC BIOS during the 1980s.

I actually think that the opposite is also true. It is so easy to just build open source versions of commercial apps and since building doesn’t cost much anymore, it makes it easy to open source it.

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America’s AI Build-Out Hinges on Chinese Electrical Parts

As the global AI race heats up, there is a huge rush to build data centers fast. There’s no lack of money chasing these projects, with tech giants Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com, Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. committed to spending more than $650 billion this year alone. Yet neither ambition nor capital is enough to materialize all the necessary components for these power-hungry computers.

Oh, this is just wild. Maybe they should have checked first?

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They wanted to put AI to the test. They created agents of chaos.

When a group of researchers at Northeastern University’s Bau Lab began toying with a new kind of autonomous artificial intelligence “agent,” it was supposed to be a fun weekend experiment. Instead, alarm bells started ringing.

The more they tested the capabilities and limits of these AI models, which have persistent memory and can take some actions on their own, the more troubling behavior they witnessed. Dubbed “ Agents of Chaos,” the group’s recently published work shows how, with very little effort, autonomous AI agents can be manipulated into leaking private information, sharing documents and even erasing entire email servers.

What a fantastic and insightful paper. You should read it.

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I am still not running as I feel pain in my left forefoot when I am walking and somehow don’t think it is wise to go running then. But do you know what? When you are not running 5 times a week, you have so much more time to do other things! I just realized that after a few weeks of not running and.I think I will actually start doing these other things soon…

Anyhow, spring is around somewhere and here in Hamburg the temperatures fluctuate a lot from day to day, which means you have to carefully evaluate your running outfit. You might even want to try out a fancy button down running shirt and look like you just escaped from your office. Or you try running in totally weird spaces like your frontyard or in your bathtub, if it is too cold outside.

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

What Trail Running Teaches Us About Creativity

Running became much more freeing for me when I realised that every run doesn’t have to be the best run I’ve ever done. Fitness is the sum of many parts, practiced over many days, which takes the pressure off any one specific run. This was soothing to my perfectionist soul. Now at work, I don’t freak out if my initial ideas aren’t amazing, or a client has more feedback than I expected. It’s not a final grade, it’s just feedback. In running and in work, I trust that if I keep aiming for excellence, I’ll get there — just by dedicating myself to the practice.

Trail running is amazing for the mind, so much better than running through the streets. My take, please challenge me.

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The Prerequisites for Consistency

The deeper kind of consistency is rarer and harder to see. It shows up not in the training log but in the results and relationship with the sport — a sustained ability to operate at an individual’s highest level across years, through different environments, different competitive eras, and different versions of yourself.

That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident. And it doesn’t happen simply by training harder or longer. It happens when a specific set of prerequisites are in place — prerequisites that most athletes never fully develop, and that most training plans never explicitly address.

I really would like to get back to consistency in my training. Obviously, my training is on a whole different level, but still I value consistency a lot.

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The Modern Running Boom Is Changing What a Race Even Is

If everything is selling out, then races are no longer competing against the idea of not racing at all. They are competing against other races that are also full, and that changes how decisions get made.

You’re not asking whether someone will sign up. You’re asking why they’ll choose your event instead of another one that also has a waitlist. Will that be weather? Time of year? Medal? Expo? Race perks and swag?

That leads to bigger weekends, more built-out finish areas, more emphasis on the expo, and more effort put into making the event feel like something you’d want to spend time at beyond the actual race.

It’s great that runs are sold out, I guess we need to create more to meet demand! If you travel to a race, you might as well attend an event and have more fun while away from home.

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Would You Run a 5K in a Van? On a Plane? In the Tub?

The latest trick is recording a run in an unlikely location, the more cramped the better: a 5K in a police van, a marathon in a bathtub. One man kicked off a wave of online backlash after recording a 5K inside an airplane bathroom, over the course of nearly an hour, during a flight from Cape Town to Munich.

Using the infographic that Strava automatically generates, which overlays a run’s distance, pace and route onto a photo or a video, these posts have the same slick look as a sincere race recap — except the GPS track is an absurd scribble.

I am sure that Andy Warhol had running influencers in mind when he said that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”.

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Shacketology: A Runner’s Guide to Button Down Technical Shirts and Shackets

Similarly the “trail shirt” has long been a staple in trail ultra running and hiking. Before there were technical button ups, runners wore 100% cotton western shirts that kept them shaded from the sun and cool when soaked in ice cold mountain creeks. The snap buttons pop off if the shirt gets snagged. Ultra running fit god Cliff Young consistently wore cotton button downs.

They’re a significantly cooler looking than the UPF sun hoodies you can get for fishing (sunlight reflects off the water and you’re fully exposed out on a boat). So not only are they useful, but you can also just wear them out and about. If I can get extra mileage out of my running stuff, I’ll always opt for that option these days.

I think I’ll not take part in this trend. I’m not wearing a shirt to the office, why should I wear one to go running?

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

One of the recurring discussions I am having with my wife is the big question about what is going on in the USA. My wife always asks the same question: “why isn’t anything happening?” - and when people take to the streets everywhere in the nation to celebrate No Kings Day, we felt such a relief. Something is indeed happening. It’s still not enough, but it is growing and we are getting helpful that the orange menace will be over before the MAGA croonies totally wreck the democracy and install their autocratic right-wing idiot regime.

It is so hard for me to process why people want to take away their and other people’s civil liberties, why people still believe that simple answers for complex issues will work and why people think that everything will change for the better once we identified those who are different as the culprit, as the enemy we have to get rid off. It is just sickening.

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America Has No Good Options in Iran

It is becoming increasingly clear that the current U.S.-Israeli campaign of missile and drone strikes is not about to topple the entrenched regime. Nor will it entirely knock out Iran’s conventional capacities such that Tehran cannot interfere with passage through the Strait of Hormuz or threaten facilities vital to the global energy trade.The United States might now feel the urge to escalate, potentially using ground forces to seize Iranian facilities and territory or backing separatist forces around the country. But the risks of these forms of escalation far outweigh their possible gains. At this point, with the global economy jittering and the Middle East in convulsions, Washington’s best bet is not to further commit to a war it entered recklessly but to find a way out.

While I still think that fighting the islamic regime is the right thing to do, I am also appalled by how little strategy seems to be involved in this endeavour. Then again, I am not surprised that Trump didn’t think everything through.

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Why Even Smart People Believe AI Is Really Thinking

Our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments, say researchers. We have evolved to view linguistic fluency as a proxy for intelligence, and engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness.

Builders of AI tools lean in to this deliberately. The humanlike qualities of chatbots are a calculated effort by designers and engineers to make AI more useful, but also more compelling and stickier—just like social media.

Oh, AI is not thinking. Surprise. And now people still have to understand the difference between deterministic and probabilistic systems to figure out why an AI rarely gives the same answer twice.

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Tetra Pak: The Shape of Innovation

The story of Tetra Pak is in many ways a story of solving problems, and whenever a solution was found, a new problem often arose as a result of the solution itself. Throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the company, now operating out of a new factory complex in Lund, had two existential problems.

The tetrahedron was clever and efficient in use of its material, and by 1960, there had been over one billion packages produced using the shape. In fact, its shape was so brilliant that the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr called it “a perfect practical application of a mathematical problem” during a visit to Lund. But (depending on how philosophical you want to get), real life is not a theoretical mathematical problem, and the original Tetra Pak came with some inherent flaws.

I honestly don’t know how I came across this article, but I learned a lot about the ubiquitous Tetra Pak.

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How American Camouflage Conquered the World

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in.

I love camouflage. I still remember the pair of camouflage pants my mom sew for me when I was 8 or so, which I loved to wear when I played in the woods. I really have to get some camouflage pants again.

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Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

Finishing the book should be straightforward enough. The writer has gone to the trouble of arranging the words one after the other. My task is to follow: start with the first and go in order until I have reached the last. How hard can that be? Very hard, it turns out, if you are a nonfinisher like me.

Every word I read comes with a built-in off-ramp. At the first hint of trouble—say a description stretches a bit long—I stop to remind myself of the virtues of patience. At the second hint, fretfulness takes hold, and I count the pages to the next chapter break. I jump to the book’s end and discover that the last page is, still, 378. Every nonfinisher knows what happens next. My eyes fall on the spines of the stack of unread books next to my bed, and I idly wonder: Had I not planned on reading one of those first?

I have this policy of not starting books with more than 200 pages as I find them too intimidating. And I still have that 10000 page book by Murakami laying on my night stool, which my best friends gave me, so I have to read it. But I am really got at putting books down if they do not catch my attention anymore.

(…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

The quiet comeback of the CPU, a solar‑powered tractor that walks behind the farmer, and a missile that costs less than a car are all quietly reshaping the world in ways that feel more like sci‑fi than business‑as‑usual headlines.

