Five Things: USA Alone, Battle Testzone Ukraine, Agentic Hit Piece, Alcohol, Miracle
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I have spent way too much time at my Macbook this year. It feels a bit like 30 years ago, when I had just discovered the World Wide Web and was fascinated by the possibilities of building homepages with HTML. Only this time it is different and way more powerful. I am witnessing a total paradigm shift. Programming has turned from scarcity to abundance. What used to be complicated and expensive just half a year ago, is now easy and readily available. So I am now doing stuff I haven’t done in a long time. I am building software products. And by I, I mean I with the help of Google Antigravity, which really let’s me build whatever I want. Heck, I even did a few open source software releases as I figured out that some stuff was not freely available and I wanted it to be. I am in a weird rabbithole right now, where I paste a URL into Claude or Gemini and say: “have a look at this and tell me why it is better than the competition and tell me how we can build something even better” - and then we start building. I am scratching an itch and I am doing something to make it go away.
It’s awesome and so empowering. At the meantime, I know how profoundly this change will be on the software industry. My wife said that I am taking away the jobs of developers when I am building the software myself. Sure, she has a point. But then again: I would not be able to hire developers to work on projects for months only to then find out if they could be commercially feasible. Now I can just figure all of that out by myself. It’s so crazy. And I like it. Also, I need more sleep. But it is so exciting and whenever a new part of the software is done (and I am developing a few projects at the same time right now, because why not?), I ask the machine “what am I missing?” and then the software is getting even better. Fascinating.
How America First Risks Becoming America Alone
Welcome to a world where America First is coming to mean America Alone, whose friends are searching for alternatives to what increasingly feels like an abusive relationship and whose enemies are gloating.
In the past year, Trump has cut off most forms of U.S. foreign aid, pulled out of scores of multilateral institutions and ended direct military aid to Ukraine as it tried to fend off a Russian invasion that many Europeans view as a threat to their entire continent. He also threatened to use military force to acquire Greenland before more recently relenting, and erected trade barriers against countries selling goods to the U.S.
The demented Idiot in Chief and his MAGA croonies are doing everything to destabilize the West and this comes at a prize.
Ukraine and the New Way of War
Already, militaries around the world are looking to Ukraine’s battlefields, seeing in the cutting-edge technologies and tactics new lessons for the future of warfare. Less considered, however, are the strategic lessons of the war, the first since the fall of the Soviet Union in which two major nuclear powers have found themselves on opposing sides of high-stakes hostilities, even if only indirectly. Although the United States is not a combatant, Washington and Moscow are deeply engaged in shaping the trajectory of the conflict and, by extension, the evolving nature of escalation, deterrence, and warfighting in the twenty-first century.
There is a battlefield in the middle of Europe and we still cannot end it. It is absurd.
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me
So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.
It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.
This might sound totally bizarre, but this was just the first time this has happened, there will be many more instances of this in the near future. And it will take a while until regulation kicks in and even longer until regulation finally works, if ever. Brave New World.
What Alcohol Does to the Body
Over the long term, alcohol use is associated with changes in brain structure. Some studies have found that middle-aged and older adults who average even one drink a day tend to have slightly less brain volume than people who don’t drink. And the more alcohol someone consumes, the more the brain shrinks. Experts don’t know exactly why that is, but one theory is that alcohol alters the brain’s immune system, ramping up inflammation, which can damage neurons.
Don’t worry, this newsletter won’t turn into a longevity thing anytime soon, but I have cut back my alcohol consumption so much over the last years that I am prolonging my dry January well into February and do not miss a thing. It’s interesting what it is like to break a pattern and then sticking with the new one.
How Will the Miracle Happen Today?
I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe. Receiving help on the road is a spiritual event triggered by a traveler who surrenders his or her fate to the eternal Good. It’s a move away from whether we will be helped, to how: how will the miracle unfold today? In what novel manner will Good reveal itself? Who will the universe send today to carry away my gift of trust and helplessness?
When the miracle flows, it flows both ways. When an offered gift is accepted, then the threads of love are knotted, snaring both the stranger who is kind, and the stranger who is kinded. Every time a gift is tossed it lands differently – but knowing that it will arrive in some colorful, unexpected way is one of the certainties of life.
We all need these miracles and the world would be a better place if we let them happen more often.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico