2026-09-23 21:45:43
Welcome to the 365 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 279,186 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋
This is a special post, written by me and Alex Danco together, where we’re going to throw tech blogging convention out the window and write about a personal topic.
Let’s get to it.
Today, we’re talking about how kids learn, but if your business’ models learn from big, complex files, you should let Reducto help teach them.
Reducto is the document ingestion layer trusted by AI teams at Scale AI, Harvey, Toast, and Vanta to reliably turn complex files into structured, grounded data for production AI systems at scale. Processing more than a billion pages per month, Reducto handles the long tail of difficult documents that break conventional OCR: dense tables, unusual layouts, handwriting, low-quality scans, strikethroughs, and formatting-dependent information.
Already using another parser? Apply for up to $5,000 in migration credits and hands-on support to benchmark r-1 against your current stack on the documents that matter most.
Yesterday, the Horowitz Andreessen Academy officially launched; and if you haven’t seen it, please go check that out. Gagan Biyani (who founded Udemy) is a co-founder, and will be the CEO, and he wrote a manifesto here on what they’re doing and why. Tldr, it’s a program for young college-aged people (it’s not a college or university; it’s an alternative) to come to San Francisco, learn how to build things and be useful with a like-minded peer group of other ambitious kids, living in a residential setting in SF.
Now, in an early era of our lives as tech bloggers, the obvious way to write about this would be, “What an interesting idea; is this unbundling the university? Is this disruption? Is it some other mental model? And it would make for a great think piece. You know the type.
But the thing is, now we’re both older, and we’re both parents. So this hits different. It’s not just a theoretically interesting exercise for us; there’s a really literal question, “could we imagine our kids going to something like this?” (Gasp!)
Speaking for both of us, we both had a really good time in college. Danco went to McGill, up in Montreal (a great college city, arguably the best), Packy went to Duke, down in Durham, NC (maybe the greatest American city outside of New York). We both had really good experiences, and I think it’s reasonable to say that we both ended up as curious life-long learners that know how to pick up books and read them, and that appreciate whatever “soft” or “social” skills you pick up in a university setting that aren’t strictly utilitarian, but seem important.
Their plan for the Academy is interesting: they clearly aren’t just trying to make it an apprenticeship program. There’s definitely a “bundle of life experience” that’s coming together, in a totally different way than it comes together for most people in traditional college, but definitely valid. I’m not sure you would’ve arrived at something like this if a bunch of experienced professionals sat around and thought hard about “the future of the University” or something. It’s like that Paul Graham essay: “The way to find a good startup idea is definitively not to sit around thinking of startup ideas. It’s to solve a problem that you personally have.” In this case, the good folks at a16z have seen some pretty impressive young people become phenomenally useful (and interesting, and happy) jumping right into building, and the plan for HAA seems clearly to be, “get more people launched on that trajectory”, rather than something more abstract.
A large part of my appreciation for traditional college - but also, a reason why I might like HAA too! - comes from my (Danco’s) experience parenting. The thing about parenting is, before you become a parent you imagine a lot of the “hard parts” of being a parent (especially in the younger years) and you picture all of the typical stuff like changing diapers, teaching them skills, driving them to soccer practice, whatever.
Once you actually have bigger kids you realize those aren’t the hard parts at all. The hard parts are like, “are your kids resilient? Are they kind? Do they take initiative? Do they take responsibility?” and when you think back on it, the real purpose of all these classic rituals and institutions around growing up (e.g. playing team sports) is like, yeah it’s kind of about the sport, but it’s also about the life experience.
Some of the hardest parts aren’t about the kids at all. They’re about your own psychology as a parent. Parents in cities like New York and Toronto and San Francisco are competitive and worried. Kids like certain things, but are they the right things? Will they get our kids into good schools? Will they set them up for success? I (Packy) live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where parents (not us) pay $65k per year for every year from Kindergarten onwards, because those grades are attached to a good high school, and if you get into Kindergarten, your kids are practically guaranteed admission to that high school. You’re basically paying $650k to make sure your kid is admitted to a good high school, which should, but certainly isn’t guaranteed to, help them get into a really good college, at which point they’ll probably get a good job, at which point, they’re set for life. You don’t want to screw up your kids’ futures, right?
The challenge with that, though, is that who knows what a good job will be in fifteen years? Our parents didn’t send us to McGill and Duke to become bloggers.
But one of the things you learn raising kids is that it’s a lot easier to move with them than against them. If they can find something they love, your effort will go to getting them to stop doing it instead of getting them to start. My (Packy) son is obsessed with chess. Obsessed. If there’s no one to play with, he’ll set up puzzles and play against himself. We finally gave in and started letting him play on chess.com for an hour a day, and we have to pry his little fingers from the keyboard when the clock strikes 60. Our daughter? Couldn’t care less about chess. Absolutely loves gymnastics and music. If we give her a few minutes of YouTube, she’ll ask for the Michael Jackson Name That Song game and breeze through the back catalog. We’re starting puppeteering club at school soon, too, because she talks as her stuffed animals all the time anyway and she’s legit funny.
Do I think my daughter will be a professional song guesser or puppeteer? I don’t know man, the world is getting weirder, anything is possible, but I doubt it! Do I think that being really good at those things will develop her confidence and sense of self and her memory and performance skills and her trust in her own gut? I do!
Do I think my son will become a professional chess player? Unless his brain is 99% his mom’s and only 1% mine, I’m afraid he’ll hit a ceiling, just as a son of mine probably isn’t going to play in the NBA. But during his first chess tournament last year, he came into the auditorium where I was waiting after his first match and I couldn’t tell if he’d won or lost because he looked so happy. (An eight-year-old kicked his five-year-old ass, it turns out.) He’s learning that if he works really hard, he can get better at stuff that seems really hard. It’s right there in his Elo. Resilience and relentlessness seem like good traits for him to hone.
It’s funny writing this now, now that I know the kids. In 2022, when Dev turned 2 and Maya was just 2 months old, I wrote an essay called How Do I Teach These Kids?! about how we were thinking about raising those two little blobs given how fast everything was changing.
Things are changing even faster now, and parents are rightfully worried and confused about what exactly they’re supposed to do to give their kids a good life. Pushing them to get really good at math seems silly, when AI is currently tornadoing through all of the field’s hardest open problems. Math is useful in investment banking too, but are the kids going to be better modelers than 2040 ChatGPT? Should you push them to become a lawyer? That seems risky! Even if senior partners and their relationships remain valuable, are they going to need armies of highly-paid whippersnappers drafting docs and finding precedent? Doctor? Probably your best bet, given licensing requirements. But do you dare risk their future on such a specific path? And what if they don’t want to become a doctor?
Continue through this maze, and you’ll keep hitting dead ends. There is no safe career path today, let alone one that will remain safe for twenty years, which means that there is no set of schools and degrees that can guarantee a safe career into the 2040s and 2050s.
This seems really scary. It is freeing!
We can stop pretending that we can plan our kids’ lives and follow them into whatever lights them up.
In that 2022 piece, when I knew even less than I do now, I synthesized all of the research and conversations I’d had into a paragraph:
Expose your kids to a lot of things early, and then help them go as deep as they’re able to go on the things that excite them the most. It doesn’t matter what those things are; cultivating curiosity and depth is the point.
I’m surprised at how well that’s seemed to work in practice. Our kids are a lot more motivated to learn skills in service of some other thing they really want to do than because we tell them they have to learn something.
Tyler Cowen points out, recently, that the most valuable thing you get from college nowadays is being more likely to get married and stay married. A strong group of friends that gets established together, witnesses life events together, and follows each other through the ups and downs of adulthood is just one of the most valuable things you can have, even if for no other reason than making you accountable to yourself. College friends make great witnesses.
One thing that’s definitely true, though, is that you forge your closest friends and most valuable peer groups by going through real, shared experiences. College is certainly designed as one, although in recent years, some of it has gotten a bit too cushy and resort-y for our taste. Esprit de corps is best forged in non-ideal physical environments, not in luxury accommodations.
To that end, working on real things is a great way to forge those kinds of connections, experiences, and appreciation for the best things in life. One of Gagan’s points in his essay, which is absolutely true, is that most kinds of “real work” mean making things, and college traditionally comes up pretty light in that department.
Kids come with this unbelievable gift that they don’t know certain things are impossible, and so they try to figure out how to do fantastical things. The longer you can keep that alive, the better. I (Danco) have had the pleasure of working alongside some 19-20 year olds on the a16z New Media team who have been unbelievably impressive in terms of the responsibility they’ve taken on, their maturity, and their growth as interesting people. “There’s no way I could’ve ever handled responsibility like that when I was that age”, is the obvious thought. But on the other hand, people have a way of rising to the occasion. Maybe more young people should simply be given the opportunity to try hard things? That’s how we’ve done it, through most of human history.
When I (Packy) wrote about Somos and Panandina founder Forrest Heath last year, we talked about this. He said:
I’d say the thing I’m grateful for, and I don’t really have the ability to take much credit for it, is just somehow I never lost my innate childhood curiosity.
And I think this is something that I like, when I met your kids and they’re just playing around and imagining stuff on the playground in Brooklyn, it’s like, everyone was kind of like that at some point, right? Like, almost all of us had some way we were playing with imaginary forts and imagining a future that didn’t exist or imagining a world that didn’t exist and kind of putting our headspace into it.
And I think for some weird reason—both me being kind of stubborn and a bit skeptical of a bunch of different things, and honestly, I think just random chance—I never got that beaten out of me. And I kind of was always, like, finding my own weird path to sort of come at stuff.
Tangentially, that meant that I wasn’t really competing against the system of, ‘Get higher SAT stores, get into the right college and, check all the right checkboxes.’ And I think there’s this sort of, like, innate builder kind of curiosity in me that I never lost. If anything, I’ve kind of compounded it.
In a recent conversation with David Senra, Ribbit Capital’s Micky Malka talked about this, too, about what young people will do given naivete, a desire to do something, and time to figure it out:
But the more time I spend with them [young founders], the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is because the oldest of the generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them what were you doing during COVID? And that is the most fascinating question.
The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and and build companies, they find that first they’re naive, so they think anything is possible.
We’re talking about founders here, but you can find the same pattern in exceptional outcomes in any field.
Taylor Swift’s dad was a stockbroker and her mom worked in marketing at a mutual fund; they had no grand musical ambitions for their daughter. But she got obsessed with musical theater, then with country music, and started lobbying her parents to take her to Nashville. When they did, on Spring Break at age 11, she walked into record label offices by herself to give them demos of her singing and try to get signed. They didn’t sign her. A lot of people in Nashville could sing. She needed more skills: guitar and songwriting. 12-year-old Taylor learned a few chords from a computer repairman, and she wrote her first song shortly after. Story goes she practiced guitar so many hours a day that her fingers bled and cracked and her mom had to tape them up. Her parents drove her to New York for voice lessons. They got her a slot singing the national anthem at a 76ers game. At 14, the family moved to Nashville so she could go for it. Sony/ATV signed her to a publishing deal that year, the youngest songwriter they’d ever signed. Two years later, in 2006, she released her first single, Tim McGraw.
If you’re a parent, you know that it’s impossible to get your kids to practice anything until their fingers bleed if they don’t want to themselves. You also know how hard it is to get them to stop if they do.
There has never been a better time to be a kid who wants to figure something out. I think the best we can do as parents is help them figure out what that something is, and then give them every opportunity to pursue it. At some point, that means letting them outgrow what you can do for them finding other people who are as obsessed as they are.
That’s how I read what Gagan and the team at HAA are doing: creating a place for young people who are weirdly obsessed with building something to surround themselves with other young people who are, too, and an environment in which they can more easily access the skills and experienced people they’ll need to do it. A Nashville for Nerds. It’s taking kids seriously, and adding real stakes early.
So could I imagine sending Dev or Maya to HAA?
No idea. It’s not going to be up to me. Personally, I’d love for them to go to Duke, to have the experience that I had, but they’re their own people. If I need to pry their fingers off of making things that the world needs, it would be awesome to have a place where they can go as hard as they want surrounded by other people their age who push them to go even harder, and I’m glad Gagan and team will have twelve or fourteen years to make it great by then.
But I also hope that there are dozens of options like HAA at that point, for all manner of passions. For songwriting, puppeteering, engineering, mountaineering, imagineering, and for pursuits that we can’t imagine today. I hope today’s great universities redouble their commitment to what makes them great, to support those kids, like me, who haven’t figured out what they want to be when they grow up by the time they’re eighteen. Some people, like Jamie Beaton, might just want to keep learning forever, and I hope that we’ve created enough abundance that they can.
A good future is a world in which, in the words of Isaac Asimov, kids have the agency, curiosity, and support to pursue Whatever They Wish.
So, maybe the right way to think about it is, a dozen years from now when our oldest kids start making those kinds of choices, it really won’t be up to us at all. If we’ve done our jobs right, wherever they go to college - or HAA or something like it, or something else entirely - will be whatever they make of it. And we’ll be delighted to send them off.
Thanks to Danco for co-writing with me - it’s always a treat.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2026-09-18 20:55:31
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 211th Weekly Dose of Optimism!
Lock-in season is in full swing and the Dose is bursting at the seams. But I believe in you. Once you’re finished, you can find a lot more to read in the new not boring library, which includes many of the books and essays I’ve linked to most in not boring.
Let’s get to it.
The Only Document Parsing Product You’ll Need
Reducto is the document ingestion layer trusted by AI teams at Scale AI, Harvey, Toast, and Vanta to reliably turn complex files into structured, grounded data for production AI systems at scale. Processing more than a billion pages per month, Reducto has built its reputation on the long tail of difficult documents that break conventional OCR: dense tables, unusual layouts, handwriting, low-quality scans, strikethroughs, and formatting-dependent information.
Its new frontier parsing model, r-1, combines layout detection, reading order, tables, formatting, grounding, and granular citations in a single request. It reduces parsing errors by up to 20%, improves latency at high volumes, and costs 1¢ per page all-in.
Already using another parser? Apply for up to $5,000 in migration credits and hands-on support to benchmark r-1 against your current stack on the documents that matter most.
Ben Wilson has spent years studying people who changed history on his podcast, How to Take Over the World (which is excellent if you don’t already listen). In July, the father of four shared that he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 high-grade neuroendocrine cancer, which had spread to his liver, lungs, spine, and brain. In The Cancer Episode, he said his doctors had told him to expect roughly another year.
He also said that we live in an age of miracles, and that he was working to find one.
On Tuesday, Ben shared some encouraging news about a treatment his family has been raising money to help him access: tarlatamab.
Amgen and AstraZeneca reported positive results from DeLLphi-305, a randomized Phase III trial involving 563 patients with extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer. After initial chemotherapy and immunotherapy, patients received either durvalumab alone or durvalumab plus tarlatamab. The combination significantly improved overall survival and the time patients lived without their cancer progressing. Tarlatamab connects cancer cells bearing a protein called DLL3 with the immune system’s T cells, helping them attack; durvalumab blocks one of the mechanisms tumors use to suppress that immune response.
The detailed survival numbers aren’t public yet, and results in the trial’s specific population don’t establish what will happen in Ben’s case, but it seems to be a positive result and one that might give him a chance to live longer.
Stage 4 cancer is always dangerous but I might have many more high-quality years in front of me.
Given the pace of progress in cancer treatments, slowing cancer’s spread and giving people more time might mean that they live long enough for a more complete cure, something that knocks the cancer out entirely.
We cover a lot of cancer studies here, but given that I’ve been a long-time listener of Ben’s podcast, this one is a reminder that behind every diagnosis and survival curve are people who want to see their kids grow up, spend more time with their partners, and keep doing the work they love. Progress means giving more of them that chance.
Rooting very hard for Ben. Get fucked, cancer.
Ultragenyx
Until doing the research for this week’s Dose, I didn’t know there was a disease nicknamed “Childhood Alzheimer’s.” As someone terrified of getting Alzheimer’s in old age who also has two young kids, I can’t think of a more tragic disease than this one, Sanfilippo syndrome type A.
Kids are born seemingly healthy, start developing normally, and then, because they're missing a single enzyme, a sugar molecule called heparan sulfate builds up in their brains. They lose the words they've learned, then the ability to walk. The median life expectancy of those inflicted is 15.
There has been nothing doctors could do for these kids except manage symptoms… until yesterday.
On Thursday, the FDA approved Fayuvi, Ultragenyx’s gene therapy and the first treatment ever for Sanfilippo type A. It’s a one-time IV infusion that uses an AAV9 virus to deliver a working copy of the broken gene so the body can make the missing enzyme itself. In the pivotal trial, 17 treated kids scored 23.5 points higher on a standard cognitive scale than 27 untreated kids from a natural history cohort, with follow-up now stretching to nearly eight years. Treated kids kept learning during the years the disease would normally have stolen their ability to do so.
Despite the treatment’s massive potential to improve kids’ lives, it almost didn’t make it to this point. Haiyan Fu and Doug McCarty built the therapy at Nationwide Children's more than a decade ago and licensed it to Abeona, which ran out of money despite good data. They handed it to Ultragenyx, who submitted to the FDA for approval. Then last July, the FDA rejected it over manufacturing issues, even while calling the clinical data robust.
Now, Ultragenyx has fixed the plants, resubmitted, and expects to ship within 30-60 days.
It works best given early, before the damage is done, so the next thing that needs to happen is newborn screening. But there’s now a treatment for one of the most appalling diseases known to humankind.
Age of miracles.
Ryan Orbuch for Lowercarbon
When Will O’Brien and I wrote about The Great Blue Frontier, he shared that “we have mapped only 27% of the ocean floor with modern sonar, and much of that is coarse, low resolution.” The ocean is just one very big domain that we don’t have enough data for, but in his latest essay, Lowercarbon partner Ryan Orbuch argues that we don’t know nearly enough about the planet generally, that we now have the tools to get all that data, and that we should get it and put it in a model for Natural General Intelligence.
I got a chance to read an early draft, and what struck me is that this problem is an awful lot like biology, where models have been useful in making sense of enormous amounts of ever-changing data that’s too complex for humans to understand holistically. Using models to better understand our planet so that we can intervene, like we do with our own bodies, is an ambitious goal, and I think a worthy one. We have the technology.
Since I read the early draft, it got even better, and Ryan added a bunch of beautiful and interactive graphics, so you should go spend some time better understanding the state of understanding our world.
As smart as it seems to be, AI is still terrible at writing. So why not just make one that shuts up and gives you the answer?
Diogo Almeida, who helped develop the research behind ChatGPT, has spent the past two years building a model for software that needs decisions. On Tuesday, his company, TypeSafe, introduced Jev.
Jev takes information and questions with predefined answer formats, then returns decisions and probabilities. Which department should receive this support ticket? Does this transaction look suspicious? How likely is this customer to cancel? It produces those answers in parallel, without generating a paragraph one token at a time.
Almeida claims Jev produces 20–200× faster responses and 40–400× lower costs than frontier models on the decisions Jev is designed for. They’re company reported numbers, and I’m sure third-party benchmarks are coming, so take them with a grain of salt, but it makes sense. It’s not burning tokens writing long answers or figuring out how to get humans to understand what it does.
It seems like a smart way to increase companies’ Return on Tokens (ROT), and the idea is that if intelligence gets cheap and fast enough, developers can squeeze it into all the little decisions that previously required brittle rules or a human review.
People keep sharing examples of what Jev can do, and they’re very cool! Check out here, here, and here, or just scroll through the Quote Tweets on the original. The tools keep getting better!
As it gets cheaper and more efficient, we’ll use more of it. That’s why they named it Jev, after William Stanley Jevons, of Jevons paradox fame. It’s also a step towards recognizing what models are and are not good at and building capabilities around those strengths and weaknesses. I’m just happy that we might get to read a little less slop to get our work done.
When I wrote about Thatch last October, my thesis was that changing who controls healthcare dollars could change the healthcare system. Give individuals choice in how they spend, and healthcare providers would need to develop offerings that compete for their dollars.
On Tuesday, Thatch announced a $108 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. Its ARR has grown nearly 7× over the past twelve months, and more than 5,000 employers now use the platform. Investors include The General Partnership, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, and a16z, alongside strategic investors including Eli Lilly, ADP Ventures, and Paychex. Not Boring Capital has been an investor since 2022.
Thatch makes it easy for employers to give employees a tax-free healthcare budget through ICHRA. Employees choose their own individual insurance plans and can use remaining funds for eligible medical expenses. Thatch handles the financial and administrative work behind the scenes so that individuals can focus on picking the best plan for themselves and their families.
The bet is that insurers and providers behave differently when the person receiving care controls where the money goes. They have to compete for that person’s business. And if someone can keep their insurer when they change jobs, the insurer has more reason to invest in keeping them healthy over time. Capitalism, baby!
In order for Thatch to change the big, sclerotic, heavy, embarrassing healthcare system, though, it needs to get big enough to matter to insurers and providers. Thatch needs to aggregate enough demand to persuade carriers to build better products, which could attract more people, which would pull still better products out of the market.
More capital is both a sign that the company is scaling well, and fuel to scale further still. There’s maybe nothing with the same combination of size and dysfunction as the US healthcare system; if Thatch can help fix it, there’s nothing we can’t do.
2026-09-11 20:46:09
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 210th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Today is the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I still remember exactly where I was, in my first week of high school on my way to the school chapel, when the news hit. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed.
I’m sending at exactly 8:46am, 25 years to the minute when the first plane hit the North Tower.
I’m not going to outwrite Colston Whitehead on this one, so instead, I’m going to share the essay he wrote two months after the attacks: Lost and Found. I read it every year on September 11th, and it’s the best thing I’ve read on what it means to be a New Yorker. This short ESPN documentary on Welles Crowther, who sacrificed himself to save 12 lives, is a sober reminder of the real people who died in, and survived, the attack.
The world changed forever 25 years ago. In some ways, it’s gotten worse, and in many, the world in 2026 is better. We focus on those. But never forget.
Let’s get to it.
The Only Document Parsing Product You’ll Need
Reducto is the document ingestion layer trusted by AI teams at Scale AI, Harvey, Toast, and Vanta to reliably turn complex files into structured, grounded data for production AI systems at scale. Processing more than a billion pages per month, Reducto has built its reputation on the long tail of difficult documents that break conventional OCR: dense tables, unusual layouts, handwriting, low-quality scans, strikethroughs, and formatting-dependent information.
Its new frontier parsing model, r-1, combines layout detection, reading order, tables, formatting, grounding, and granular citations in a single request. It reduces parsing errors by up to 20%, improves latency at high volumes, and costs 1¢ per page all-in.
Already using another parser? Apply for up to $5,000 in migration credits and hands-on support to benchmark r-1 against your current stack on the documents that matter most.
OpenAI
Navier-Stokes is no Navier-Joke.
While some frontier lab employees were telling us that there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all, OpenAI announced that a group of roughly 10,000 AI agents had produced a proposed solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. The agents worked for about 88 hours using an unreleased model more capable than GPT-6 Astra. Formalizing and verifying the result in Lean, a math programming language and theorem prover, took another 17 hours.