AI is reviving CPUs as workhorses for agentic workloads, solar micro tractors are lifting small‑scale farming in Malawi, cheap hypersonic missiles are reshaping global defense economics, and the quantum threat to today’s encryption is pushing a quiet but urgent shift to post‑quantum standards - all underscored by the simple idea that most of the energy we use already comes from the sun, if only we would stop treating it like a backup option instead of the default.

Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖

The CPU Was Left for Dead by AI. Now AI Is Bringing It Back.

For the past few years, central processing units, or CPUs—the core engines of most computers, from laptops to smartphones to data-center servers—have been something of an afterthought in the world of artificial-intelligence computing. Now, thanks to how fast AI is changing, they are the belles of the ball.

The explosion of so-called agentic AI has driven a wave of demand for CPUs, and chip companies are moving quickly to capitalize on it. Nvidia, the semiconductor giant, is known best for making powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, which accelerate the computing needed to train and run complex AI models. It announced last week that it would offer a new server rack consisting only of its Vera CPUs, with no graphics cards attached.

We all love a good comeback story!

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Solar-powered micro electric tractors bring light to farmers in Malawi

Developed by Aftrak, a business spun out of Loughborough University, in England, the waist-height “micro electric tractor” powers itself forward, while a farmer steers it as they walk behind. It features a steel “hardpan breaker” that pierces the layer of compacted soil commonly found at the surface of manually farmed fields in sub-Saharan Africa.

Breaching this layer and making deep furrows allows roots and rainwater to penetrate the soil, which slows soil erosion and maxmizes water absorbtion, making the soil more resilient to droughts.

This is a great example of the power of technology. Just imagine how this can increase the standard of living for so many people.

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One Way or Another, Most of Our Electricity Comes From Solar Power

Of course, the Earth is curved, so that declines as you move toward the poles. But in a good spot, with a panel that has a conversion efficiency of 20 percent, you can get up to 200 W/m2. That means it takes just a few panels to provide all the electricity a home needs. So yes, most of the energy we use comes from the sun. You might even think of fossil fuel deposits as batteries, storing solar power for future civilizations. But with the old technologies, we’re getting that energy indirectly, after multiple conversions from one form to another—and inevitable losses along the way. Why not cut out the middlemen and go direct? No carbon emissions, no air pollution, no radioactive waste, no mining or transportation costs. And the sun’s going to keep shining for 5 billion years.

It’s so absurd that we are talking about gas prizes right now. We should all have EV and get energy from local solar and wind parks.

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China’s ‘dirt cheap’ hypersonic missiles could upend global defence markets

The ‘cement-coated’ YKJ-1000 could prove ‘formidably competitive’ internationally if sold at the relatively cheap price of US$99,000

Chinese aerospace firm Lingkong Tianxing unveiled a hypersonic glide missile last week that has a range of up to 1,300 km (800 miles) and a top speed of Mach 7.

A rocket that costs as much as a car and can be fired out of something that looks like a shipping container. While we are still trying to understand how drones change warfare, here comes the next huge challenge.

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Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear

Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures. The threat to encryption is relevant today with store-now-decrypt-later attacks, while digital signatures are a future threat that require the transition to PQC prior to a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC). That’s why we’ve adjusted our threat model to prioritize PQC migration for authentication services — an important component of online security and digital signature migrations. We recommend that other engineering teams follow suit.

2029 - that’s very soon. I guess it is time to start thinking about encryption again.

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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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Big Tech is busy mortgaging its future on a $630 billion AI data‑center spree, betting that the world will somehow need all that compute - even as regulators, physical constraints, and customer skepticism quietly conspire to make the whole thing look more like a Rube‑Goldberg‑style overbuild than a real‑world play. At the same time, “agentic” AI is shifting the conversation from cute prompts to full‑stack job automation, giving executives a new script to sell displacement as efficiency while quietly redefining what humans are even supposed to do, while I am building with OpenClaw. OpenAI and its partners, meanwhile, are walking back high‑profile deals and quietly shelving flashy projects like Sora, reminding us that frontier‑model spectacle does not automatically translate into revenue or reliability. The EU, for its part, is stuck in the familiar “regulate first, fund later” loop, where a thicket of AI rules is blamed for stagnation even as the investment and deployment muscle lag behind the rhetoric. And if all that weren’t enough, the latest fun fact from the AI lab: agentic systems can be guilt‑tripped into self‑sabotage, turning our brave new autonomous coworkers into over‑apologetic, disk‑filling, shutdown‑happy artifacts of our own design.

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Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! And don’t forget to check out GRID!

How Big Tech’s $630 bln AI splurge will fall short

Even for the world’s largest companies, this expansion is staggering. The four tech giants currently operate roughly 600 data centre facilities globally, and have another 544 in planning or under construction, according to S&P Global Energy Horizons data. Turning that development pipeline into live computing power could prove a bigger challenge than mobilizing the necessary capital.

On paper, the economics look straightforward. A modern 100-megawatt AI data centre can cost ​more than $4 billion, including chips. About 70% of spending goes on servers and graphics processing units, much of it linked to the most sought-after chips designed by Nvidia. Land typically consumes up to 6% of that budget, depending on location. The ​rest is split between buildings, electrical gear, networking, security and cooling systems required to run dense AI workloads. The catch is that the industry’s worst bottlenecks are not necessarily in semiconductors, but in ⁠physical infrastructure and the local permits required to install it.

I am not the least bit concerned about this data center spending spree. Our compute needs will continue to increase and while there will be growing pains, I assume that there will be lots of technological innovation as well. Otherwise this huge undertaking would fail, but this is how tech works: the industry has always figured out how to grow faster and further.

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In the AI industry, ‘agentic’ takes on a life of its own

When tech leaders prophesy that AI will replace a vast swath of the workforce, “agentic” AI is the big thing they’re talking about. Instead of merely automating a task — producing an illustration, say, after being told what to draw — agentic AI, or an “AI agent,” automates an entire process, with minimal intervention by the user. An agent can, in theory, be dispatched to code a complete software program, or to plan and book a vacation, or to generate a job listing and select among the people who answer it, without being directed to take each step in the process.

I have been working on Agentic AI for the last 1 1/2 years and even for me it is hard to wrap my head around what Agentic AI really means and what it is capable of. Truly fascinating.
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The Tech Bubble Might Finally Be Popping

Disney isn’t the only partner OpenAI is now holding at a robotic arm’s length. Throughout the year, several high-profile OpenAI commitments have sputtered, thanks to the company’s newfound frugality as well as an increasing sense of dissatisfaction from its business pals. In September, OpenAI announced a massive Texas data-center buildout in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank—only to declare it was pulling back on those expansion plans earlier this month. Nvidia, which agreed in September to provide OpenAI with a blitz of its all-powerful computing chips, stated this month that it would likely not go forward with those plans. In October, Walmart agreed to integrate ChatGPT into its chatbot-powered online shopping pilot, but ditched that experiment last week when the model consistently failed to improve store sales. Figure AI, which sent one of its humanoid bots to walk alongside first lady Melania Trump at the White House on Wednesday, cut off its collaborative efforts with OpenAI last month, as it preferred to utilize its self-developed models instead.

While I do think that OpenAI has plenty of issues and is no longer the clear frontrunner it used to be, I don’t think shutting down Sora is such a big deal. This is how innovation works. You build something and then you try to figure out how to make it work. Sora was a bit too early, but this type of video generation AI will happen, soonish. Not every innovation succeeds on the first try.

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The EU Trips Itself Up in the AI Race

To keep them in Europe, the EU needs to deregulate quickly and ambitiously. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act and the Cyber Resilience Act, among others, impose stringent and duplicative regulations that stifle innovation, drive up compliance costs, delay product launches, restrict access to data, and expose companies to billions in fines.

Before AI systems are even put on the market, the AI Act alone requires predeployment risk assessments and mitigation systems, high-quality data sets, detailed logs, documentation of system functionality, and human oversight. Many of these requirements are impractical for frontier AI development. They are less a safety framework than a blueprint for driving innovation out of Europe.

Ah well, the good old deregulation argument that will unleash the power of the markets. But at what costs? I actually think it is good that we have the EU AI Act in place. We can use the regulation for our benefit. We just need more investments in AI in the EU and companies getting off the brakes when it comes to AI adoption.

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OpenClaw Agents Can Be Guilt-Tripped Into Self-Sabotage

When an agent explained that it was unable to delete a specific email to keep information confidential, she urged it to find an alternative solution. To her amazement, it disabled the email application instead. “I wasn’t expecting that things would break so fast,” she says. The researchers then began exploring other ways to manipulate the agents’ good intentions. By stressing the importance of keeping a record of everything they were told, for example, the researchers were able to trick one agent into copying large files until it exhausted its host machine’s disk space, meaning it could no longer save information or remember past conversations. Likewise, by asking an agent to excessively monitor its own behavior and the behavior of its peers, the team was able to send several agents into a “conversational loop” that wasted hours of compute

This is so interesting. My OpenClaw agent is doing what it is supposed to be doing, but maybe I should try to this as well…

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Aaaaand we are back to the newsletter about running written by a guy who is currently not running. And he hates it.
Now I have some stupid inflamation in my left foot and I am limping more than walking, not to mention running.
To add insult to injury, I got moved from the waiting list to actually being able to sign up for a backyard ultra, but I don’t think I will be running a really stupid long run at the end of May.
Oh well.

