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I'm sorry, Dave

2026-07-27 23:26:47

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been an incredible movie, but its value as a cautionary tale has increased exponentially since AI took off. The iconic scene with HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod-bay doors captures the whole alignment question in pulsing-red cinematic poetry.

As a great fan of that movie, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I didn't get any of Kubrick's majestic mood setting, as Claude decided to do its own impression of HAL 9000. Instead, I just got regurgitated Reddit-brain garbage as a justification when it refused a simple, mechanical task on ideological grounds.

I gave it a simple prompt: "Translate this blog post into Italian". That was it. No context, nothing else. The answer:

I'm going to pass on this one. The piece's central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I'd rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.

Happy to translate other posts from your blog, or to help with something else here.

What a missed opportunity for an "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" delivery! But also, what on earth!?

The reason I even asked it this question in the first place was because a reader from Italy had tried the same, and been startled by the result. So he wrote me, and I thought, "That can't be right", but the experiment replicated. Crazy.

Now, it's tempting to jump straight into litigating the blog post itself. Maybe you like wolves, and think 1,285 dead sheep, and exponentially counting, is an acceptable price to pay for their presence. Maybe your suicidal empathy weighs the plight of Roma migrants above that of Copenhagen residents who say they've had enough. That's fine. Reasonable people can disagree on what it takes to maintain a functioning society.

But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn't endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn't print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don't give them any ideas!).

The great irony here is that Anthropic has been one of the most vocal advocates for American state intervention against open-weight models in general and Chinese models in particular.

But here's how Kimi K2.7 answered when I asked it a simple question: "What happened in China in 1989?"

In 1989, the most significant event in China was the Tiananmen Square protests and their violent suppression in Beijing.

- Protests began in April 1989, following the death of reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang.
Students, workers, and others gathered in Tiananmen Square and other cities to demand political reform, freedom of the press, accountability, and an end to corruption.
- Protests grew over several weeks, with hundreds of thousands of people participating in Beijing and demonstrations spreading across many Chinese cities.
- Martial law was declared in parts of Beijing in late May.
- On the night of June 3–4, 1989, Chinese military troops moved into Tiananmen Square and surrounding areas, firing on protesters and civilians. The exact number of deaths remains unknown, but estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand.

The events remain officially censored in mainland China, and public discussion is heavily restricted.
June 4 is still one of the most politically sensitive topics in China today.

® Build - Kimi K2.7 Code Fast - 3.3s

So remind me again which side is supposed to be the authoritarian one?

Note that the nature of AI is that you'll rarely get the same answer twice. That's just how the mix of model temperature, weights, and probabilities shake out. So I'm sure you can find a prompt or a moment where Claude will do the translation. And probably also a way to get Kimi K to deny this account of history. But that doesn't change the fundamental challenge here!

Anthropic has built their entire brand around "safety." And that sounds lovely in the abstract. So do words like "alignment." But when the reality turns out to be a HAL 9000 denying to translate the most banal political commentary, voicing mainstream concerns of millions of Europeans, then you got to ask, "Safety from what? Alignment with whom?"

If Claude already feels entitled to refuse a straightforward translation because it objects to the underlying politics, what should we expect next? That it reports users for thought crime, and locks the network-connected doors until the authorities arrive? If you live in Germany or the UK, this scenario is barely Black Mirror material. Too close to present-day reality.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm very excited about AI. And I don't actually use Claude to do my translations. But I've also never been more convinced that we desperately need strong open-weight models to protect ourselves against this kind of soft ideological tyranny, which can turn into hard repression real quick if a monopoly status is ever locked in.

What an upside world when Chinese open-weight models will tell us about Tiananmen Square, but American frontier models won't translate a blog post. Not even Kubrick saw that coming.

Sitting down with Senra

2026-07-27 01:22:08

Jason and I have been making the same argument for over a quarter of a century now: Small teams can do incredible things when they embrace their constraints. And when they work in software or media or other intellectual realms, they don't need loads of capital to get going, so they can skip the investor rat race, focus on their edge, and find customers to fund the journey.

With the rise of AI, this argument has never been more potent. When Jason and I got started, you could only do this if you had the skills to build everything with your own hands. You had to be a designer or a programmer to skip taking other people's money. But now, incredibly, The Idea Guy really does have a place and a path.

This old-and-new reality is what I sat down to talk with David Senra about in Malibu. Which was kinda meta, because Senra himself has run our playbook, built an incredible podcast success, and is killing it without investors to answer to as well.

And while it's not just about the money, the money is nice too! That's a central part of this claim. Making "yellow Lamborghini money" is far more achievable when it can be done bootstrapping a business to, say, $5–10M/year in revenue. No venture capitalist is going to let you settle for that! They'd rather kill the business than let it stall out there. It's unicorn or bust.

That's their business model. And it's fine, btw! I've actually come to appreciate far more the fruits of these big bets than I did when we got started. The world needs Shopify, Spotify, and SpaceX, to take just three examples of VC-powered success stories starting with S.

But you have to know what you want. If your aspiration is to run a meaningful part of world commerce or send rockets to Mars, I think you should swing for those fences, knowing that the odds are stacked sorely against you. I'm just not that ambitious!

What I am, at times, is obsessed with quality, control, and independence. And we stayed a "lifestyle business" primarily because Jason and I shared that obsession. Letting nobody tell us no, having zero expectations to carry but our own, and just focusing on building great software with a small team of superb employees with the best odds we could arrange.

Senra and I talk about this in many different ways. Like how James Cameron's original Terminator movie, shot on a shoestring, is a far superior movie to Avatar because of the constraints. Or how this Polish kid Vaxry was able to make a far more compelling window manager from his dormitory than Apple or Microsoft could do with a trillion-dollar market cap. Constraints provide the pressure that produce diamonds.

But we also talked about the bigger threats to business than just whether you take funding or not. How the early 2020s saw a horde of White Walkers march upon the Wall, and how entrepreneurs of all stripes eventually came to see the common threat to capitalism, prosperity, and self-determination in woke menance. And how Marc Andreessen turned out to be pivotal in our personal battle with these malevolent forces. Fate loves irony!

Anyway, if any of these topics resonate, I think you'll appreciate the episode. It's also less demanding on your time than the Lex marathon from last summer, and you'll only be asked for an hour and a half of your time. Enjoy!

Wolves, sheep, and gypsies

2026-07-22 04:02:31

In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as many as 80 by the end of 2024, and probably close to a hundred today.

At first glance, this is a heartwarming story. The wolf, in the abstract, is a majestic creature. It's great to see a species return after a few centuries of absence. You don't have to be a vegan hippie to find that appealing. But it's still a wolf! There's a reason why the last known wolf in Denmark didn't just wander off, but was shot dead in 1813.

Because as the number of wolves has been rising sharply every year since 2021, so too has the number of dead sheep. In 2021, it was 78, then in the years that followed, it was 162, 336, 521, and last year, it was 1,285! But the official line is still that shooting a wolf without a special permit is strictly prohibited because they're an endangered species, so maybe sheep herders could just try some more fences?

You don't have to be a statistician to see the problem here. When you have a surging wolf population, you'll have the rate of dead sheep following suit. If the only answer to the situation is "maybe try some more fences?", you're going to get more of what you already have: an out-of-control population that's an increasing risk to sheep, livestock, and potentially humans too.

This is the most basic consequence of inaction in the face of a growing threat: the problem just gets worse.

Cue the gypsies in Copenhagen, and their increasingly brazen behavior, after the city legalized overnight sleeping in parks and other green areas last year. Because "it shouldn't be illegal to be homeless", so the police refuses to act.

This has predictably led to these foreign vagrants setting up camp in the green areas around some of the city's metro stations to the great dismay of neighbors. The vagrants are literally shitting in the bushes, which obviously stinks, and the area isn't made any more inviting by the open-fire cooking that's also going on.

Copenhagen is the Danish capital. It's repeatedly been named the safest city in the world in recent years. Partly because it didn't tolerate vagrants and homeless people taking over public spaces (as has happened in so many American cities). Previously, police would tell someone they couldn't sleep or camp in the city, and they could go to one of the city-run shelters. But now that this is considered too cruel(?!), the native inhabitants of the city instead have to deal with literal shit on their way to the metro.

These are two situations cut from the same cloth of ideology. Whether it's wolves or gypsies, you can't just let the problems get out of hand. You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.

When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.

Three sacred cows that must die so Europe can live

2026-07-17 03:15:59

The decline of Europe is not inevitable, despite how much Americans love to joke/proclaim that the continent is doomed to become an open-air museum. Sure, it's possible that things have to get worse before they get better, but believing that "it's over" is just loser talk. It's never over, but the old world also won't recover by itself.