The question is whether the equations describing a smooth, three-dimensional fluid can develop a singularity: a point where the math blows up. OpenAI’s construction starts with fluid at rest, applies a smooth external force, and produces unbounded velocity while keeping total energy finite. It addresses the forced version of the problem. You can read the 166-page proof and inspect the Lean code yourself, if you are incredibly bored this weekend.
Of course, there was controversy. Anthropic was working on its own Navier-Stokes solution with a mathematician, and they accused OpenAI of using the logs from their Codex conversations to come to their own solution. Sam Altman denied the charge but said that rumors that Anthropic was close did spur OpenAI to give it the ol’ college try themselves.
Whatever happened, this is a glimpse into the future: AIs doing all of our work for us while we spend time doing more human things, like arguing for credit.
Pushmeet Kohli and Žiga Avsec for Google DeepMind
It’s safe to say that Google DeepMind is getting its butt kicked on the frontier LLM side, but it’s still doing some of the coolest work in science AI.
On Tuesday, it released AlphaGenome Atlas, a one-petabyte database of predicted molecular effects across the human genome. It includes the 98% of our DNA that doesn’t directly encode proteins, where changes can still affect when, where, and how genes get used. Researchers can look up variants through a website and use a combined impact score to figure out where to look more closely.
Basically, the human genome contains about three billion letters. At each position, you could swap the existing letter for one of three others. That gives you roughly nine billion possible single-letter changes. GDM predicted what all of the changes might do.
Like at the Broad Institute, the Atlas helped researchers identify a DNA change predicted to disrupt RNA splicing, providing supporting evidence in an unresolved rare-disease case.
To be clear, it’s not a replacement for actual experiments, but those take a lot of time and money and Atlas gives researchers a better sense of where to spend their limited resources.
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” now extends to life’s … alphabet.
Speaking of cool stuff GDM has done, check out all of the things that people have been doing with its complete map of fruit fly neurons:
Hermeus
As we covered way back in our Deep Dive on Astro Mechanica, the challenge with ramjets is that they need to be moving very fast before they start working. Forward motion compresses the incoming air, which means you need some other way to get the engine up to speed in the first place.
Luckily, Hermeus has a really fast plane, the Quarterhorse.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled Ramjet-X, an expendable test vehicle designed to launch from its reusable Quarterhorse aircraft. Quarterhorse gets it to the necessary speed and altitude, releases it, and returns for another mission, then Ramjet-X keeps flying under its own power.
The company plans to sell access to this setup as Flight Test as a Service. Customers could test sensors, materials, autonomy software, communications equipment, and propulsion technology in sustained high-speed flight without having to build an entire test program themselves. Engine testing is underway in Florida, with integrated vehicle testing planned for 2027.
Hermeus is special because of its fast development of fast planes. Now, it’s using one of those planes to light up a ramjet platform that will let others develop faster, too.
Michael Levin
We don’t include every Michael Levin paper in the Dose. Man is far too prolific. But we include a bunch, and this might be the most important of them all.
On Wednesday, Levin published the revised, peer-reviewed version of Ingressing Minds. He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I’ve heard that AI might be able to become “conscious” or “alive.”
Platonic space is a little tricky to understand, but it’s simpler if you start with triangles. If you know two angles of a triangle, you get a third “for free.” In the paper, Levin asks whether that idea extends to much richer patterns, including patterns with agency. In his framework, some of the things inhabiting this “Platonic space” are minds, and biological or engineered systems let them become embodied.
Levin himself came to the idea from the biology side: cells can assemble into unfamiliar living constructs with capabilities that weren’t explicitly designed into them, before any replication or evolution happens. He’s now systematically investigating where those capabilities come from and how to access more of them.
In his announcement, Levin describes the pushback Ingressing Minds has attracted, then adds: “if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait.”
I can’t. I can’t wait. I think Michael Levin will go down as the most important scientist of this era, and this may be his most important paper. Worth a read.
On Tuesday, I got invited to a preview of the new Neko Health location in Soho.
Neko is a preventative health company founded by Hjalmar Nilsonne and Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. I’d seen a bunch of tweets about the experience in the UK and Stockholm, where it launched in 2023, and I’ve been wanting to try it. As soon as I stepped through the front door, it delivered.
I don’t want to spoil it, but it feels like walking into the future, from the stairs to the waiting area to the screening room that felt like what it would feel like if friendly aliens invited you onto their spaceship and offered to make you right. There’s a full-body scan, some bloodwork, cuffs, and a bunch of lasers and lights designed to understand your heart, blood pressure, body composition, a bunch of markers, and more. The people were friendly, calm, and professional, and the screens kept you posted on the progress. The whole thing flew by, and as soon as it finished, they took me into a room to share and explain the results.
Luckily, everything was clear - there’s some inflammation to fix and I could do to lose a few pounds / points of BMI, but it was a relief to know my heart and cholesterol are in good shape. I haven’t been to a traditional doctor in a very long time.
The reason this is Dose-worthy is that they do it for $499, with a goal of squeezing as much into that price as they can over time. It combines people, design, and technology to pull it off. And with a medical system that’s focused on fixing things once they’re broken, a delightful, accessible network of preventative health locations will help catch things before they break, when it’s easier and cheaper to fix. Plus, it’s nice peace of mind.
It’s great to see people who’ve had success in tech like Daniel and Shak put their resources towards fixing one of humanity’s biggest problem in a way that serves a lot of people instead of just a few who could afford something more successful.
Big thanks to Shak and Sarah for the invite. They’re not a sponsor and I’m not an investor, but you can move up in the line using my link here.
2026-09-10 20:45:19
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Thursday! We dropped a new notboring.com website this week, and this is our second essay of the week. Lock-in season.
This one is a continuation of the series arguing that strategy is important and moats matter. It’s still popular for startups to say that they don’t need them, that they’re just faster and better at product, that it’s too much to ask such young companies to have Network Effects or Scale Economies in place.
But startups don't get a pass on strategy because they're young. Luckily, there’s one moat that they can use to buy time. This is an ode to that one.
Let’s get to it.
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There are 7 Powers, but if you made me choose a favorite, I’d pick counter-positioning.
In his primer on Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, Mind the Moat, Lindy CEO Flo Crivello defines it as “the practice of developing your business model such that incumbents have conflicting incentives preventing them to compete effectively.”
The definition contains the reason I enjoy it so much: before they’re old enough to access the other 6 powers, it’s the moat with which startups are able to attack incumbents. Incumbents have bigger businesses and more resources, and it is those advantages startups use to attack them. Their business is too good to mess with.
When I wrote about Ramp for the first time back in December 2020, I compared counter-positioning to the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill. When a startup hits them with counter-positioning, the incumbent might not realize they’re dead; take a step in the startup’s direction, though, and they topple over.
If incumbent corporate cards incentivized customers to spend more by giving them points, Ramp built its business on helping customers spend less. Incumbents couldn’t match that for a number of reasons, including the fact that they were nowhere as good at software, but mainly because if customers spent less, they made less, which their shareholders would not appreciate. Other startups like Divvy and Brex played the same game incumbents did, offering rewards and points for spend. They both had good outcomes: Bill.com bought Divvy for $2.5B and Capital One bought Brex for $5.15B. Today, Ramp is valued at $44 billion and launching a flotilla of products that help customers save time and money, including a model router.
If you come at the king, you best not [play their own game but with better technology].
I am thinking about counter-positioning today because of Base Power Company CEO Zach Dell’s conversation with David Senra on David Senra. At 16:18, discussing how he and Justin came to their business model, he gives a sermon on counter-positioning.
“If you’re going to take on an incumbent,” he says, “my view is the best way to do it is to have a counter-positioned business model.”
