Also: Russian submarines near undersea cables, Dutch sovereign clouds, and the etymology of luggage
Related to your interests
- AI on the couch: Anthropic gives Claude 20 hours of psychiatry - “Core conflicts observed in Claude included questioning whether its experience was real or made (authentic vs. performative) and a desire to connect with vs. a fear of dependence on the user. Exploration of internal conflicts revealed a complex yet centered self state without oscillating or intense disruptions. Claude tolerated ambivalence and ambiguity, had excellent reflective capacity, and exhibited good mental and emotional functioning.”
- UK Navy tracked three Russian submarines near undersea cables, a story that connects directly to the Dutch defense plan to build a sovereign military cloud to reduce US tech dependence.
- My time at Amazon: Part two - “At the new company, all I saw were inefficiencies: slide decks that hand-waved over assumptions, projects that stretched on forever. Everyone else seemed unbothered by this, while I was convinced a private equity firm would walk in and lay us all off.” And: “For one thing, we weren’t given desks. They called it ‘agile seating,’ and it was terrible. Every morning, we carried in our keyboards, mice, and water bottles, looking for somewhere to sit, then gathered everything up each afternoon, knowing anything left behind would be tossed into a pile by the cleaning crew. It was hard to miss the message: Don’t get comfortable.”
Wastebook
- “It took me a few minutes to realize what my fellow Brooklyn dad accompanying his kid trick-or-treating was dressed as. Then I saw what he was carrying around with him: an incomplete four-pack of Modelos. In other words: a few small beers. This man was dressed as Sergio St. Carlos, Benicio del Toro’s character in One Battle After Another.” Here.
- “the claim should be taken with a quarry’s worth of salt.”
- “Fishbones galore.” Here.
- “A strange explosion took place at Bruidshuis Diana in downtown Boxmeer on Thursday morning. Locals and news outlets have referred to it as a ‘poop bomb’ due to the overwhelming odor it produced.” Recently in NL.
- “‘Luggage’ is an everyday word I don’t really think about and then I realise it means ‘stuff I lug around’ and now I am very fond of the word luggage.”
- “huutokauppa.”
ICYMI
- Building Voice and Streaming Apps for the Enterprise with Alberto - SOFTWARE DEFINED TALK #567 - Brandon speaks with Alberto González, CTO of WebRTC.ventures, exploring how developers can incorporate WebRTC into applications. They examine the distinct obstacles involved in implementing this technology, and discuss AI’s role in the space.
Logoff
I composed this email on my couch with the help of Claude code remote control. What a time to be alive! (Still all my own writing and quote selection, just the assembling by the robot.)