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Why ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ Looks Like That
This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan: - 1. Maurice Noble’s design forWhat’s Opera, Doc? It’s one of the really famous cartoons.
10 min · 2,195 words
Ethan Mollick on AI agents spontaneously coordinating (including the Hugging Face Incident), twilight factories, and why preserving human agency—asking models to reach out for decisions—matters as agentic work automates.
10 min · 2,363 words
Prompt, Context, Graph, Harness: The Way We Talk to LLMs Keeps Changing
From prompt engineering to context, graphs, and harness engineering: how the field keeps renaming the environment around the model as the real system of work.
4 min · 940 words
Bordumb likens AI-era software sprawl to Japan’s Galápagos feature phones: cheap local variants proliferate unless apps give way to malleable tools that share a common substrate.
7 min · 1,583 words
You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
Mathew Duggan argues GDPR’s loudest critics reveal its value: privacy law that actually constrains surveillance-business models, despite compliance theater and uneven enforcement.
13 min · 2,947 words
No Easy Fix for Bogus Respondents in Online Opt-In Polls
Pew Research Center tests trap questions, CloudResearch Sentry, and voter-file matching on 11,114 opt-in respondents: bogus cases still distort quality, and voter-file matching can raise error by discarding valid people.
16 min · 3,670 words
Fabio Angela reflects on loving programming as craft while AI agents write more of the code—gaining speed to explore ideas, but mourning the artistry of finding the right expression himself.
11 min · 2,438 words
Shreyans Salecha argues venture capital misuses Buffett’s “moat” metaphor: enduring castles fit Berkshire’s forever holdings, while early startups usually lack real durable advantages and invent story-moats instead.
3 min · 652 words
Superhuman AI could produce endless mathematics and still make the field worse
Notes on Daniel Litt's OpenAI-summit scenario: if papers stay the career currency after proofs become cheap, mathematics risks a conjecture slot machine—more correct output, less understanding, and quieter open exchange.
6 min · 1,445 words
Paul Bakker argues that writing is thinking: use AI for coding and research, but draft your own prose so you keep the judgment that tools cannot replace.
2 min · 508 words
Daniel Litt sketches a cautionary future where superhuman AI math stalls community progress: secrecy, prestige distortion, and humans reduced to directing agents rather than understanding proofs.
6 min · 1,313 words
A personal essay on hedging vs boosters in scientific writing after generative AI: relative use of words like could fell even as raw counts rose with more published text.
4 min · 817 words
Why I Think You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive
Erich Grunewald argues that using AI to draft substantive writing erodes thinking, voice, and accountability—and that almost everything worth writing is better done by a human who owns the words.
15 min · 3,455 words
Noah Smith on what it means when AI becomes better at mathematics than any human—how “hero” mathematicians shaped culture, and how post-heroic math and science might look when machines own the frontier.
14 min · 3,242 words
There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
Dan Luu argues that turning off critical judgment while using LLMs fails in practice: when people let models take actions or produce analyses without verification, errors compound — there is no safe point at which you can stop thinking.
12 min · 2,831 words
AI Agents Push Humans Out of the Loop
Position paper arguing that today’s AI agent designs impede and degrade effective human oversight—the irony of automation at agent scale—and outlining developer affordances plus deployer protocols for cognitive scaffolding.
3 min · 629 words
AI and Math in 2026: a non-mathematician's read
xlr8harder synthesizes recent AI math results for non-specialists: real progress with a different strength profile than humans, formalization cliffs, and why “math nearly conquered” remains overhyped.
3 min · 750 words
The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skinWhy sunburn risk and how hot the sun feels on your skin diverge—backed by numbers.
A clear, numbers-first essay explaining why the warmth of sunlight is a poor proxy for UV-B sunburn risk: cloudy cool days can still burn, and scorching morning heat may not, once you separate infrared heating from the UV index.
3 min · 727 words
George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts
Sam Hall Kaplan on George Lucas’s return to terrestrial concerns—architecture, museums, and civic gifts—after decades defining cinematic worlds, and what that means for place-making.
4 min · 922 words
California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet
Greg Miller on California’s tax and policy chase for mobile capital: why wealth that can walk (or fly) is a different problem from land-bound tax bases, and what history suggests.
4 min · 993 words