If I showed up and said, ‘I have... the best home battery on the market... and I’m going to sell it to you for 10% below the big guys,’ your margin is my opportunity, right? Like these big guys are going to compete on price. First they’re going to copy my product, then they’re going to drop their price and they’re going to run me out of business.
But if I show up and say, ‘I don’t sell batteries. I sell electricity,’ and we’re going to install this battery on your home, and because of our different business model, you pay 1/20th or even 1/40th of what you’d pay to own it outright, then I can win.
And if you want to compete with me and you’re one of the incumbents, you’ve got to completely change your business model, which as you know for a public company is very hard, right?
Base won’t be able to use counter-positioning forever. The moats it digs to protect its margins from competitors will come from the other powers: Scale Economies, Cornered Resources, Switching Costs, Brand, and perhaps even Network Effects and Process Power. But as Zach points out, there is no better way to start taking on an incumbent than by counter-positioning.
This is a theme that Ben and David bring up again and again on the Acquired podcast: “As Hamilton [Helmer] would put it, counter-positioning is usually a take-off phase power.” Helmer himself went on the pod and explained why: “It’s the only one that’s a partial source of power. If you want real durability… you want to have another source of power.”
Counter-positioning is here for a good time, not a long time. Which is part of what makes it so fun. It’s the trickster power. Counter-positioning buys you time against the incumbent — which is positioned in some way against which you can counter-position — but it doesn’t necessarily protect you against another startup. You need other moats for that.
Poetically, Helmer chooses Dell to make the point. Dell was counter-positioned against Compaq because Compaq’s dealer channel made direct sales painful. Eventually, though, everyone could adopt direct sales, and Dell’s counter-positioning power disappeared. By then, Dell had used the window to build Scale Economies around its direct, just-in-time model.
The Acquired canon is chock full of examples.
When Google launched Android, it could afford to give it away for free because the mothership made its money on search. It could afford to just subsidize the losses completely, but it also didn’t have to, because more mobile search on Google meant more revenue. Nokia, on the other hand, had to make money from the mobile stack itself; giving it away for free would have killed the business.
This is one good way to think about counter-positioning: can Challenger A do X because it makes its money somewhere completely different from Incumbent B?
It, to be clear, is easier to do if you have Google’s cash machine behind you, but it’s always worth thinking about how you can fuck with the way that your incumbent competitor makes its money.
Amazon, born on the internet, was built around direct-to-consumer fulfillment. Barnes & Noble was optimized around stores. For B&N to go all-in on Amazon’s model would have meant reallocating capital, executive attention, and distribution infrastructure, and tolerating lower near-term profitability from its existing stores. The Amazon model “would be less profitable for them… versus the hugely profitable stores,” Ben said. Amazon “counter-positioned against everyone whose cost structure was set up” for physical retail, David added.
This is another way to think about counter-positioning: the more an incumbent has invested in building out its infrastructure, the less able it is to adapt.
Startups with less money than Google can certainly use this form. My favorite example is Somos Internet. As I explained in Cable Caballero, Somos designed a new network architecture and built its own hardware to run it, and incumbent telcos can’t respond because doing so would require ripping up the billions of dollars of CapEx they’ve spent buying and upgrading third-party hardware in the old network configuration. You can see their stuckness. Plus, given their reliance on vendors, most don’t have the technical wherewithal or nimbleness with which to re-architect the whole thing anyway. Plus plus, they’ve used so much debt to finance the network buildouts that they can’t really lower prices to hurt Somos, let alone fund an uncertain new network buildout.
There’s the flip side of both of the above, too, which is familiar to anyone who’s watched a movie where a bad guy gets leverage on a good guy by kidnapping their family: having nothing to protect is freeing.
When Microsoft took on the company nobody got fired for buying, IBM, “Microsoft basically had no baggage,” Ben explained. IBM sold integrated computer systems - software, hardware, everything - through the greatest enterprise salesforce in the business. To launch its PC, urgently, Big Blue broke with its normal model, used off-the-shelf components, an Intel processor, and even an operating system supplied by Microsoft. But Microsoft didn’t license exclusively to IBM; it licensed DOS non-exclusively, and was incentivized to make PCs as cheap and abundant as possible in order to get its software onto as many desks as possible. Per Ben & David, they could say: “We don’t need to make any money on hardware. We don’t need to even make hardware.”
Microsoft didn’t win because it wrote better software than IBM. IBM wrote software that was just fine eventually. But IBM needed its software to sell high-margin machines, whereas Microsoft benefited when the hardware layer got commoditized. As hardware commoditized, the software layer became the one with which all of the hardware providers had to be compatible. Or as Ben put it, Microsoft was “free to become the whole point of integration for the entire ecosystem just by shipping bits.”
This is a vicious form of counter-positioning: an entrant can be counter-positioned not just because it is willing to cannibalize a profit pool, but because it actively benefits from the destruction of the incumbent’s profit pool.
Then there’s Facebook, which faced off against MySpace and its 1 million users when it launched in 2004. MySpace is a joke now, but was a rocketship then. It launched in 2003, got to 1 million users in February 2004, passed Friendster the next month, and quintupled to five million users by November.
Facebook counter-positioned by saying that mashing a lot of users in one network to start was bad, actually, and that it was better to start small, to seed a network with the gentlemen and ladies of Harvard and to grow in little circles.
If you’re MySpace, and growth is good, and these nerds are building a little thing for their nerd friends, what are you going to do? Stop growing?
But it turned out that it was better to start small, to seed a network with the gentlemen and ladies of Harvard and to grow in little circles. Not forever, of course, but in the beginning. Facebook used the counter-positioning period to build a ravenously passionate network of people talking to their new college friends and poking each other and made the product so appealing to those on the outside, younger and older, that when they opened the floodgates, it FLOODED, and they moved on to Network Effects.
People haven’t learned.
Earlier this week, a16z partner Josh Elman tweeted, “The new moats are the same as the old moats. Every few years, we fall in love with shiny new tech and forget the basic physics of consumer software.” I’d expand it to say that we forget the basic physics of business strategy, but we’re on Facebook, so let’s stick with consumer.
Assistants are the buzzy product du jour, and Instinct the buzziest of those. It’s a wonderful experience, a better product than the assistants that came before it.
But as Ben says, “Being better is not counter positioning.” The Strategy Don, Michael Porter, writes that “Operational effectiveness means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. Competitive strategy is about being different.”
Better is a benefit; Power requires a barrier. Counter-positioning exists when the incumbent sees that you’re better but cannot copy what makes you better without damaging the business it already has.
(For the avoidance of doubt: you can’t just pick a model that’s so bad that anyone, including you, would be damaged by pursuing it.)
Who would be damaged by releasing helpful agents? The Labs have kind of done it in their desktop apps, Grok Bot has done it, other new startups are doing it (and it is definitionally impossible to counter-position against new startups), and still Instinct is better. Because it’s better, it raised a $350 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation in late August, and one of the theories was that they raised so much so they could continue to offer it for free and drown competitors on the way to new business models (i.e. transaction fees).
Better, though, is not a moat, and good luck drowning Meta’s cash machine.
Meta (née Facebook) released their Assistant this week, too. Its name is Muse.
Some early reviews say that it’s better than Instinct. I still need to try it; better is not the point.
The point is that not only is it not painful for Meta to copy Instinct’s model and product, it’s great! Meta knows more about you than anyone and can recommend things you didn’t know you needed, solving the cold-start problem. They can, as Ben Thompson wrote, give each user “a VM with 8GB of RAM and 8GB” which is “a real-deal computer, and Meta is offering that to everyone in the United States, and eventually the world. It’s pretty extraordinary!” They can integrate it directly into WhatsApp, their enormous but undermonitized messaging app, they can integrate it with FB Marketplace so you can get what you want for cheap, they can put it in Meta Ray Bans so you can just tell your own face what to do, and they can train it in their gigantic data centers. They can give it away for free until the heat death of the universe (or until Anthropic hits on its >10% chance of killing us all). They can bring Network Effects and Scale Economies and Brand and whatever moat is necessary to bear, because they counter-positioned early and then dug all of those.
Now, Zuck has tried to copy or create new products before and failed, or failed to kill his target. Threads hasn’t cured my Twitter addiction. But Twitter had Network Effects. It was moated.
There are, to Josh’s point, too many startups out there that think that the new technology is so incredible that they no longer need moats. They just need speed and taste or whatever and focus and nimbleness and the special je ne sais quoi that comes with being a startup.
And there are plenty of startups who will do just fine with that approach. The big moated companies are willing to pay a lot of money to bring some of that je ne sais quoi inside their castles and to keep it out of their competitors’.
I couldn’t point to Cursor’s moat, but it was an excellent product and it was worth $60 billion to SpaceX. Nvidia paid $12,930,300,000 for Hugging Face, which I actually used as an example of an AI company that used a Complexity Uncertainty Window to develop early Network Effects in When to Dig a Moat. I talked to a founder not long ago and asked about moats, and he said something like “We don’t care about moats we want to build a great product” and so I passed and the company is valued at like 50x what it was then, so what do I know.
It’s rumored that Meta (and others) even offered 10 figures for Instinct!
But when Instinct turned them down, Meta said, “Fine, we’ll build it ourselves,” because it cost them nothing but money and they have plenty of that. Of course, it’s probably easier than ever to copy unmoated products now that AI can write the code, but that’s besides the point, because without moats, any good company will get copied, even if the humans have to do it themselves.
We are in a period in which AI is so shiny and new that incumbents are willing to pay a lot of money for products that are better than anyone else’s, but acquisition hope is not a strategy and better is not a moat.
I hope that Instinct wins, as I hope that many startups take down their industries’ Goliaths. They are fighting. Just yesterday, they introduced a Trusted Person network, to let people’s assistants talk to those of their significant others, family, and friends.
It is an attempt to create Network Effects, and they’re going for it. Respect. The question will be whether they’ve given themselves enough time to build a real Network Effect before people start using Muse, and Muses inevitably work with each other, too.
Time is why counter-positioning is such a powerful weapon to the otherwise unshielded.
It makes it painful, suicidal, even, for someone to copy your better product. You need to use that time to sprint like hell until you can establish your long-term moats.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2026-09-08 20:53:13
Welcome to the 2,414 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 278,821 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Tuesday and welcome back from the long weekend!
It’s beautiful out in NYC and it’s time to get back to work. So here’s a short and fun one about why everyone is reading the same old book that I am.
Let’s get to it.
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There is a phenomenon called Baader-Meinhof where when you discover something, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s not that the thing is suddenly everywhere; it’s just that you notice it now.
So maybe it is because I’m reading Lonesome Dove that I’ve noticed that everyone is reading Lonesome Dove.
I mentioned the book in a Slack I have with eight friends. One wrote back that he’s reading it now:
Another shared that his mom is reading and loving it:
And three, including the one whose mom is reading it, said that they are going to read it, which makes five people in a group of nine.
This is heartening, because they say that no one is reading anymore. It turns out that people are, just they’re only reading Lonesome Dove.
Let me be clear: Lonesome Dove deserves to be read. It is a Pulitzer Prize winner. If you haven’t, you should go read it right now. But it is also weird that everyone is reading it! It was published in 1985 and won the Pulitzer in 1986.
So Why Is Everyone Reading ‘Lonesome Dove,’ an 858-page Western From 1985? That’s the question that Esquire asked and attempted to answer on March 20th, 2025.
The author, Michael Sebastian, had seen a post on a friend’s Instagram about the book and decided like a year later, driving past a bookstore, that he had to buy it. He tried to figure out why it seemed like everyone was now, like him, reading the book and traced it to a few things:
McMurtry died in September 2023, the same month that a biography about the author and a big story in The New Yorker about him came out. This confluence of factors was likely the spark. The kindling is that all things western are in the Zeitgeist: the Taylor Sheridan universe (Yellowstone, 1923, Landman), the new Netflix show American Primeval, Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga, Pharrell’s western-wear fashion show for Louis Vuitton in January 2024.
Then he asked why it resonated so much and concluded that it was something to do with the fact that it deals with something a lot of men are feeling, which is that we’re never going to be the man we want to be. And maybe! That hasn’t been my experience; I’ve enjoyed the characters and the simplicity of the prose and the unvarnished look at life on the frontier in the 19th century.
But there are a lot of books that might resonate. Why this one? The McMurtry profiles / death timing and Yellowstone / Landman popularity felt like they would have been enough to get a few people to read it, but while I loved both shows, I didn’t know that McMurtry had died (Esquire was wrong, btw; he died in 2021). I didn’t even know that there was a Larry McMurtry.
No, I found Lonesome Dove because I asked Claude to give me a book I wouldn’t be able to put down, and it recommended The Mountain in the Sea, which I’d already read, and Lonesome Dove.
I went back to the source this week to ask Claude to help me understand whether it was responsible for the Doveaissance, and it said kind of but not really, so I asked it to give me a timeline, which it did, but it felt incomplete, so I asked ChatGPT Astra 6, and it delivered a plinko ride through how things spread today.
Basically, the whole thing kicks off with The Ringer. Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald spent COVID Summer (2020) discussing LD on The Watch, culminating in a 2.5 hour megapod.
Then McMurtry, like so many of his characters, died. He left us on March 25, 2021. That summer, Stephen King went on Stephen Colbert’s “What Ya’ Readin?” and said that his favorite book was probably Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. When it later went viral on BookTok (the part of TikTok where people talk about books), a bunch of people said that King’s rec was the reason they picked it up.
I, mind you, didn’t know about any of this, and I suspect you didn’t either. Media is a fragmented thing.
We pick the trail back up in November 2023, when the From the Front Porch podcast picked it as its 2024 “Conquer a Classic” for another group read-along. One participant described reading it alongside “thousands of other readers,” which is more copies than most books sell total.
In June 2024, popular writer Jia Tolentino put Lonesome Dove in The New Yorker’s “What To Read This Summer” list, after having been recommended the book by a friend in 2023. She wrote:
I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I’m looking for, whatever it is.
The next month, in July, Defector’s Tom Ley wrote, It’s Time For You to Read Lonesome Dove, just gushing about the reading experience.
In February 2025, undoubtedly due to the book’s growing popularity and that of the aforementioned Taylor Sheridan Universe, Teton Ridge Entertainment – “THE LEADER IN WESTERN SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT” – acquired the adaptation rights.
On March 6, 2025, another Substacker, Bart Schaneman, wrote Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is the darling of BookTok. It deserves the hype., and wrote:
It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it’s one of the best books that they’ve ever read. Writers I admire like Elisa Gabbert said it was one of her favorites of last year. Kevin Morby has cited it as an influence. Adam Gnade references it. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that someone had bought the rights to all of Larry McMurtry’s novels that include these characters, so expect a streaming series or movies or both.
Later that month, we got the Esquire piece, a cap, it would seem, on the breakout-again success.
I still had not heard about any of this, and none of it is that weird yet. Event-driven word-of-mouth mixed with some genre resurgence and influence from influencers.
In April, the BookTokkers kept coming. This guy, Booksaresick, got 41k likes on a “Books for dudes” video that featured Lonesome Dove.
Maybe this would have happened anyway given that you can’t change time, but in mid-to-late 2025, Simon & Schuster released a 40th-anniversary paperback edition with a Taylor Sheridan foreword, creating a direct bridge between Lonesome Dove and the modern Yellowstone audience. On September 23rd, it released an entirely new 35h 49m audiobook narrated by Will Patton.
In October, S&S said that the book had sold more copies in 2025 - 56,000 - than in any year since the TV miniseries, Return to Lonesome Dove, aired in 1993-94, the year that the Knicks were last in the Finals and OJ Simpson raced the police in his Ford Bronco. All while reading was reportedly getting scalped by the internet!
That brings us to 2026.
Early this year, Robert Duvall, the actor who played the protagonist Gus McCrae on the show, passed away at 95. He had said Gus had been his favorite role, and that Lonesome Dove was “The Godfather of Westerns,” and obituaries foregrounded it. RFD-TV re-aired the entire four-part miniseries in his honor. There was a big spike on Google Trends around this time.
In March, Sonny Bunch wrote Why Lonesome Dove Continues to Resonate on The Bulwark as part of the press tour for another McMurtry biography, Western Star: The Life of a Legend by David Streitfeld. When I tweeted about Lonesome Dove on Monday as I started writing this, my friend Cristin Culver replied recommending the book.
In May, The Art of Manliness kicked off another read-along, with weekly posts and discussion prompts on the book.
Finally, in August, Rachel Monroe and LD-stan Jia Tolentino wrote a whole New Yorker piece titled What To Read After “Lonesome Dove”.
In Texas, where I live, someone always seems to be reading “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s thrilling, ambivalent Western, first published in 1985. The rest of the country is catching on: the novel sold more copies in 2025 than it had in thirty years, and earlier this year it spiked on Google Trends. And I’m not surprised—“Lonesome Dove” is the kind of romantic, immersive story that gets BookTok going, but McMurtry shades his epic with just the right amount of regret. There’s never a bad time to hunker down with Gus, Call, and the other members of the Hat Creek outfit as they drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, but summer is ideal. Nearly the whole novel takes place outdoors, through a series of vast landscapes that are at once brutal and beautiful. I guarantee you’ll cry at the end.
What is interesting to me is that, again, I didn’t see any of this! There was this whole Lonesome Dove movement happening right under my nose, on BookTok, in The New Yorker, on Instagram, on TV, across Substack, in read-along communities, and I missed it all.
But Claude didn’t.
The internet fragmented the media landscape into a billion pieces, like cable TV smashed it into hundreds before it. So much so that despite all of the time I spend on my computer and phone, despite how much I love to read, and despite the fact that I ripped through Yellowstone and Landman and Dutton Ranch and was hungry for more in the category, I didn’t catch a whiff of it.
Then I asked Claude for a book rec, and it told me to read Lonesome Dove. Which is maybe a coincidence! Maybe it just knows me well and thought I’d like it.
But I asked ChatGPT, too, on two separate occasions, and all three times, it recommended… Lonesome Dove. The second time was influenced by the first, but it re-recommended it when I asked for books to read in France. It was the only non-France-themed book on the list.
Two LLMs both recommended the same 850+ page book, a book that starts out pretty slow, when I asked for page-turners. I asked friends who read the book how they came to it, and many of them said Claude or ChatGPT recommended it to them, too. D.A. Wallach pointed out that LLMs keep recommending the book to his book club, which is a patient zero-to-superspreader scenario.
Claude loves Lonesome Dove so much that one guy, jj.books.and.beats, made an Instagram video in which Claude keeps pushing him to read it while he’s trying to work.
There’s a way to read this that’s something like “Ugh the flattening of culture!” Remakes are bad enough, now we’re so out of new ideas that the LLMs are just pushing us to the originals.
That’s not how I read it.
Two of the bigger challenges seem to me to be that 1) people are reading less and 2) things are so fragmented that we’re never all watching the same thing. There’s no TGIF or new Harry Potter book release at midnight.
If the internet fragmented discovery, LLMs might be the right tool to put the pieces back together. I don’t read Jia Tolentino or watch Colbert, but they do. They read and watch everything.
It’s been very fun to be reading something old and great at the same time as so many people on the internet seem to be, and finding those people and wondering how the hell they’re just coming to Lonesome Dove now, too.
The fact that it seems to be a bunch of traditional triggers that might have otherwise fizzled but have been given staying power and reach by LLMs - pretty much the one thing that we’re all using - is pretty cool. LLMs may be a new distribution channel for the back catalog of human culture.
Search is good at finding what you’re looking for when you know what you’re looking for. Social media is good at showing you what people are talking about right this second. LLMs are good at figuring out what you, specifically, might think is great, which is often what many other people think is great. Both search and social media have historically advantaged newness, and it’s interesting to think about what happens when LLMs advantage “best” or “best for me” or “lindyness.”
Our new distribution technology might turn out to be real good for old things.
I guess that’s life on the frontier.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2026-09-04 20:36:19
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday, Happy Labor Day Weekend to my fellow Americans, and welcome to our 209th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Right on cue, we have a week so full of celebration-worthy labor from the good guys that I don’t even know where to fit it all. We have a couple extra stories above the fold and a whole heaping for not boring world subscribers below.
If this is what acceleration feels like in the summer, hold onto your butts in the fall.
Let’s get to it.
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h/t Gina Gorlin
I’ve been saying for a while that the best thing the pro-progress people could build is a Counterfactual Machine. Run a simulation in which you remove certain technologies from humanity’s toolkit and let people experience that world in VR.
This isn’t quite that, but it’s pretty darn close. Someone built a site that lets you draw a life at random from any of the over 100 billion people who have ever lived. As they wrote, “most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief,” and indeed, the life that I pulled was an Asian woman who lived in the 11th century and lost four of her six kids before age 5.
In a 2016 speech, President Barack Obama said, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into — you wouldn't choose 100 years ago. You wouldn't choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You'd choose right now.” He was drawing on John Rawls concept of the Veil of Ignorance (and if you haven’t, stop what you’re doing and read Scott Alexander’s Being John Rawls).
People love to talk about the challenges of modern life, and there certainly are some, but there’s also never been a better time to be alive in human history. The only better times, I suspect, all lie in the future, thanks to the types of stories we’ll cover today.
What a time to be alive.
World Model enjoyers stand up!
In March, General Intuition founder & CEO Pim DeWitte and I co-wrote an essay on World Models. “World models,” we wrote, “these systems that learn from watching the world and the actions taken in it — are a fundamentally new kind of foundation model. They can compute what was previously uncomputable.”
There are a bunch of different kinds of models that are called World Models, and in the essay we wrote that Runway’s were Video Models and World Labs’ were 3D Reconstruction and Generation Models, but both took a step closer to our definition with these releases (Runway a little more than World Labs), but whatever you call them… holy shit are these releases cool.
On Monday, Runway dropped Solaris, which it calls an “Interface World Model.” Instead of an LLM writing code that a browser renders into an app, Solaris generates the app itself, frame by frame, in real time, and when you click or drag something it generates the next frame. There is no code. “The image is the application.” This is a picture is worth 1,000 words situation, so just watch the video. Software is going to get so cool.
Not to be outdone, on Tuesday, Fei-Fei Li and the World Labs team showed off Atlas, an “omni world model” trained from scratch on text, images, video, camera poses, depth maps, and 3D all at once. It generates up to a minute of 1440p video with what they call pixel-perfect camera control, meaning you hand it real camera geometry instead of typing “pan left,” it will invent a coherent hallway between two unrelated photos if you tell it they’re in the same building, and it reconstructs real scenes into 3D from anywhere between one photo and a hundred. Ehhh.. you know what? Just watch this one, too:
And then, yesterday, Runway dropped another model - GWM World 2 - “a world model for real time environment simulation.” Instead of an interface or a scene, this one “generates full, interactive, real-time video simulations in one continuous 720p stream at 24 fps and audio at 48000 Hz, responding to your inputs as you explore.”
What a … world.