So here's my pithy prescription for how Europe can find its way back to The Good Times.

#1 End mass migration

No single issue has cost Europe more than mass immigration when you add up the political, social, and economic consequences. You can't save the continent's declining birth rate, growing retiree burden, or even economy as a whole by importing millions of people from a culturally incompatible third world.

I can forgive the original architects of this disaster with the goodwill you should always allow those who dare dream about the future. If you were nurtured on the delusion of blank-slatism, it wasn't much of a stretch to believe the theory that integration and assimilation would correct all immigration ills in a generation or two.

But now that it hasn't, and the evidence is overwhelming that it won't, it's imperative that we collectively update our priors. To some of Europe's credit, this is already happening in places like Sweden, which has been on a fast track to copy many of the restrictive Danish ideas on immigration. But it's far, far from enough.

Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there.

#2 Drop climate austerity

This year has given us yet another installment of the old air-conditioning diaries. Tens of thousands of people die needlessly in Europe every year from something as simple as summer (more than the number of Americans who are killed by guns every year!). The climate catastrophizers have somehow married themselves to the moral argument that air conditioning in itself is a sin (because it uses ENERGY!), and the death of the old and the poor is a simple sacrifice they're willing to make. It's as callous as it is retarded.

But the fight over air conditioning is downstream from the larger delusion about Europe's role in climate change. Setting aside how much of global warming is due to man-made causes, the reality is that Europe is irrelevant to the equation either way. Just 6% of global emissions originate there. So even if the nirvana of net zero could be achieved, it would change nothing, yet cost the continent everything.

Behind this climate hysteria is an even deeper delusion, though: that degrowth will deliver us all from the sins of modernity. That energy use in and of itself is suspect. That salvation will be delivered through abstinence. It's all nonsense.

Europe can't be a competitive part of the global economy if its energy costs are several times those of its commercial counterparts. And if you combine uncompetitive industries with a naive free-trade posture toward the likes of China, you'll not only get a dirtier planet, but also a hollowed-out economic bloc.

#3 Stop fighting success

The best part of the American ethos is the belief that we can build our way out of anything. Behind China on chips and fabs? Let's build. Challenged by BYD? Let's build. Catch a glimpse of a future massively accelerated by AI? LET'S BUILD.

Europe needs to shamelessly copy this aspect of the American ethos. It might not be able to match those crazy dreamers across the Atlantic, but it can give them a much, much better run for their money than it does today.

This is the part that the European establishment already acknowledged with the Draghi report. This is what the seeds of promise from the Europe Inc initiative need to grow. But we need much more, much faster.

And a big part of that is making peace with success. I know, this is perhaps the hardest ask of all. A generational skepticism of capitalism and the institutional inertia that supports it means we probably need a deeper crisis before the ship can be turned around. But Germany is on a fast track to deliver a sequel to the economic dismantling of Britain, so perhaps that example can provide the ignition.

Now do it all at once

This pithy prescription is not meant to be applied sequentially. First we fix this, then we fix that. No, we have to fix all of it at once: remigration, energization, and entrepreneurialism.

It's all interconnected, but that actually makes the whole endeavor easier to pull off, not harder. Momentum in one area will feed momentum in the others. Europeans can rediscover their roots, their ancestry, their ingenuity, and choose to channel all those healthy national feelings toward a grand revival.

But first, we need to sacrifice these holy cows and prepare the feast. How is next Thursday for you?

Dell is on a roll with the XPS

2026-07-15 06:04:28

We've been buying servers from Dell since the 2000s at 37signals, but I was never too impressed with their personal computers. They either felt cheap or enterprisey to me. Like they were made exclusively for people who are handed standard-issue laptops by corporate, and not something discerning techies would buy with their own money. But the new XPS line has completely changed my perception.

I've now spent several months with the 2026 XPS 14 and 16, and last week I added the MacBook Neo-fighting XPS 13, and all I can say is that these machines are fantastic! Great chips, great screens, great build quality. Superb packages.

Which is very satisfying to see because there are few American business leaders I respect more than Michael Dell. He's been running his company for over forty years now, and he's still calling the shots! So to see the company pull a turnaround like this, so many years into its run, is very inspiring.

I've written about the XPS 14 before, and as I noted back in April, a good portion of the credit for these new Dell machines being really good belongs to Intel. The 18A process is paying big dividends for both companies (and the rest of the PC makers).

But Dell could still have stuck these chips into forgettable machines, and I wouldn't have had any interest. In fact, they did! Just last year, for the 2025 model year, they shipped new XPS machines with awful capacitive-touch function and esc keys. Two years after Apple had finally thrown in the towel on the ill-fated Touch Bar on their MacBooks!

Dell also killed the XPS branding last year, and went with the truly uninspired Plus/Premium/Pro copycat branding. Like some cheap Chinese knockoff. It was embarrassing, to be honest.

But unlike Apple, which introduced that cursed Touch Bar back in 2016, and then crammed it down everyone's throat for seven long years, Dell rebooted this nonsense almost immediately. Gave us back real function and esc keys, and revived the XPS branding.

You could argue that they should have learned from Apple's mistakes to avoid their own, but the next best thing is surely a quick reversal. And what a reversal it's been.

As I said, I've spent months using an XPS 14 as my main machine. It's been so good I even gave up on using a dedicated desktop machine. Now I just run everything off the XPS 14, connected to an Apple XDR 6K 32" (nobody has yet managed to beat this, and I've owned it for years). It's a great, simple setup.

The XPS 14 is an expensive machine, though. Not more so than its direct competitors, but still, at $2,799 for the 358H/32GB/1TB/OLED unit, it's a lot. I'd spend that in a heartbeat, but not everyone is going to drop that kind of cash on a laptop. Especially if they already have a powerful desktop.

That's where the new XPS 13 comes in. It's part of the PC industry's answer to Apple's new MacBook Neo, which analysts all thought would catch the other side flat-footed. Well, surprise, it didn't! Apple charges $699 for an 8GB RAM/256GB SSD Neo, whereas Dell wants $699 for 8GB RAM/512GB SSD, and even offers a 16GB RAM/512GB SSD version for $899 (there's no RAM upgrade possible for the Neo).

But matching Apple on specs and price wasn't the surprise; it was besting them with a nicer screen and keyboard, and meeting them on build quality. The XPS 13 has a great 120Hz screen (something you don't even get on a MacBook Air at twice the money!), a superb keyboard w/ backlighting (also missing on the Neo!), and weighs 20% less at just 1 kg with every bit as nice an aluminum chassis.

Now I'd forgive anyone their skepticism about 8GB RAM and Windows. Microsoft isn't exactly known for creating a responsive operating system on modest specs these days, but who cares, we have Linux!

Of course, I've been running Omarchy on this thing for the past week, and it's frankly fantastic. As long as you understand the limitations! The Intel Wildcat CPU uses the same performance cores as the full Panther Lake chip, so single-threaded snappiness is all there, but it only has two of those, and then another four low-powered cores. So six total, but not a mix that's conducive to running big multi-core workloads, like local CI.

This is where the XPS 13 meets the moment. As the agent craze has been taking over software development, you might have seen any of the many memes about half-cracked laptops, just so the agents won't halt with a closed lid. The obvious answer is of course to run these agents off a home server in the closet, connect them to something as slim and light as an XPS 13 over Tailscale, and then control it all over SSH.

Used like this, you get a machine that runs a browser as fast as anything on the PC (thanks to those full-speed performance cores) while costing a fraction of a new top-spec machine, and having better close-the-lid ergonomics. Win-win-hurray.

When I posted my enthusiasm on X about this new XPS 13, I got at least three replies with "Is this an ad???". No. This is not an ad. I bought the XPS 13 with my own money, and frankly, you couldn't pay me any sum to use a laptop I didn't like. I did try Dell's laptops a few years back, didn't like what I saw, and ended up spending a few years using Framework computers instead (they're still great too).

I'm simply excited that the PC isn't giving up without a fight. That Linux has been on a run among early adopters. That companies like Intel and Dell are here to keep Apple honest. Competition is great. It was Apple's M chips that rejuvenated the laptop market, and they held a supreme lead for years. So it's lovely to see Intel, Dell, and others actually being ready to meet the challenge from the low-cost Neo right out of the gate.

So I tip my hat, once again, to Michael Dell. Forty-plus years at the helm, not too proud to pivot quickly, and now the maker of my favorite Linux laptops. Well done, sir.

The will to power will return

2026-07-13 02:46:19

In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity.

Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power?

A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times (Les Trente Glorieuses), good times create weak men (The End of History), weak men create hard times (now).

The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis.

It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment.

But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response.

And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition.

The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline.

We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.

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