Five Things: Infinity, Green Bus Shelters, Agents, AI Payday, Rare Minerals
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
It’s May! Yay! This is the month with the four-day work week being the norm in Germany. I love it. Even though I spend most of the longer weekends working. I am sooo deep in an infinite AI rabbit hole - it is both fun and exciting while being frustrating and scary at the same time. Ever since I started building digital products again with a fleet of coding agents, I have been sucked into a new world of programming, a total paradigm change with so many new developments every week. Fun, but also a bit breathtaking. I am still waiting for all that newfangled AI based productivity to kick in, right now it just let’s me rething everything all of the time.
I like change, so I really do welcome this fascinating Agentic AI development, even though it is sometimes so hard to wrap one’s head around it. The last few days I have entertained the thought of massively parallel agentic coding workforces building large projects in mere hours instead of months. Nope, I haven’t found the solution yet, but it sure is an interesting problem to think about.
Anyhow, it’s finally warmer here in Hamburg again and I am sitting outside on the balcony, enjoying the evening while writing this. I haven’t read a whole lot this week, mostly due to the fact that I am trying to figure out this newfangled agentic AI thing that keeps morphing at insane speeds, but also because I started listening to the audio book of Traversal, by Maria Popova, which is so good that my dog walks are getting longer and longer. Read this book, or do the lazy-ass version and listen to it. So fascinating.
Enjoy these Five Things!
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
These physics-based challenges to the infinite tend to delight ultrafinitist mathematicians, who hold them up as evidence that their mathematics is a truer description of reality. At the 2025 conference, Carroll’s talk on whether the universe is truly infinite or “merely quite large,” as he put it, made him something of a celebrity in the Columbia University halls. But the burden of proof, he cautions, remains with the infinity doubters. If you could somehow prove experimentally that the physical universe is indeed finite, even the most ardent backers of the higher infinite would likely take a moment to pause and reflect. They would probably even wonder about the consistency of set theory, given the towers of actual infinities that it allows. That’s a healthy thing to do from time to time, anyway.
Even if this were to happen, set theorists who study and use infinity would still be within their rights to continue their work unfazed — to say that perhaps this is where physics and math must branch off from each other. It is no requirement that math and physics describe the same things (though many believe it is), and infinity might live on in some larger Platonic sense.
I thought I’d kick off these Five Things with some light reading for all you maths buffs out there.
The futuristic bus shelters giving commuters a cooler place to wait
In Montreal, a pilot project by researchers from École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) has transformed a pair of standard municipal bus shelters through an almost invisible intervention.
The secret? Beds of hardy greenery were added to the sloped roofs of two standard Montreal bus stops. Developed in collaboration with Quebecor’s outdoor advertising subsidiary Out-of-Home and local landscapers Les Toits Vertige, the augmented shelters sit at the downtown intersection of Robert-Bourassa Boulevard and Saint-Jacques Street, and on Sherbrooke Street East in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood, within a stone’s throw of the city’s iconic Olympic Stadium.
From a distance, the simple shelters are accented by a jolt of plant life, animating the urban realm with red and green hues of flowering sedum, a hardy plant well suited for extreme weather. For transit riders, the greenery acts as natural insulation, helping to moderate temperatures. The effect is particularly notable at the peak of the summer heat.
This is so smart, and yet I wonder why this is not yet the standard everywhere. This cannot be so complicated to set up, but I assume that city governments are simply not that aware of the amazing benefits or not that willing to push for change.
I built an agent to do my job. Then it hung up on my boss.
My experiment involved testing the limits of several AI tools. I used Claude to analyze my work at Business Insider, with some guidance from deepfake detection company Reality Defender. The chatbot parsed my style into bulleted points, summarizing what I've written in passing about my friendships, relative age, where I live, and assumed "she is single" based on a story I wrote about in-person meet-cutes coming back into vogue. The model also picked up on structural similarities across articles: "almost never a dry news lede." It analyzed how I use quotes and data, and said my tone is "skeptical but fair," and "self-deprecating without false modesty." At the end, there was 18 months of work, derived from hundreds of interviews and personal experiences, analyzed into a neat and orderly profile — a comprehensive analysis of my own work I'm not sure I could have put into words.
I am sure that lots of people are doing this right now and are trying to get away with it. Our work changes. Rapidly. Especially when you are a so called knowledge worker, as our understanding and access to knowledge changes with every new release of an LLM. Just look at all those skills that can be used with MCP to do all sorts of stuff that used to be really complicated to do just 12 months ago.
The Clock Is Ticking for Big Tech to Make AI Pay
Most tech executives have approached the AI boom with calculated irresponsibility. They know the current returns can’t justify their spending, but their faith in a future in which AI drives the global economy means they won’t rein it in.
The executives are, in a way, the corporate equivalents of graduate students running up credit-card debt, certain their lucrative careers will pay it off. They just better not drop out—or else end up working at Starbucks.
I think Google will figure out first how to make lots of money by sprinkling AI onto all of their products, while Meta will be struggling to provide value from sprinkling AI onto everything. I have big doubts that Larry Ellison’s big bet will succeed, but at the same time I have never understood why anyone ever wanted to use Oracle’s products in the first place.
The New Resource Curse
Starting in the late nineteenth century, as the world industrialized and the internal combustion engine displaced coal and steam, access to petroleum became inseparable from national power. The emergence of critical minerals—cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earths, and a dozen others essential to the energy transition, digital infrastructure, and advanced military systems—already bears some parallels to this history. A bonanza is underway: according to the International Energy Agency, in 2024 demand for lithium soared by nearly 30 percent, roughly three times the average annual pace during the 2010s, and demand for cobalt, graphite, nickel, and rare earths each climbed by six to eight percent. Prices for the heavy rare earths (such as dysprosium and terbium) on which electric motors and advanced weaponry depend have more than tripled since 2020. The IEA expects that by 2040, demand for lithium will be five times as large as it was in 2024; the world’s need for cobalt and other rare earths will also rise sharply.
Finally, some new dependency that we will have to deal with and which will be used by China and others to try to coerce us into business ties we should avoid. If I had something to say, I’d know where I would push for lots more scientific research.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico