Arthur C. Clarkes first law is: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” His second law is: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to... 1/

"Any Sufficiently Advanced Technological Problem Is Indistinguishable from a Curse": LAUGH OF THE DAY

Clarke’s Third Law has a dark twin: the corollary Arthur C. Clarke declined to write...

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The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer says 94%. The audience says 97%. I liked it too. People I respect like Bret Devereaux, Theo Nash, and Patrick Wyman all read the film as a successful Bloomian “strong misreading”—and then Emily Wilson, who gave us the most celebrated recent Odyssey translation... 1/

Emily Wilson's Inordinate Rage Against Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey" Adaptation Seems Worth a Note: HUMANITIES

Where is all the energy here coming from? It feels like a speed-run through every criticism anyone with an axe to grind might conceivably think of...

braddelong.substack.com

My view: The most ambitious thing SubStack could do right now is stop pushing forward. But given who is running and funding the place, that is unlikely. Scott Carney says the platform is collapsing. I say it is more likely that it has reached the limit of its supply lines—and that the cure is... 1/

Have I Picked the Wrong Week to Ponder Whether to "Relaunch" My SubStack?

To speak in a metaphorical riddle: Has SubStack now arrived at Smolensk, and is it 1812? And thus would there be any wisdom in now attaching myself more firmly to this enterprise?

braddelong.substack.com

I would not say “on the brink”, quite. But I think the text of the piece is quite good. Oracle is going to survive: The database business still throws off steady billions. That floor is real. But by the time your bonds are rated BBB-minus, your debt is now your equity, and your equity are now... 1/

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: MIKE BROCK: The House of Ellison is on the Brink

Mike Brock's subheadline: "Everything the world’s briefly richest man built is failing at once"; the worry is that Oracle is in a box: heads, no product anyone will buy; tails, no pricing power...

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Buying a movie studio by not selling but giving away fake pictures. But it is completely unclear just what Ferey thought he was doing. Just what the exit strategy of all this was going to be, other than pump as much money as he could into his own Italian bank accounts and then spend enough of... 1/

CROSSPOST: DAN DAVIES: The MGM Affair

Dan's subheadline: "non è ben trovato, è vero"; that is inverting Giordano Bruno's “se non è vero, è ben trovato...”—"even if it is not true, it is a good story..."; it is a good story, & true...

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Taylor Lorenz doesn’t perform outrage about AI; she itemizes her use of it in SubStack’s new “Model Behavior” series. In her production pipeline AI aggregates research, organizes notes, drafts titles across five models, and runs on a script she wrote with Claude Code. She estimates her income... 1/

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: TAYLOR LORENZ: Model Behavior

The subheadline: "Kicking off an honest series about writers, thinkers, creators, & AI—how a tech journalist works with AI..." Taylor Lorenz has 20 AI tools & fortifies the hill "human-written"...

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Another one of the good things Jim Leach did was to push through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which did not “ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors…. [With] the increased friction of getting your money in and out... 1/

How the Late Former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach Still Lives Rent-Free in the Head of Nate Silver

Leach would have been 84 this year. Former Republican congressman from Iowa who served in the U.S. House from 1977 to 2007. He switched to the Democrats after 1/6—one of few good things he did...

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Silver ought to know better. To say “apart from Iran, most of the Trump-related stories this summer have been boring and dumb… or kinda funny, maybe we’re movin on from him…” is to fly your “I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE LULZ!!!!” flag. It is the very opposite of, you know, being one of the grown-ups... 1/

Josh Marshall's Ire Is Activated by Nate Silver: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY

"Boring and dumb... or kinda funny" ("apart from Iran"). That is Nate Silver's judgment on Donald Trump's actions this summer. Josh Marshall is rightly annoyed. I share that annoyance...

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I fed my own ‘bot’s prose to Pangram/SubStack’s AI detector. it passed the test. Labeling ClaudeFishing to keep AI-slop out of my feed as a higher priority than remembering that toleration is a truce when dealing with NeoNazi misinformation: **SubStack/Pangram is Scanning the SubStack Corpus... 1/

SubStack/Pangram is Scanning the SubStack Corpus for AI-Generated Content, & Labelling It!

Public reason. Or, rather, public non-reason here in 2026, with the rising tide of AI-slop, and attempts to channel it...

braddelong.substack.com

The deep truth on JD Vance is spoken by Noah Smith here: “I will never forget the "Haitians eating cats" lie. I will never let it go. It was so deliberate and monstrous and unprovoked and cruel, and no one has ever apologized for it…. JD Vance even admitted that they lied. What a barbarous act… 1/

CROSSPOST: Lyz Lenz: Who Will You Blame When They [the Haitian Immigrants] Are Gone?

Lyz Lenz "did not intend to come to Springfield, Ohio, the week that temporary protected status (TPS) ended for Haitian immigrants"; Trump is truly an evil, racist monster. And so is JD Vance...

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For two generations, a Soviet enemy forced the North Atlantic right to keep its ugliest strands coalition-respectable, and a booming 1990s economy drowned out the rest. Then the enemy vanished, the boom failed unevenly after 2008, the spark that had been lit by Rothbard, Buchanan, Francis, and... 1/

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: WILLIAM DAVIES: Review of "When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists & the Origins of Trumpism" by John Ganz

Davies's original title is a quote from Murray Rothbard his goal was to "Repeal the 20th Century"; how 1992's losers became 2016-2028's winners; or, a neo-Foucauldian genealogy of MAGA, DOGE, & al...

braddelong.substack.com

My local-agent pipeline burbled along until it announced, confidently, that it had just completed a document it had actually written and emailed to me three weeks earlier. Calling in remote anthropic/claude-opus4:8 with its massive krell-like brain of nvidia chips produced a crisp diagnosis... 1/

The LLM-Generating Machine Underneath the Dining-Room Side-Table Hallucinates Again: MONDAY MAMLMS

The most revealing move was anthropic/claude-opus4:8's own recommended fix: get the LLM out of the loop entirely...

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The Oatmilk Default: A “retired” economist’s field report from the coffeehouse inellectual frontier: **Things Have Gone too Far!: LAUGH OF THE DAY** Is it time to start writing for Bari Weiss's Free Press Substack and start denouncing the woke oatmilk hegemony here at UC Berkeley?... 1/

If the goal were really fighting forced labor, why sort 60 countries into just two flat rates? The uniformity gives the game away, and the courts are likely to notice—and, ultimately, sink this rationale for tariffs. But in the two years it takes to happen, the tariffs will be collected... 1/

A car company by revenue, a rounding error by profit, and a meme by market cap—and with $300,000B of global liquid financial assets, there is an insufficient short-selling kitty to make things consistent: **Tesla Motors: CHART OF THE DAY** A $50 Billion Company Wearing a $1.2 Trillion Magical... 1/

An expansion of the world-economic prosperous core countries from 900 million to 1.3 billion and of peripheral as share of core per capita income from 12% to 24% between 1990 and 2023 were absolutely wonderful things to see. But for the past decade, the relative income gap between core and... 1/

Hormuz closure removed Gulf crude and LNG → emergency stocks were released, pipelines bypassed, and non-OPEC output plugged some of the gap → prices spiked, then partially retreated → but the adjustment happened vai drawdown and rationing, not new durable supply or permanently altered demand... 1/

The Strait of Hormuz Has Now Been Effectively Closed for 4 1/2 Months: CHART OF THE DAY

Via Torsten Slok of Apollo, drawing on Bloomberg and MacroBond. If we can trust these numbers, then the situation is truly dire. If we can trust these numbers, and if a lot of oil has not snuck out...

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Here we are: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν—ándra moi énnepe, moûsa, polýtropon, hòs mála pollàplánchthē, epeì Troíēs hieròn ptolíethron épersen—about the man whose mind and body goes to many places, sing to me, muse, who was so... 1/

Christopher Nolan's Remix of the Story of Odysseus: Humanities Tuesday

As Bret Devereaux says: a remix, not a cover: As Theo Nash says, fusing the Athenian idea of the Sack of Troy as unholy excess with the historical reality of the Late Bronze Dark Age...