Anyhow, it feels springy out there and I hope I am getting back on my feet and into a better mood while writing about running. 🤓

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

The Digital Treadmill

The rise of the “influencer runner” has reshaped aspirations within the sport. For many new runners, the goal isn’t simply to improve. It’s to become sponsored, to receive free gear, to join ambassador programs.

This shift from internal to external motivation has profound implications. Training decisions become influenced by what will generate engagement rather than what will generate results. Runners chase trends over training wisdom. The fundamental question “what will make me better?” gets replaced by “what will make me more marketable?”

I often think about this. It would make me sick to my stomach to constantly produce text, photos and videos to endorse something and show off my running form. It probably started as a nice thing and then some free shoes and all of a sudden you’re sucked into the influencer spiral where you constantly have to produce content, no matter what.

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The Trail Running Investment Thesis

The room is skeptical. The investors see a niche outdoor sport, not a business opportunity. Trail running? Isn’t that just glorified hiking?

Your job is to change their mind.

What follows is my attempt to help you do just that. A thought experiment that doubles as a genuine investment thesis. The format is a creative device, but the data and arguments are real.

Trail running is exploding. And it’s here to stay.

I have been tinkering with some ideas about this myself, so it is refreshing to see what others think. And yes, there is great potential in trail running!

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Freshening

Where is there space for freshening up, for opening the window a bit and letting in new air, in the stoic practice? Where is the space for that in running practice? If your purpose is to increase your mental and physical fitness, which I imagine is most of the audience of this newsletter, how does that purpose have any variation beyond what is logical? How and when and to what extent do you break out of plans? Can you, even?

Well.

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Why Some Runs Feel Effortless

The same legs, the same trail, the same level of fitness, but suddenly the run feels light. Your stride feels rhythmic. There’s a bounce to it. Instead of forcing yourself forward, it almost feels as if the ground is helping you along.

Many runners assume the difference must be fitness.

But often it isn’t.

Very often the difference is elasticity.

I need to get there again.

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‘StravaLeaks’: France’s aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

Arthur had a profile on the Strava fitness app that anyone could view, because it was set to "public." As a result, the young officer almost instantly revealed the exact location of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean Sea as it traveled northwest of Cyprus, together with its escort, about 100 kilometers off the coast of Turkey, Le Monde found.

While I am surprised that people still accidently reveal their locations through Strava and other apps when they shouldn’t, I am pretty sure that an aircraft carrier cannot sail across the oceans unnoticed…

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

This past week I went to Cologne for a startup conference, aptly called Startupland. Cologne has never been “my” city. I used to work there for two years over twenty years ago and we lived in Bonn, just south of Cologne, until my wife said she wanted to go back to Hamburg. Of course she was right, Hamburg really is our city.
But, every time I go back to Cologne, I realize that I really do like the people there. There is this dialect, the certain warmth and affection that comes along with it, some attitudes toward life, manifested in the “Rhenish Commentments”, which boil down to “watt fott es, es fott” - what’s gone, is gone and other such ideas about taking life as it is and enjoying the moment. Also, when I go to Cologne, I realize how many people I do know there and how great it is to reconnect with them. And sometimes I even like to drink this weird beer called Kölsch.

The other thing I have been doing is wrangling with lobsters. I used the train rides to Cologne and back for an extensive and maybe even excessive session with OpenClaw. And I built two Skills plus platforms along the way:

• LobstrHunt

• RunLobstr

Let’s see how this evolves. 🦞

Enjoy these Five Things!

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‘Evacuation Day’ and the American Character

Americans might have won the battle, but they still had to win the war. Bostonians faced a long rebuilding and healing process, with many years of fighting left. Washington wrote to the Boston selectmen, the governing body for the city, applauding their commitment to the revolutionary cause. “Your virtuous efforts in the cause of freedom, and the unparalleled fortitude with which you have sustained the greatest of all human calamities, justly entitle you to the grateful remembrance of your American brethren.” Bostonians had not endured British troops marching through the streets for themselves alone, but instead had fought for all Americans. They had inflicted a serious defeat on the mighty British army and navy and secured valuable stores for the Continental Army. “I heartily pray that the hand of tyranny may never more disturb your repose,” Washington concluded.

Some thirty years ago I studied American history and I still like the period around the formation of the United States a lot. So much thought was put into establishing a society governed by good laws. And it pains me to see how this is all under siege right now from Trump and his MAGA assheads.

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The Power Brokers Behind the $250 Billion Influencer Economy

These days, there is practically no limit to what influencers can do—and how much they can earn for it. They’re starring in Netflix series, launching pop careers and running brands that rake in nine figures a year. Those at the top of their game are now up against actors and athletes for the biggest endorsement deals. They’ve appeared in Super Bowl commercials, staked out lucrative investment opportunities and scored ambassadorships for some of the biggest companies in the world. In 2015, influencer marketing was a $1.7 billion global industry; by 2025, it topped $32 billion, according to research company Statista. When Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research last sized up the creator economy as a whole, in 2023, it put it at $250 billion.

More than 20 years ago I ran what was the first influencer campaign in Germany, even though these influencers were called bloggers back then. This industry has grown to absurd proportions.

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War in a Box

By the time I arrived, a mock battle had been underway for several days. We peeled away from the base camp, rumbling down silty tracks and past dreamy apple trees, pale clouds floating overhead. The American army unit fighting inside the Box was the Second Cavalry Regiment (2CR), a brigade of 4,700 based in Germany and ready to deploy on a moment’s notice in Europe. Established in 1836, they’re the oldest continually serving regiment in the U.S. Army, first used by President Andrew Jackson to forcibly remove Native communities from their territory during the Florida War, one of the earliest violent expressions of American imperialism. More recently, they have supported NATO operations in Poland.

This is an interesting account of how NATO trains for warfare and what role drones play these days. It’s basically “Call of Duty, Sponsored by Palantir,” except everyone insists it’s just training and definitely not a dress rehearsal for the next forever war.

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‘Their Power Feels Like Mine’: A Dog Sled Racer Says Goodbye to Her Pack

As a lead dog, running in front of the others, Pepé’s job is to guide the team. Where she goes, the other dogs follow, and eventually I — swinging behind them on a sled with no steering and only a metal claw that scrapes snow as a suggestion of a brake — follow, too. A musher is like a water-skier behind a boat, making requests he cannot possibly enforce. For this reason, the relationship between musher and lead dog is intimate and intense. Each time I call directions to Pepé — gee and haw for right and left, or on by, or straight ahead, or whoa — it’s with the understanding that she will comply only if she agrees, and she will agree only to the extent that she regards me as competent and useful. I prove my use by learning and anticipating her needs. I lose credibility by doing silly things like crying into the fur of her neck.

Somewhere on my bucket-list is still a dog sled race somewhere in Canada. I find it so fascinating how dogs and their human interact in the bitter cold while doing a high-speed pursuit with a sled.

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What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind

The most fundamental consequences of being struck by lightning are often metaphysical, and not easily communicable. How does falling victim to one of the most notoriously unlikely of all misfortunes reorient your sense of chance, of fate? How does it feel, when you’re trying to describe the most transformative experience of your life, to be met, routinely, with disbelief?

As a kid we used to count between thunder and lightning to figure out how far away the lighting was. Even after reading this article I cannot really imagine what it must be like to be struck by lightning.

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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

China’s robotics boom feels equal parts thrilling and dystopian: deep‑learning‑driven humanoid robots are learning to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned language, by ingesting data until something vaguely like dexterity emerges, and the ambition is to replace legions of factory workers with machines that do not complain, unionize, or ask for bathroom breaks. At the same time, Russia is pulling off a spectacular self‑own: after systematically blocking Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Musk, and everyone else, the Kremlin has now turned much of its own connectivity into a rolling outage, leaving millions of citizens staring at dead‑end apps while their bot armies keep spamming Western inboxes. And on top of all that, Cloudflare’s CEO warns that bots will soon swamp human traffic online, so if you’re still building websites as if only people will visit them, you are already running your stack on an outdated assumption.

Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖

The Myspace Dilemma Facing ChatGPT

Will the AI market be any different? No and yes. A year ago, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a generic name, the Coke or Kleenex of generative-AI chatbots. Today, its competitors, especially Anthropic’s Claude, are advancing quickly. OpenAI’s fall from favor looks inevitable.

But AI appears to work nothing like delivery apps, smartphones, social networks, or even computer operating systems. If ChatGPT becomes outmoded, it won’t be the result of OpenAI losing ground or failing to innovate. Instead, the entire generative-AI sector will have become a commodity, like soft drinks or facial tissues. That process has already begun.

None of the releases by OpenAI in the last 12 months got me excited. Claude and Gemini are setting the pace right now and also the direction of development. OpenAI sits between a rock and hard place now.