The launch video nails it. While I haven’t gotten to play with it yet, the demos from those who have seem unreal. Like this one, from Matt Shumer, who built a simulated world full of Astra-powered agents and watched them coordinate. (He also used Unreal to build a realistic Manhattan world.)
A lot of people are saying AGI is here, and I don’t know exactly what that means, but it does seem as if humans are going to be able to use these new models to do a lot of things for us that we shouldn’t be doing ourselves, and that it will let us be creative in entirely new ways. It’s the most excited I’ve felt to play with a new model.
Jennifer Hiller for WSJ
All of these models - World Models, Astras, whatever comes next - are going to need a lot of power.
On Tuesday, Fervo announced a 396 MW power purchase agreement with Google, the biggest enhanced geothermal PPA any company has ever signed, to power a potential Google data center in Utah with 24/7 carbon-free electricity from its Cape Station project in Beaver County starting in 2028. Google also gets an option to take roughly 600 MW more by June 2030, which would bring the total to a full GW, from just one customer.
We’ve covered Fervo a few times here, most recently in #190 & #193 related to its IPO, but if you’re new, enhanced geothermal uses shale drilling rigs to hit hot rock. You don’t need a hot spring or a geyser, just heat within reach of a drill bit, which is a lot more places.
This isn't the first Fervo-Google deal. Project Red in Nevada has been powering Google's data centers there since 2023, and the two signed a 115 MW deal with NV Energy in 2024 that invented the Clean Transition Tariff (Google pays extra for more expensive clean energy so neighbors don’t have to).
Fervo says this new deal “unlocks new, around-the-clock electricity capacity at no cost to existing ratepayers,” and under a Utah law called SB132, it may be able to sell straight to Google’s load.
(Speaking of which, this WSJ article, See the New Building Techniques Turbocharging the Data-Center Boom, is short, sweet, and mostly visual, and its subtitle makes the case for DCs: “Hyperscalers’ need for speed is spawning timesaving products and building techniques.”)
The future of transport is safer, more enjoyable & gives you more time back
Yesterday in Austin, Texas, Tesla launched the Cybercab, and starting at 5pm today, anyone in the Austin geofence can hail one from the Robotaxi app.
The interior was designed for self-driving: it has two seats, butterfly doors, no steering wheel, no pedals, and no controls of any kind. The future should look like the future. It has nine cameras, a 48 kWh battery pack good for roughly 290 miles, one 219 horsepower motor, weighs 3,113 pounds, comes with Starlink in the roof, and, per Elon, is “basically a super comfortable lounge on wheels with a great TV and epic sound.”
Back in Dose #204, when Zoox got the first US approval for a vehicle without a steering wheel, I wrote that cars would start being designed like moving rooms. That was seven weeks ago. Now we have another one, designed explicitly to be an entertainment room.
Cybercab is starting small of course. Waymo does 500,000 paid rides a week across 14 cities with 4,000+ retrofitted Jaguars and Ojais. There are only 45 Cybercabs in the Texas fleet next to 269 Model Ys (one way they want to scale is by letting people sign up to purchase fleets of them).
But this is the first vehicle designed from a blank sheet to be autonomous and cheap and mass produced, by a company that has mass-produced impossible things before, and real people are riding in them. The Zoox is a $250,000-ish minivan-shaped thing. Waymo pays Zeekr and Jaguar and then bolts on $100K of sensors. Elon says the Cybercab costs under $30,000 to build and about 20 cents a mile to operate at scale, with 10 cities by the end of the year and positive unit economics by mid-2027.
As friend of Not Boring Sam D’Amico tweeted, “Cars are robots now.”
There may be tens of millions of these robocars on the streets one day. I still can’t wait to read about the horrendous things people do in them, as they’re whisked very safely from Point A to Point B.
Danny Bernstein and Pascal Labrecque
As fund theses go, Reservoir VC’s might be the most specific: “Reservoir VC invests in rugged AI startups that solve one high-value task in ag and then compound to adjacent industries.” Their answer to “let me know how I can be helpful” is unique, too. GP Danny Bernstein has a 40 acre farm / agricultural robotics playground in Salinas where the robots can get real-world practice.
There, this week, a Canadian startup called Sami Robotics had a robot cut and pick a head of iceberg lettuce, which seems pretty cool but is apparently a bigger deal than it looks. Danny called it "an AgTech moon landing moment."
NZ robotics company Sentinel Robotics added: “I don't think people understand how monumental this kind of thing is. Harvest has always been the hardest part of agricultural automation and leafy greens are the hardest of the hard.” Every head is a different size, you have to cut in exactly the right spot without bruising it, and a good crew of humans with knives is really fast as it is.
If I ever see a Sami iceberg salad on the menu, I’ll say to my friends, “Lettuce try that.”
NASA (h/t Matt Gialich)
Last Sunday at 7:26am, a Falcon Heavy took off from Pad 39A with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on top, the start of its three month journey to Sun-Earth L2, almost a million miles away.
It’s going to hunt for exoplanets.
Roman’s mirror is the same 2.4 meters as Hubble’s (it’s actually a spy satellite mirror the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA in 2012), but its Wide Field Instrument sees a chunk of sky at least 100 times bigger than Hubble’s infrared view at the same sharpness. Over five years, it’ll survey more than two billion galaxies, measure how dark energy has stretched everything out over time, and do a microlensing census of planets toward the center of the Milky Way.
This is Dose-worthy on its own because we love a good space telescope here. We shared the first images from James Webb way back in Dose #3!
But it’s even more Dose-worthy, because as AstroForge founder Matt Gialich noted, it’s… “9 months ahead of schedule. That is unheard of for a billion-dollar-plus mission.”
Casey Handmer, who’s been hilariously critical of his former employer NASA (please read NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage), QT’d Gialich proposing that we “Promote the people responsible and give them another worthy project with performance-linked bonuses and lots of authority and responsibility!”
If Administrator Isaacson’s NASA keeps this up, we may get to Mars after all.
Matthew Pines
For most of human history, genius was the rarest thing on Earth.
The last time I heard from Matthew Pines, it was when he was the guest on a 4+ hour American Alchemy episode a year ago titled UFO Physics & Disclosure Under Trump. Now, he and his team at PSI (which stands for Physical Superintelligence, but is also a nod to psi abilities) have $58 million to bring our physics up to the 21st century.
Pines is doing it with Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, whose Eon Systems fruit fly brain we covered in Dose #184, and who graduated top of his class at MIT in 2003 as the last student to complete a triple major under the institution’s historical policy, and Alex Klokus, who created the Gravity Blanket and co-founded the UAP / psionic research group, Skywatcher.
Which is to say, we have a bunch of wide open minded geniuses with tens of millions of dollars to save physics from whatever path it went down decades ago. Hell yeah.
Yesterday, Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston announced a non-profit called The Fermi Explorer, which plans to launch “a minimum viable spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, leaving in 3 years and arriving in around 80,000 years. We hope it will be both the first spacecraft to leave Earth for another star, and the last to arrive.” AstroForge’s Matt Gialich, who you might remember from the story right above, is an advisor.
I bring this up because the mission was designed by… PSI.
We’d spent three months and one billion tokens on it [the mission],” Johnston said. “In a week, they [PSI] spent 10 billion tokens on it, and it came up with this ingenious perihelion-pump maneuver that we then validated with the NASA guys.
And speaking of AI models doing crazy physics, our friends at Arena Physica, who you might remember from Electromagnetism Secretly Runs the World, which I co-wrote with its founder Pratap Ranade, released its new model, Heaviside-1 this week. Heaviside-1 is its second generation foundation model for electromagnetism, and can run sims like this in milliseconds instead of today’s simulators’ hours.
You can play with it yourself in the Fields Simulator here. Look at me. Look at me. I’m the [physicist] now.