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But are these <epoch.ai> assessments real numbers that mean anything? And how could we tell? The apparent slowdown in LLM improvement is exactly what you would expect if the LLMs are at base just emulating internet s***posters. But if the compression = true understanding crowd is right, the... 1/

My view: A deliberately fuzzy AI manifesto looks less like prudence and more like some kind of marketing funnel for one faction’s agenda. But which faction? And for what agenda? I agree with Noah Smith that before we sign up to “steer” AI, we should find out who wants to drive and where they... 1/

CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Why I Didn't Sign the "We Must Act Now" Statement (Yet)

Noah' subheadline: "I'd like to know exactly what the actions are"...

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“AI” truly is potentially poised to liberate us from dehumanizing work—unless the market makes that potential liberation into a dystopian catastrophe for human equity. What I thought back in 2018 the big issues were going to be, with the real danger being not that AI takes all the jobs, but... 1/

A report from the coalface itself: Paolo Perrone of <http://theaiengineer.substack.com/>: “AI”-agents have escaped the Integrated Software Development Environment, vendors have minted their own models, the bills have gone metered—and nobody trusts the resulting software code. We now have all... 1/

CROSSPOST: PAOLO PERRONE: AI Coding Tools: What Changed in the Last 6 Months

Paolo's own subheadline: "A 10-minute update on what shipped, what broke, and what it costs now". From Autocomplete to loose cannons in this truly New Age of "AI" agentic coding tools...

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Isn’t piracy against the law? When the president claims a royal right to tax global commerce over waterways half the world away from America, the rule of law walks the plank: **Can We Call This Anything But Piracy?: TUESDAY CHAOS-MONKEY TRUMPISM** Isn't this piracy? What could make it not... 1/

Can We Call This Anything But Piracy?: TUESDAY CHAOS-MONKEY TRUMPISM

Isn't this piracy? What could make it not piracy, other than a congressional declaration of a war to conquer & annex the Strait of Hormuz to the USA? And isn't piracy not only a bad thing...

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Three months ago, the FOMC—the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee with its 19 participants—was split, with a 50% chance of a half-a-percentage-point cut and a 50% chance of standing pat over the rest of this year. Now it is split between a 50% chance of a half-a-percentage-point... 1/

CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: What Will It Take for the Fed to Hike?

Claudia Sahm's subheadline: "The June FOMC minutes laid out two scenarios, and the committee is split right down the middle on the outlook for inflation". But it is now split in a different way...

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Over and over again I have been told on conferences of the rich and businessy and financial over the past year and a half that Scott Bessent is head and shoulders above everyone else associated with the Trump administration. But Scott Bessent is always the guy whose mental universe is such... 1/

CROSSPOST: ART GOLDHAMMER: The Unbearable Vacuity of the Moment

Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.

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A quarter-century ago back in the High Weblogosphere Summer, I thought the big story was that some of us—those with NYRB subscriptions, fast T‑1 lines, and a taste for “unassigned surfing”—were going to weaponize the internet for learning much faster than others. Boy was I wrong!: **From 2003... 1/

Agentic AI shines on verifiable, testable work—and quietly falls apart when the answer isn’t checkable. “Run and find out” only works when you can quickly and cheaply assess the answer. We don’t have thinking machines; we have very fast runners-who-find-out who we can wire into our workflows—... 1/

A nice chart from Torsten Slok: Financial markets are treating the recent decoupling of oil prices and bond yields as evidence that the Fed’s problem has shifted from headline to core inflation, meaning cheaper oil alone no longer moves expectations about interest-rate cuts: **Financial... 1/

Why is JD Vance trying to make war on American prosperity? Because the Vance-Trump policy agenda he has been one of the principal architects of is, as it was clear from the get-go, a miserable failure in terms of making a middle-class American lifestyle more affordable. It is about distracting... 1/