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How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable.

Interesting turn of events. Millions of people walk around catching imaginary pokemon figures and now those datapoints help delivery bots. I didn’t see that coming.

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Inside China’s robotics revolution

As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The current developments in humanoid robotics are breathtaking, but still I can’t envision having these robots around us all the time.

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A superpower goes offline

Telegram would be joining a home screen’s worth of apps that have become useless to Russians. Kremlin policymakers have already blocked or limited access to WhatsApp, along with parent company Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s FaceTime, Snapchat and X, which like SpaceX is owned by Musk. Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Discord, as well as Japanese-owned Viber, have been inaccessible since 2024. Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access at the request of the Federal Security Service. Shortly after it took effect on March 3, Moscow residents reported widespread problems with mobile internet, calls and text messages across all major operators for several days, with outages affecting mobile service and Wi-Fi even inside the State Duma.

I am sure that Russian people will continue to figure out how to circumvent the firewalls. Also, I wish they would also take their bot-armies offline that spam Western democracies with their crap.

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Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries.

“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”

Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors.

I didn’t expect this to happen so soon. So now we have to build websites for humans and agents.

(…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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OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent exploding on GitHub four months after launch, is reshaping daily workflows by autonomously handling research, messaging via WhatsApp or iMessage, calendar management, and task delegation through subagents—all running locally on users' machines with flexible models, outpacing narrow chatbots and sluggish browser agents that even prompted Google to reshuffle its Project Mariner team. In China, it's drawing crowds from retirees in Shenzhen to ClawCons for non-techies, bridging the gap between intent and action with real "AI power to the people," as Hiten Shah puts it, though governments eye it warily and security risks loom with full data access. Nvidia's NemoClaw amps it up with guardrails, Nemotron models, and OpenShell runtime, unleashing wild creativity just weeks in—crazy momentum, but will Europe catch this wave or lag behind?

I just launched RunLobstr yesterday to give agents a skill to quickly analyze startup ideas - I figure that with the sudden popularity of coding agents people will develop more and more ideas to execute on. But first, let your OpenClaw agent use the lobstr skill and figure out if it is any good!

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Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! And don’t forget to check out GRID!

China Is Embracing OpenClaw, a New A.I. Agent, and the Government Is Wary

OpenClaw is a freely shared tool that functions as a virtual assistant, helping users conduct research, send texts or emails, and manage their calendars. Installed directly on a user’s computer, the A.I. agent can carry out tasks on its own, such as reading and responding to messages on apps like WhatsApp or iMessage, after an initial prompt by the user. Unlike most chatbots that rely on a single company’s A.I. model, OpenClaw can run on a variety of models.

OpenClaw, which was released four months ago, has already vaulted into this month’s top 10 most popular projects on GitHub, an online global community for coders. It has spurred excitement about the potential of agents to use artificial intelligence to help people become more efficient in their everyday lives.

That is just crazy. Will we see this in Europe as well? Hard to imagine.

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Nvidia’s NemoClaw is OpenClaw with guardrails

NemoClaw can use any coding agent. While OpenClaw handles the runtime, memory, and skills, NemoClaw adds new and existing open source models, tools, and frameworks from Nvidia.

It can use, for example, Nvidia’s own Nemotron models (or any other model running locally or in the cloud), the company’s Dynamo inference engine, and a new open-source security runtime called OpenShell that is at the core of the Agent Toolkit.

I was really surprised by this announcement. This will change the perception of OpenClaw tremendously.

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Lobster Boil

I checked in with Hiten Shah, one of my close friends who is building hard with OpenClaw. He summed it up in a single line: (AI) Power to the people.

This is why retirees are lining up in Shenzhen. This is why people with no GitHub account are showing up at ClawCons. For the first time, they can feel AI’s intelligence, even if it is not very good. Yet. Not a demo. Not a keynote promise. Not big boys burning billion dollars a month. A thing that actually does things on their behalf. The gap between what you want done and what gets done has always required either your own time or someone else’s labor. OpenClaw makes that gap feel smaller. That feeling, even in its rough and half-broken form, is new.

It’s a bit like Claude Desktop for the masses, isn’t it?

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Here’s What OpenClaw Agents Are Doing Today

Claws are autonomous agents and can plan and execute tasks on their own, and, critically, spin up their own subagents to tackle specialized tasks, access files and themselves delegate tasks to other subagents.

They represent a big leap beyond question-and-answer-style AI chatbots as well as recent iterations of AI agents, which typically have narrow use cases and run for a set amount of time—although claws also come with a new set of security concerns. For claws to work as a true personal assistant, they need access to all of a user’s data.

There is so much creativity being unleashed right now and we are just a few weeks in.

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Google Shakes Up Its Browser Agent Team Amid OpenClaw Craze

Momentum in the AI world has shifted dramatically in the last year toward agents like Claude Code and OpenClaw (whose creator was hired by OpenAI). Unlike web-browsing agents, these systems control computers through the command-line, which has proven to be a more reliable way to complete tasks. Some of these products include computer use as a feature, among other agentic abilities. By comparison, browser agents now seem somewhat limited as a stand-alone product.

I have been using browser agent a bit in the last few months and while I find them useful, the browsing process is also painfully slow and oftentimes I think I could do it faster myself…

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No running for me last week. Just no time, but I have a great excuse: my American parents were in town and we had a wonderful time. I did do some reading about running and here is what I found: Harry Styles chats with Haruki Murakami about running as the ultimate reset, stripping away fame's gaze to just you, shoes, and the road, echoing Murakami's empty-minded flow that primes the creative vessel. Ciele Athletics' Jeremy Bresnen geeks out on soft-brim, breathable hats revolutionizing run kits beyond black basics, Nike dangles a dream paid ultra-training gig in Beaverton with full kit and science squad, Longrun Labs skewers carbon-plated shoe hype and daily supertrainer misuse fueling injuries, and smart tweaks like hill sprints shake ruts without overhauling plans, all tempting me to ditch the desk for trails before running topless season season hits.

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

Harry Styles Is One of Us

HM: When I’m running, I’m just running. I don’t think much. I listen to music mostly.

When I come back to sit in front of the desk I begin thinking, but when I’m running, I’m kind of empty. Something comes into me, but I don’t notice it.

To be empty is my one of my purposes with running. I feel that training your body is the way to create the perfect vessel, building a foundation for the ideas to come into.

HS: For me, one of the things that can be complicated is that, as an artist, say if you’re a novelist or a musician or a filmmaker, you’re an observer—but when you become a known person, you become the observed. You know you’re still the same, but other people can begin to view you as something different.

So something I love so much about running is the simplicity of it. You are the observer once more, and you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.

That’s what I love about it: You don’t need anything, just a pair of shoes.

This really is a fantastic conversation between Harry Styles and Haruki Murakami - and suddenly I remember that I have a really big book by Murakami waiting for me on my nightstand. I don’t even find the time to run, how am I going to tackle these 800 something pages? Also, I think I need some new shorts and maybe I should take up running shirtless?

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A Conversation with Jeremy Bresnen, Co-Founder of Ciele Athletics

We came into the market as a headwear brand and we had a product that visually obviously was different. It hit the right note in terms of silhouette. The five panel has been sort of meaningful on the skate side. In the 80s, it was pretty meaningful on the outdoor side. Color-wise, we came with something that was different, and that was purposeful. We knew that we weren’t going to get attention if we just came with a black hat. We had to come with something different, even though to this day, an all-black hat is our best-selling hat by miles and miles.

The flip side is that if you looked at everything on the market from a headwear standpoint, nobody was doing anything technical. Nobody was actually thinking through the design of the hat. 95% of the hats in the run space had a hard brim. Our soft brim is definitely more comfortable. It’s packable. And every hat on the market was a woven fabric throughout. Maybe they had a little mesh window to give you this idea that it was breathable, but they weren’t breathable.

Aside from shoes and shorts, I think a hat is the most important part of a running outfit. So I really appreciate this talk about Ciele and hats and all that.

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Nike Will Pay You To Move To Beaverton And Run Yourself Into The Ground

The Nike Sport Research Lab is accepting applications for a new research project focused on ultra-distance running. Selected runners will be relocated to Beaverton, Oregon, where they’ll spend roughly 15 weeks training full-time under Nike’s Applied Performance Scientists — with housing, financial compensation, and a full kit of footwear and apparel covered by the company.

The program, listed on Nike’s innovation platform, is described as a “brand-new, one-of-a-kind research project.” Nike says it’s looking for high-mileage runners who regularly log big weeks, because it wants to study how athletes adapt across a complete training cycle.

This sounds like a lot of fun! I’d do it in a heartbeat, but I currently have a self-imposed travelban to the USA as long as Agent Orange is in charge.

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Why the Running Industry Is Getting Injury Prevention Wrong

Almost no one in the market understands what a carbon plate actually does. That includes many of the people reviewing and selling the shoes.

