Weekend Briefing No. 619
AI Cult Violence -- Laws of Media -- The Blue Book Burglers
Welcome to the weekend.
If you’re looking for Christmas tunes this week, check out my Ultimate Christmas Playlist.
Prime Numbers
3,000 — Climate models predict the world will lose 3,000 glaciers annually by 2040 (up from 1,000 per year currently) even if countries meet emission targets, threatening water supplies for 2 billion people who depend on mountain snow and ice melt.
326 — Louisiana waived $3.3 billion in sales taxes (enough to build 33 high schools or pay every public school teacher for a year) to attract Meta’s Hyperion data center, which will create just 326 permanent jobs after construction ends.
20 — Songs released after 1990 take an average of 20 years to enter the classic rock canon, according to analysis of Q104.3’s annual countdown, as the genre slowly shifts forward with 1990s songs growing from 6.3% of the list in 2005 to 11.2% in 2025.
AI Cult Violence
A group of tech-savvy effective altruists convinced they alone could prevent humanity’s extinction by artificial intelligence descended into a years-long spree of murders, attempted murders, and disappearances—all while insisting they were the rational ones. The story tracks from masked protests at a Bay Area retreat center to stabbing attacks, shootouts with federal agents, and the execution-style murder of a key witness, with the group’s leader faking her own drowning to evade capture before resurfacing armed in a Maryland box truck. What makes this chilling isn’t just the body count (at least six dead, two missing, countless traumatized), but how a philosophy designed to save all sentient life became justification for eliminating anyone who got in the way—and how the broader rationalist community struggled to recognize the danger until it was far too late, revealing the thin line between believing you can optimize the world and believing you have permission to destroy anyone who disagrees. Wired (7 minutes)
Laws of Media
Marshall McLuhan thought his greatest achievement wasn’t “the medium is the message”—it was discovering that every human invention, from safety pins to AI, follows the same four-part pattern. Any technology enhances something (gloves protect hands), obsolesces something (the iPhone killed the house as a fixed home base), retrieves something from the past (highways brought back rivers as transportation routes), and reverses when pushed too far (information overload paralyzing decision-making instead of enabling it).This isn’t just pattern recognition—it’s predictability. If you know these four things will happen with any new technology, you can anticipate effects before they become “unforeseen consequences,” which means you can actually build or invest with your eyes open instead of being reshaped by forces you didn’t notice. a16z (7 minutes)
The Blue Book Burglars
Ray Flynn robbed roughly 500 homes belonging to America’s wealthiest families by treating the Social Register—an exclusive directory of high society—as a shopping catalog, cherry-picking estates filled with obscure eighteenth-century paintings small enough to fit in a briefcase and silver services worth tens of thousands. The brilliance wasn’t just the audacity (calling homes fifty times to confirm they were empty, then cutting phone lines to trigger alarms and watch police leave), but Flynn’s self-taught connoisseurship: over years of work, he trained his eye to spot the exact kind of marketable-but-not-famous art his fence wanted, becoming possibly the hardest-working art thief in American history—active from 1965 to 2010, responsible for $40 million in losses, and spending less time in prison than most one-time offenders. What matters for anyone building systems of trust or security: the most dangerous threats aren’t the dramatic museum heists that make headlines, but the patient professionals who study your patterns, exploit your assumptions about safety, and operate just below the threshold where anyone notices there’s even a problem. Atavist Magazine (7 minutes)
The Gender Admissions Gap
Elite colleges now accept male applicants at rates 60% higher than equally qualified women—at Brown, men had a 7% admission rate while women faced 4.4%—and administrators openly admit they’re doing it to maintain “gender balance” on campus. The perverse logic: universities fear that if they admitted purely on merit, their campuses would become 60-70% female (reflecting how women now dominate academic performance at every level), which might hurt their “yield rate” since applicants supposedly prefer gender parity for dating purposes. This matters because we’ve created a quiet system where institutions publicly committed to equality are systematically discriminating against their best applicants, using the exact same “holistic admissions” machinery that was just ruled unconstitutional for race—except this version is perfectly legal due to Title IX carve-outs, operates in near-total secrecy (schools won’t release comparative SAT data by gender), and solves nothing at scale since boosting male enrollment at Harvard just means worse ratios at state schools while doing nothing to address why boys are genuinely falling behind in K-12 education. Yascha Mounk (7 minutes)
America’s Civic Downgrade
The U.S. just dropped from “Narrowed” to “Obstructed” in global civic freedom rankings—the same category as Hungary and Brazil—after deploying 700 Marines to police immigration protests, arresting journalists covering demonstrations, revoking NPR/PBS funding while launching state media, and using terrorism accusations to investigate pro-Palestine campus groups. What’s remarkable isn’t that any single action crosses into authoritarianism (plenty of democracies struggle with protest policing or campus speech), but the systematic pattern: military deployment against peaceful gatherings, financial punishment of critical media, visa weaponization against foreign academics, and the speed of deterioration—a six-point drop in one year following Trump’s return, joining 14 other countries downgraded in 2025. This matters because civic space erosion follows predictable trajectories, and the U.S. is now exhibiting the institutional playbook (control media, militarize dissent, exploit emergency powers, target vulnerable communities) that typically precedes democratic backsliding—a trajectory that’s especially dangerous when it happens in a country other democracies have historically used as a reference point for their own freedoms. Civicus (7 minutes)
The Toaster Camera
Steve Sasson built the first handheld digital camera at Kodak in 1975 by stealing parts from supply bins—a movie camera lens, a $12 voltmeter, a cassette deck—creating an 8-pound contraption that took 23 seconds to save a single 0.01-megapixel black-and-white image to tape, and when he demonstrated it to executives asking “why would anyone want this?”, he predicted it would take 15-20 years to match cheap film quality (it took exactly 18). The tragedy wasn’t that Kodak ignored the invention—they patented it and earned billions in licensing—but that Sasson had arrived too early: digital photography needed personal computers, the internet, and Moore’s law to catch up before consumers would trade instant film for waiting half a minute to see a grainy face on a TV screen. What matters for anyone building transformative technology: being right about the future means nothing if the infrastructure to support your vision doesn’t exist yet, and the people asking “why would anyone want this?” often aren’t wrong at the time they’re asking—they’re just measuring your prototype against today’s alternative rather than tomorrow’s possibility. BBC (7 minutes)
Hibernation Works
We expect ourselves to maintain August energy in December, but chronobiology shows our hormones, sleep patterns, and motivation naturally shift with the seasons—a mismatch that leaves us exhausted and guilty for feeling half-speed. The insight isn’t that you should power through; it’s that rest is when your brain does its most important work, consolidating memories and repairing stress damage while you think you’re doing nothing. For builders, this means the foundation for your next sprint gets built during the downshift, not despite it. Create a corner for intentional rest, cut non-essential commitments, and choose presence over performance—because operating at 100% year-round doesn’t make you productive, it makes you brittle. Ness Labs (4 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
Maybe Christmas (he thought) doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more. - The Grinch