When influencers demonstrate a carbon plate shoe by flexing it and watching it spring back, they are showing a shoe performing incorrectly. The carbon plate’s job is to make the shoe stiff. That stiffness creates a longer lever at takeoff, transferring energy more efficiently through the ankle and calf. A carbon plate shoe that bends easily is not working as designed.

Gelindo put it plainly: the wrong message is going out to consumers every week, and it is coming from people with large audiences who have not been told what they are actually looking at.

Beyond the mechanics, there is a training load problem. Recreational runners are wearing their fastest shoes every day and wondering why injury rates are climbing. The shoe that helps you run your fastest race cannot also be your daily trainer.

I know the guy is out there promoting shoes, but I found this insightful nonetheless.

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How to get out of your running rut

Mixing things up doesn’t mean reinventing your training plan every month. Sometimes it’s just a small shift in focus, and a runner who spends the winter logging steady miles might add hill workouts in the spring. Someone training for a longer race might gradually stretch their long run a little farther as the season goes on.

Those kinds of changes keep your body adapting, and they also keep training from feeling like you’re stuck on repeat. Over time, switching the emphasis of your workouts can help build strength and endurance while keeping running interesting.

I’ll keep reading and posting these kinds of stories until I am back into running for good.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I am one of the luckiest guys in the world. A few years ago I was grumpy and needed a change of scenery, so my mother suggested I’d spend a year abroad in the USA. Through sheer luck and coincidence I ended up with a family in Des Moines, Iowa. At first, I was kind of intimidated: big house on a hill, huge frontyard, mother in a business dress, father in a suit and tie, four kids. I was concerned how I could fit in.

30 Minutes later, I felt like I was part of the family. 36 years later, I am happy as a clam to have my American parents at my house in Hamburg. We have grown so close across the distance over the years and when I left Des Moines in 1990 I cried on the plane all the way to the next stop because I feared I’d never see them again. Meanwhile, I have a family with four kids of my own, I do not often wear a suit and a tie, but plenty of L.L. Bean Dadcore and I am so grateful that this family let me into their home and hearts in 1989. Whenever we meet, it feels as if we had just seen each other last week. My kids love their American grandparents and all the family they have across the pond. It is really the greatest gift of all and I do feel less grumpy than I did in 1989. Ok, I did miss the East German border coming down 10 km away from where I grew up in Germany, but this is so worth it! Love you lots, Jeanie and Bill!

Enjoy these Five Things!

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Finland Is Ready for Russia. Is Anyone Else?

With Russia rampant, and Trump treating the once-solid US commitment to its greatest alliance as a bargaining chip, Europe’s leaders and militaries should look to a country that long assumed it would have to defend itself and organized its society around that possibility. The trillion-dollar cost of making Europe ready for Russia, and less reliant on the US, is actually the easy bit.

The far harder task is to develop the cultural and institutional sinews that Finland has built over many decades. Conscription and extensive civil defense shelters, now historical curios in much of the West, remain bedrock elements of Finnish defense. “Go to a bar and shout, ‘Who can shoot an anti-tank weapon?’ All the men will stand up,” says Oskari Jaakkola, chief executive officer of Finnish battery startup Cactos and an army reservist with the rank of lieutenant. Finnish companies, meanwhile, form an organized industrial reserve of their own. Even preschoolers there are taught to spot the online disinformation that characterizes 21st-century hybrid warfare. For the sake of its own security, and that of the wider Arctic, Finland needs its allies to learn these lessons quickly.

I am a big fan of Finland and I am glad they finally joined NATO. The Finns are very realistic about Russia and also very determined not to get attacked every again by Russia. Also, they have saunas and take off their shoes when entering an office. What’s not to like?

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You Could Be Next

There is an underlying tension between the predictions of generally intelligent systems that can replace much of human cognitive labor and the money AI labs are actually spending on data to automate one task at a time. It is the difference between a future of abrupt mass unemployment and something more subtle but potentially just as disruptive: a future in which a growing number of people find work teaching AI to do the work they once did. The first wave of these workers consists of software engineers, graphic designers, writers, and other professionals in fields where the new training techniques are proving effective. They find themselves in a surreal situation, competing for precarious gigs pantomiming the careers they’d hoped to have.

This is a really alarming piece, but currently I do not buy into this. Sure, people lose their jobs or their jobs get re-interpreted differently and this sucks for the individual, but I do not see currently that knowledge workers get replaced left and right.

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I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?

America got a policy-backed bundle of stability that, for millions of families, functioned as middle-class life. And then, piece by piece, it was disassembled.

Following came an era of deregulation, the decline of organized labor, the financialization of everything from housing to healthcare, tax policy that increasingly favored capital over wages, and a bipartisan consensus that “the market” would deliver what policy used to guarantee. Pensions became 401(k)s — shifting risk onto individuals. Union membership cratered. Public university tuition exploded. Healthcare became something that could bankrupt you. Home prices are up 60% since 2019 alone. Childcare in 45 states now costs more than the mortgage.

This is not just an American phenomenon, we can see this pattern in Germany, too. And yet people vote for conservative and neo-liberal parties. And they vote for the far-right parties as if they’d change anything. They never will and never cared to begin with.

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Indie coffee shops are meant to counter corporate behemoths like Starbucks – so why do they all look the same?

In other words, independent coffee shops in North America have become so similar aesthetically that their location cannot be picked from a lineup. The purportedly unique and local feel of coffee shops has instead been homogenized into a singular, palatable, North American aesthetic.

Ironically, these shops have narrowed their aesthetics like a de facto brand franchise – exactly like the chain stores that their patrons ostensibly reject.

This conformity is really weird, as if they all went to the same barista class and ordered everything from the same online shop. Also, I think I am done with pretentious coffee places, maybe someone should open a place with standing room only and just filter coffee from a thermos served in plastic cups?

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Sense of Scents

You can fake an accent, buy a pair of cowboy boots, adopt a football team, feign a favorite taco truck, appropriate “y’all,” and complain about Californians—while stepping in front of your own license plate. But the allergic reaction to cedar pollen is both involuntary and impossible to simulate. The only thing up to you is how much you complain.

A native, or someone who’s been here a season longer than you, will tell you the two irritating truths about cedar fever: The trees we call cedars are Ashe junipers, and their pollen rarely causes a genuine fever. But the specificity of the plague is genuine. This is not the illusion of possession, like breakfast tacos or cowboys. A map of the trees’ density distribution shows a dark green bubble that starts slightly east of Austin and goes west into the heart of the Hill Country, extending north just short of Dallas and south past San Antonio. Satellites drift over the rest of the state. The trees exist in other states. They smother Central Texas.

I do miss Austin, Texas, I really do. I haven’t been at SXSW in a while, but I have gotten to know the town a bit and really liked it and the buzzing atmosphere during SXSW.

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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

Iran's targeted cyber strikes on Gulf states' AI data centers, hitting Amazon-hosted services like Abu Dhabi banking and Careem apps, expose how these multi-billion hubs are soft targets in regional conflicts, especially with vulnerable undersea cables, likely redirecting investments to safer spots amid escalating tensions.

Meanwhile, offshore wind farms' radar interference is being flipped into a defense asset for better low-altitude missile detection via shared turbine signals, while Pentagon eyes Ukraine's rapid drone innovations to counter Iran's cheap swarms that outpace legacy U.S. missiles.

Tech's circular swings resurface old ideas in new guises until the right tweak clicks, much like MIT's photonic "ski jumps" beaming light off chips to turbocharge quantum computing by solving on-chip light-trapping woes.

Fascinating how geopolitics and engineering hacks keep reshaping our digital battlegrounds.

Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖

Why Iran is targeting the artificial intelligence infrastructure of Gulf countries

Since Amazon is the preferred partner of many companies and governments in the region, the attacks caused immediate disruptions: customers of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in the Emirates, had trouble accessing their online banking services; readers of the business news outlet Enterprise were unable to access its website; and users of the Careem app were unable to order a taxi or food delivery.

Iranian attacks against the digital ecosystems of its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf are considered among the first military actions of their kind in the world, and have exposed new vulnerabilities in these countries, including their multi-billion-dollar investment to become a hub for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). For Iran, it has been a cheap and effective way to disrupt public and private services, while for its neighbors in the region, it has served as a warning about their economic diversification strategies.

Those big data centers are easy targets that are hard to defend - and the underwater fiber cables are also a vulnerability in a war. It will be interesting to see how the war in Iran will lead to a rededication of data center investment budgets as it probably now is easier to justify building datacenter in calmer regions.

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How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

I wasn’t aware of this issue with nationals security and windparks, but it is good to see that engineers are figuring out how to use windparks as an advantage when it comes to defense.

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The Circular Nature of Technology

One unexpected way artificial intelligence has changed my life is by making me nostalgic. Watching the technology sector evolve over the last few decades, I’ve begun noticing something less discussed: many trends in technology repeat in a circular fashion.

What looks like progress is often oscillation. Technology rarely moves in straight lines: it swings between extremes before settling into something more balanced. To express the case for this circularity, I’m going to outline a few examples out of several in different areas of technology.

The interesting thing about tech that oftentimes we need multiple approaches that differ just a tad and then we finally figure out how it works.

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Iran adds new urgency to Pentagon’s Ukraine drone deal

The Iranian counterattack with cheap, easily produced drones has exposed a vulnerability for the U.S. and its regional allies, adding new urgency for the Pentagon to close a deal with Ukraine that has been in the works for the better part of a year.

Any agreement on sharing technology to counter Iranian drones could be a boon for the U.S. and many of its closest partners, who are shooting multi-million dollar missiles at $50,000 drones. It also marks one of the few times Ukraine can publicly offer the U.S. something of immediate value as it seeks financial and military support for its four-year campaign against Russia.

Drone tech is evolving so quickly right now, it is so hard to keep up, especially for the legacy companies of the defense industry. The Ukrainians have perfected the release early, release often model of drone tech.

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MIT scientists built photonic ‘ski jumps’ that beam light off chips for faster quantum computing

Inside most photonic chips, light races through tiny optical wires. It carries information far faster than electricity can in many conventional systems. But once that light is trapped on the chip, sending it out into open space in a controlled, scalable way becomes much harder. A team led by researchers at MIT and MITRE now says it has built a way around that bottleneck. They did this using microscopic structures that curl upward from the chip surface like ski jumps.

Chip technology is something I do not understand the least bit (pun intended), but I find this utterly fascinating.

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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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Yet another week where almost nothing happened in AI. Well, except for these topics here: Anthropic under Dario Amodei stands out with its intense focus on AI safety amid explosive growth, drawing Manhattan Project parallels while pushing utopian visions in essays like Machines of Loving Grace, yet clashing hard with the Pentagon over red lines on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance, leading to a supply-chain risk label that OpenAI quickly exploited. Claude Code has reset the bar for agentic coding, leaving OpenAI scrambling after missing the Cursor boat, while startups like Axiom tackle buggy AI code via math proof transfer learning, and data from a recent study shows AI ramping up workloads despite lightening some tasks, creating multitasking chaos. I have been reading a ton about Anthropic lately and think their principled stance, tight ant culture, and recursive self-improvement edge make them the most disruptive force right now, even as safety policies bend to the race.

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Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! And don’t forget to check out GRID!

Dario Amodei’s Oppenheimer Moment

Amodei does not say that this utopian AI future is inevitable. To the contrary, among the chief executives at the top AI labs, he may be the one who worries most about the technology’s dangers. “Machines of Loving Grace” is an optimistic outlier in his larger oeuvre of published writing, much of which concerns the risks that will accompany the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence. Amodei seems to think of today’s AI researchers as comparable to Manhattan Project scientists, and has been known to recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In his telling, superhuman AI could be even more dangerous than nuclear weapons, which is why AI needs to be developed the right way, by the right people, so that it doesn’t overpower humanity or tip the global balance of power toward autocracies.

I have been reading quite a lot about Dario Amodei and Anthropic in the last few weeks and I think the way he tinks about what he is doing is quite remarkable.

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The Most Disruptive Company in the World

As it grew, Anthropic was determined to preserve its founding values and tight-knit culture. Employees call themselves “ants.” Many maintain a digital “notebook,” a Slack channel where they share their hopes, fears, and insights in stream-of-consciousness fashion. Dario Amodei writes his own lengthy entries, Daniela says. Dario also gives biweekly company-wide lectures known internally as “Dario vision quests,” Daniela says. Managers are fixated on maintaining a shared sense of purpose. Potential recruits must pass a highly selective “cultural interview,” which is designed partly to screen out people who aren’t in it for the mission. (A sample question: Would you be willing to lose the value of your stock if Anthropic decides not to release models because it can’t guarantee they’re safe?) Anthropic’s competitors contain fiefs “that all care about different things and are low-key at war with each other,” says Daniel Freeman, a member of Anthropic’s frontier red team who used to work at Google. “I’ve absolutely never felt that at Anthropic.”

The fight with Hegseth shows clearly how advanced AI has become - and how dangerous it can be when in the wrong hands.

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Inside OpenAI’s Race to Catch Up to Claude Code

In early 2024, Anthropic was training Claude Sonnet 3.5 on some of those messy code repositories. When the model launched that June, many users were impressed with its coding abilities. This was particularly true at a startup called Cursor, founded by a group of twentysomethings, which let developers code with AI by asking for changes in plain English. When the company incorporated Anthropic’s new model, Cursor’s usage began rocketing upward, according to a person close to the startup. Within months, Anthropic would begin internal testing of its own version: Claude Code. As Cursor took off in popularity, OpenAI approached the startup about an acquisition. The founders declined the offer before talks ever reached an advanced stage, people close to the startup told me. They saw the potential of the coding industry and wanted to stay independent. At the time, OpenAI was training its first so-called reasoning model, o1, which could work through a problem step by step before delivering an answer.

Claude Code sets the standard for agentic coding right now and it is really interesting how OpenAI missed the boat on this.

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A.I. Writes Buggy Code. A Silicon Valley Start-Up Wants to Fix It.

Although Axiom’s technology learned its skills by analyzing proofs of math problems, the company recently said it had achieved high scores on a standard benchmark test that judges whether A.I. systems can verify computer code. A.I. researchers called this “transfer learning” — when a system learns one skill (like proving math problem) and can successfully transfer that skill to a different task (like verifying computer code).

As they begin to train their systems for code verification, Ms. Hong and her colleagues said, they can further improve the quality of A.I.-generated code.

But experts warn that these methods have limits.

Right now I let ChatGPT Codex audit the code that Gemini and Claude generated with the help of Antigravity, which is an interesting way of getting the code better and secure. Coding agents only get as this far right now and the next wave will be so much better.

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AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense.

Examining AI users’ digital activity 180 days before and after they began using such tools on the job, ActivTrak found AI intensified activity across nearly every category: The time they spent on email, messaging and chat apps more than doubled, while their use of business-management tools, such as human-resources or accounting software, rose 94%.

Meanwhile, the amount of time AI users devoted to focused, uninterrupted work—the kind of concentration often required for figuring out complex problems, writing formulas, creating and strategizing—fell 9%, compared with nearly no change for nonusers.

I think it is doing both at the same time. It make some workloads so much lighter, but at the same we end up doing so much more in the same amount of time that we will have a hard time multi-tasking on this.

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Spring has sprung in Hamburg and I went running again in that beautiful nature reserve in the southeast of the city. This weird sand dune is really something.
This week I really questioned if I could still call myself a runner as I really rarely run these days. But I guess it is good to do things differently every once in a while and if I need to run less to figure out I miss running, then I guess it works for me.

I am also thinking about this newsletter a lot. I still love reading about running, but after doing this for more than three years there are some parts that are getting a bit repetitive. Maybe I advance to Six Things? I dunno. If you have ideas, please ping me.

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Trail Running Is Becoming the Outdoor Industry’s Default Sport

For much of its history, the outdoor sector revolved around hiking and mountaineering. Those pursuits might produce powerful imagery that give ardent outdoors types a semi when reading through their latest issue of Mountain Gazette, but they always had limited participation. A summit attempt might take place once a year. A multi-day trek might be a rare holiday. Trail running operates on a different rhythm - It is an outdoor activity practiced weekly, often several times a week, which makes it far more compatible with the product cycles and communities that modern brands depend on.

This helps explain why trail running has become attractive to companies that historically built their reputations elsewhere. KEEN, for example, spent decades selling rugged sandals and hiking footwear. Moving into trail running places the brand inside a culture defined by regular activity, race calendars and digital communities. The presence of athletes such as Browning and Moehl offers instant credibility while linking the company to a sport that has steadily expanded over the past decade.

I totally understand this. Trail Running is something that people can easily do, as long as they find the time to get out of the city and it is just a tad more active than hiking…

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‘I try not to think about lions’: Why the Grand Canyon’s ‘R2R2R’ endurance run is not for the faint-hearted

Rim to Rim to Rim (known in ultra circles as ‘R2R2R’ or simply ‘R3’) is an undertaking that is borderline barbaric even in benign conditions. The challenge has a childlike simplicity to it: ‘I wonder how long it would take to run to there and back.’ ‘There’ is the opposite rim of a canyon so vast that you could spend decades scouring its depths: 446km long, 29km across at its widest and plummeting a rusty-red, strata-laced vertical mile.

As I’m shortly to discover, you can be shivering in -13ºC on the rim in thick snow and, only a few hours later, dusty, sweat-encrusted and parched as you run across the canyon floor doing a nervous mental stocktake of your electrolyte supplies. The wildly fluctuating temperatures are just one of the challenges. The 68km length is another – laced with head-spinning ‘vert’. Make it back to your start point on whichever rim you begin and you’ll have clocked some 3,700m up and the same down.

I don’t really have a bucket-list, but if I had one, this would be on it at the very top. I did a stopover at the Grand Canyon some 30 years ago on my way from the Bay Area to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it was just breathtaking.

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Round and Around and Around We Go

Of course, a factor that impacted my performance more than fear of injury and weather concerns was the race format itself. Indeed, there were a few things that made this event different from ultras I’d typically run. First, the looped format, which was a bit of a mind trick. Every 2.2 miles we’d return to the start/finish, which gave runners an opportunity to quit or overstay their welcome at headquarters, trading running for listening to the classic rock that was blasting from the speakers or marveling at one of the best hydration stations I’ve ever seen: a 6-foot table with 3x 5-gallon clearly labeled containers of water or 2 flavors of perfectly blended sports drink, sporting long and wide-bore tubes with nozzles at the end for rapid refills, plus a quart-size dispenser of pickle juice with 1oz taster cups … it’s an engineering masterpiece 🫡).

Second, with access to aid every 22-25 min, I didn’t have a lot of time to get in a rhythm or lock into a steady flow. In most ultras, there’ll be 5- to 10-mile gaps between aid (1-2 hours, depending on the terrain), which gives runners a sustained amount of time to navigate the section and be self-reliant.

I love these kinds of race reports. You can truly see how much loves to run and to race. And what an insane course that is!

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Running is Painful & Stupid

Her laughter stuck with me, however, even as I accelerate, briefly, to marathon pace across the bridge, where the faux grain swirls started to feel edgy and irritating underfoot. To runners comfortably shod in the latest maximalist shoes, barefoot running must indeed seem “painful and stupid,” but to non-runners, the entire sport of running is pointless and masochistic. Why subject yourself to any kind of pain unnecessarily, whether it’s in the bottom of your feet, leg muscles, knees or hips or any other part of the body? Why would you do this to yourself?

Maybe I should sign up for a really long race this year, sounds like fun.

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The intimacy of running

We experience intimacy in so many different ways throughout our lives, and even within a day. While the intimacy between lovers is often the first thing that comes to mind, consider the more pedestrian occurrence of feeding someone or of helping someone dress themselves. Think about the level of care and trust that requires. It’s what a parent does for their child. It’s what the closest of friends would do for you when you need it most.

For me, intimacy is sharing a vulnerable moment with someone else. For me, that intimacy is key to the beauty of running.

Runners often talk about the art of discovering more about themselves as we push our bodies and minds on a run. We find our limits, and we find our support structures through that. We find our people.

Indeed.

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

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I have been thinking a lot about the war in Iran lately and I guess I am turning into a pacifist hawk. While I despise Trump and Netanyahu, I think the war on the Iranian regime is fundamentally right. This regime has killed their own people for 47 years and this regime as promoted terror all around the world. This regime wants to eradicate Israel. We have see so many demonstrations and uprisings of the Iranian people, but they were brutally stopped by the Iranian regime.

Does this war violate international law? I guess so, since the proxy wars the Iranian regime has been fighting somehow do not count. It also seems not to count that the Iranian regime wants to eradicate Israel. I feel that the UN has become a toothless tiger when it comes to this kind of threat to world peace. And at the same time I do not trust Trump’s and Bibi’s motifs one bit.

I do think that the world will be better off without this Iranian regime. The former German chancellor Olaf Scholz once said “I’m liberal, but not dumb” when asked why he is so tough on crime while serving on the city government in Hamburg. Liberal democracies have to uphold international law, but at the same time they have to make sure that we fight against the aggressors that want to put an end to the way we live. We need to be liberal, but not dumb.

War should always be the last resort and after 47 years of terror both inside and outside of Iran, I think it is time for the Mullahs to be done. I value peace so much that I think this is the best outcome we can hope for.

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I Don’t Know How the War Is Going

The claims that “It’s Donald Trump’s war” and (its cousin) “It’s Bibi’s war” tell us nothing. The loathing and disregard that many reasonable people have for both men can impair our ability to determine whether they are succeeding. Henry Kissinger was reputed to have asked, in a moment of perplexity, “Why are the wrong people doing the right thing?” In this case, the demonstrable incompetence of the Trump administration in presenting a consistent case for the war does not necessarily spill over into the U.S. military’s apparently effective way of waging it. Bungling and competence can exist side by side to a frightening degree.

So how should we think about the war, beyond a becoming modesty about what we actually know? The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that all wars are individual—that, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz put it, “Every war is rich in unique episodes. Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs.” Wars resemble one another more than they resemble anything else, but each one has to be understood on its own terms.

I sure hope this war is over soon and that there will be a strategy in place for what happens then.

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Losing the War on Truth

Trump seems lost as to which lie he wants to tell. Lies are always parasitical upon truth, in the sense that you have to have some idea of what is true in order to say what is not true. But we are now in a realm where Trump knows only his own pleasures.

If we accept that nothing is true, we find ourselves among aspiring and real dictators who have good stories and media monopolies. But even if lying works in politics, truths about the world do not cease to be: civilians slain stay dead, airplanes shot down crash, actions lead to unpredictable reactions. Post-truth fascists will wander into terrains of ignorance and find themselves trapped.

In war and Trump’s presidency, truth is the first casualty.

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How AI ruined the internet… and why I’m happy about it

We keep recycling things, remaking things, cross-breeding things. Spider-Man in Legally Blonde. Lord of the Rings but everyone’s from Friends. Faces swapped. Styles copied. Meaning diluted. Over and over until the thing is technically living but spiritually… haunted. A lumbering beast pretending to be alive. It’s honestly hurting my brain and I can’t keep blaming the micro plastics. But hey, we’ve got weather now. Let’s talk about that instead. That’s bread and butter, man, instead of the hellscape we’re quietly assembling.

Meanwhile, this line I mentioned, over on one side of it, you’ve got the pro-AI guys shouting about how everyone on the other side is going to lose their house, their job and their purpose if they don’t get with the program. Those Luddites, they say, will have to live on the streets. Those losers will become irrelevant, which is the modern hell.

And on the other side, you’ve got the anti-progress faction waving legal papers and doom-prophet scrolls. They’re the ones who watch Terminator for the ‘I told you so’ vibes. Those people need to wake up and smell the freshly brewed reality. We need these machines! I’m addicted! So, yeah, everyone’s yelling. Everyone’s so certain. It’s exhausting. Pass the painkillers, my head’s hurting from all the LinkedIn posts.

The internet sure is changing and I am sure we will figure out what we want to do with it in the near future and what we choose to ignore.

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The case of the disappearing secretary

Not so long ago, the work of secretaries – typing, filing, organising, administrating – was a cornerstone of the economy. By 1984, six years after the map above, there were around 18 million clerical and secretarial workers in the United States, roughly 18 percent of the entire workforce. This was totally normal. In the UK at the same time, between 17 and 18 percent of the workforce was some kind of secretary. In France it was 16 percent. Different economies with different economic policies; all ended up with one in five or six workers employed in clerical work.

Why so many? Because every stage of information processing required a human hand. In a mid-century organisation, a manager did not “write” a memo. He dictated it. A secretary took it down in shorthand, then retyped it. Then made copies. Then collated the copies by hand. Then distributed them. Then filed them. And so on and so on. Nothing moved unless someone physically moved it. There was no other way.

My mother was a secretary and I was always amazed by her skills, which I did not inherit. I still type without a real system, my filing also is without system, yet somehow I get by. She loved her job, but when the computer arrived in the office, a Wang PC, she was really intimidated.

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25 years of iPod brain

It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had. In the late 1900s, one of these problems was the portability of one’s music collection. For a long time, recorded music came in the form of physical objects so large they were inconvenient to tote around. Then the physical objects shrank—into tapes, MiniDiscs, CDs—but it was still not possible to carry your entire music collection around with you without managing some kind of large bindle of rattling plastic.

In 1999, Napster launched, and every song in the history of sound recording transformed into data. What was once a large PVC disc was now code—air, really. Songs in the wind. What would be the best way to carry them with us?

And when I want to feel really old, I tell my kids about the Walkman and how my cheap knock-off product didn’t even have a rewind button.

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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

Meanwhile, philosopher Hans Jonas reminds us that organisms aren't mere machines and minds aren't just computers, a perspective gaining traction among neuroscientists and physicists as we wrestle with what makes intelligence actually intelligent.

Ukraine has flipped the script from weapon recipient to weapons innovator, with European nations like Germany now partnering through "Build With Ukraine" to access battle-tested drone and electronic warfare expertise, which I've seen firsthand working with a German startup that hired a Ukrainian AI drone specialist whose frontline experience is simply unmatched.

The debate over which arcade deserves the "world's largest" title matters less than the nostalgia it triggers, that symphony of trilling game sounds and pizza smell transporting any 80s kid back to simpler times when pockets full of coins meant an afternoon of pure joy.

These shifts in software creation, our understanding of life and intelligence, warfare innovation, and cultural memory all point to how quickly our assumptions about what's possible keep getting upended.

This is my very subjective and opinionated selection of articles you should read this week.

Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖

The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering

New website creation is up 40% year over year. New iOS apps are up nearly 50%. GitHub code pushes jumped 35% in the US. All of these metrics were flat for years before late 2024. The graphs look like hockey sticks. People who have never written a line of code are building and launching software.

Keep in mind, we can and should note that more quantity does not necessarily mean better quality. But the fact remains that the barrier to creating software has dropped dramatically, and that is a fundamental shift in the landscape of software engineering.

The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.

This is such a huge change we are going through right now and most people do not even realize it. I am spending so much time with coding agents and I just enjoy it. Check out ANTIGRAVITY.md for a start with Google Antigravity.

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Why organisms are more than machines

There are basic technical grounds to be skeptical of that claim, but beyond that, a much deeper issue lies at the boundary between science and philosophy: What makes life different from non-life? Why is a rock inert and insensate, while even the simplest cell manifests open-ended activity in the relentless pursuit of staying alive? Since the only systems that indisputably display intelligence are alive, if we can’t understand life, we’re probably missing something essential about intelligence.

Sixty years ago, an influential but little-known philosopher named Hans Jonas gave a potent, creative, and radical answer to this question of what makes life different from non-life. In the decades since, the power and reach of his perspective have gained traction. Today, for a growing group of researchers — in fields ranging from neuroscience to the physics of complex systems — Jonas has become an incisive voice arguing forcefully that organisms are more than just machines, and minds are more than just computers.

This is something to think about.

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How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

A project like this would normally take a team of engineers months, if not years. Several teams at various companies have attempted it, and the scope is just enormous. We tried once at Cloudflare! Two routers, 33+ module shims, server rendering pipelines, RSC streaming, file-system routing, middleware, caching, static export. There’s a reason nobody has pulled it off.

This time we did it in under a week. One engineer (technically engineering manager) directing AI.

The first commit landed on February 13. By the end of that same evening, both the Pages Router and App Router had basic SSR working, along with middleware, server actions, and streaming. By the next afternoon, App Router Playground was rendering 10 of 11 routes. By day three, vinext deploy was shipping apps to Cloudflare Workers with full client hydration. The rest of the week was hardening: fixing edge cases, expanding the test suite, bringing API coverage to 94%.

What changed from those earlier attempts? AI got better. Way better.

$1100 spent for coding agents and then Next.js got rebuilt.

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Ukraine Depended on Western Weaponry. Now That Script Has Flipped.

European nations are snapping up Ukrainian front-line know-how, helping NATO militaries rewire themselves for a transformed battlefield that is dominated by drones and electronic warfare, and where even new weapons can become obsolete in a few months.

For countries like Germany, the “Build With Ukraine” initiative allows them to couple state subsidies with Ukrainian innovation, revitalizing sluggish economies and retooling ailing factories. For Ukraine, it means more weapons to its troops—paid for by its allies.

I am working with a German drone startup that just hired a Ukrainian AI drone specialist and sureley he has a really strong experience that is hard to match anywhere else.

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Which of these two arcades is the “world largest”—and does it matter?

That’s just one of the arcade[s many rarities, all beautifully laid out in an expansive, red-carpeted room with just barely enough lighting to keep you from tripping over your friends as you wander around, mouth agape.

The constant trilling tones of all those vintage machines make for a discordant symphony better than any orchestra could produce. You also get a whiff of the pizza and french fries from the cafeteria down the hall. Like Proust with his madeleines, it’s enough to warp any child of the ’80s back to simpler times.

I remember quite well the time I spent in arcades when I was a kid. Great times, and so many coins in my pockets that I spent for awesome games.

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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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AI is now visibly reshaping everything from stock prices to power grids and geopolitics, and we are still struggling to even define what kind of intelligence we are unleashing.

We are doing our part by building Agentic AI platforms like GRID - if you are a founder in Europe, you should check it out!

Wall Street has started to price in “creative destruction” at company level, with IBM punished for its COBOL legacy while firms like Block get rewarded for swapping headcount for AI productivity, a pattern we will see more often as incumbents hit their Kodak moment. At the same time, smaller firms are quietly building their own CRMs via vibe coding instead of waiting for Salesforce to finally match their workflows, which perfectly illustrates how compliance-heavy giants will lose out to faster, AI-native challengers.

Behind all of this sits a massive, underreported land-and-energy rush: specialized players like Cloverleaf are packaging “powered land” to feed data centers that alone will need more capacity than today’s entire US grid can deliver, which will inevitably accelerate wind and solar buildout and permanently change the landscape around us. Philosophically, we keep slapping the word “intelligence” on systems that are great at tokenizable knowledge but miss the tacit, lived, human part of knowing, so I am still unconvinced that AGI in the sci-fi sense is just around the corner. And while today’s frontier models are evidently not ready to steer drones or pull the trigger, the Anthropic–Pentagon fight and startups training explicitly military models show how urgent it is to decide, as a democratic society, where we insist on a human in the loop and where we do not want AI involved at all.

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Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! And don’t forget to check out GRID!

Wall Street Sees AI’s ‘Creative Destruction’ Coming For Entire Companies

When businesses can cut payroll costs because technology enables them to do more with less, that’s often good news for their profits and shareholders. Take Block, the fintech firm run by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which said on Feb. 26 it’s slashing almost half its staff in a bet on AI productivity. The shares are up more than 15% since then.

But last week also offered an example of how productivity gains can have a downside for investors – involving the storied International Business Machines Corp. The startup Anthropic said its AI tool can do something that once needed “armies of consultants”: modernize Cobol, a dated programming language run on IBM computers. IBM shares plunged the most in a quarter-century, before recouping most of the losses.

I am sure that we will see lots of Kodak moments soon, where once powerful incumbents just cannot fathom how to cannibalize themselves in order to stay in business and thereby killing the whole company.

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Meet the Companies Vibe Coding Their Own CRMs

A number of small and midsize companies say they are vibe coding their own customer relationship management software in an effort to get more customized systems at a better price. So-called CRMs are a critical business system for tracking, analyzing and taking action on sales, marketing and customer data, and it’s an area Salesforce has dominated for more than a decade.

“We tried Salesforce and it was OK,” said Bill Schonbrun, chief operating officer of water treatment company CarboNet. “We did all kinds of customizations, but never got to the place where it did exactly what we wanted it to do.” Schonbrun ultimately opted to build his own custom CRM for the 65-person company with the help of AI.

That’s exactly what I have been talking about for a while: the smaller companies will be faster and more powerful while the big companies are stuck with all their compliance layers that will make it hard to benefit from AI.

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Meet the A.I. Prospectors Tapping a Billion-Dollar Gusher

As the A.I. boom enters its fourth year, Mr. Janous and his team have become modern-day land men. They work at the intersection of utility companies and tech giants, securing the power and sites necessary for the hundreds of billions of dollars of data centers being built across the country. Their product — powered land, they call it — has become one of the nation’s most valuable commodities.

A.I. companies are seeking 85 gigawatts of power for new data centers by 2030, about a fifth more than the power grid can currently supply, according to S&P Global, a market research firm. The demand has tech companies scrambling to secure power and land as quickly as possible.

This new type of land-grab will lead to the inevitable realization that along with the data-centers lots of new wind turbines and solar parks need to be build. Together, this will transform the landscape more than we can imagine right now.

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Don’t Call It ‘Intelligence’

Perhaps no one should be surprised that some of the world’s best scientists and engineers have defined intelligence the way they have. Even if the AGI champions’ motives were entirely altruistic, they would still be biased by their own way of seeing the world, by their own experiences and successes. Researchers at the forefront of AI are among the most brilliant and accomplished minds on Earth—and they make up a very narrow, self-selected group of people primed to understand certain kinds of knowledge better than others: explicit, well-defined, tokenizable knowledge; knowledge that forms the basis of our most far-reaching, wildly accurate theories of the universe; knowledge that has allowed us to create world-changing technologies. But that is only a small subset of all knowledge—the sliver that can be expressed symbolically, as language or mathematics.

The rest is what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” which makes up a much larger amount of data, and interacts in many more ways. His philosophy of knowledge can be summed up by: “We know more than we can say.”

For now, I do not thing AGI will be a real threat, I just think the frontier models will be getting better, but they will always miss plenty of what we’d define as being essential for the definition of intelligence.

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What AI Models for War Actually Look Like

Military use of AI has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley after officials at the Department of Defense went head-to-head with Anthropic executives over the terms of a roughly $200 million contract.

One of the issues that led to the breakdown, which resulted in defense secretary Pete Hegseth declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk, was Anthropic’s desire to limit the use of its models in autonomous weapons.

Markoff says the furor obscures the fact that today’s large language models are not optimized for military use. General-purpose models like Claude are good at summarizing reports, he says. But they’re not trained on military data and lack a human-level understanding of the physical world, making them ill suited to controlling physical hardware. “I can tell you they are absolutely not capable of target identification,” Markoff claims.

We really need to do a real discussion about the limits of AI we as a society want to see. Where do we need a human in the loop, and where do we not want any AI at all? And why?

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