Weekend Briefing No. 632
Brain Fry -- The Military’s AI Problem -- What Silicon Valley Rewards
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
9 — Raccoons in a UBC study kept solving all nine mechanisms of a custom puzzle box even after eating the only marshmallow inside, revealing the animals are driven by curiosity and information-seeking, not just hunger.
100,000 — Households earning $100,000 or less now account for just 36% of new vehicle purchases, down from 50–60% earlier this decade, as automakers have nearly tripled the number of models priced above $40,000 while quietly shrinking budget options from 25 models to just 20.
102,700,000,000 — Amazon spent $102.7 billion shipping its own packages in 2025, yet did so more efficiently than ever at 17.5% of sales — raising the question of whether its logistics empire could follow the same path as AWS and eventually open to outside customers.
Brain Fry
The tools built to make you faster are making you slower — not through burnout, but through a different, sharper kind of exhaustion that most workplace surveys aren’t even measuring yet. Oversight is the culprit: the more you’re managing AI rather than using it, the more your brain pays the bill. The key distinction is that burnout is emotional depletion, while this is cognitive — and they respond to opposite interventions; offloading repetitive work to AI reduces burnout, but supervising swarms of agents creates the new strain. Three tools is apparently the cliff edge where productivity peaks and then falls, which means the race to stack more agents on one person is actively destroying the output it’s supposed to maximize. The workers most likely to quit are the heaviest AI users — the exact people companies are betting their AI transformation on. If you’re building workflows, teams, or products around AI, the architecture of human attention is now a design constraint, not an afterthought. Harvard Business Review (7 minutes)
The Military’s AI Problem
The U.S. military had AI from a single vendor baked into its most sensitive combat commands — CENTCOM, INDOPACOM, SOUTHCOM — under terms of service that could have shut the system off mid-operation if a general crossed a contractual line. A private company’s model “constitution” was, in practice, sitting inside the chain of command, and nobody noticed until a new administration read the contracts. The vendor-lock wasn’t just a procurement failure; it meant that someone’s corporate ethics policy had veto power over lawful military operations approved by Congress and the Executive branch — a democratic legitimacy problem dressed up as a software agreement. When that same vendor quietly asked whether their product was used in a successful special operations raid, it clarified the stakes faster than any policy memo could. If AI becomes infrastructure the way telecommunications did, whoever writes the model’s values writes the rules — and right now, that’s not voters. A16Z (5 minutes)
What Silicon Valley Rewards
Roy Lee built a multimillion-dollar company around a principle he personally finds unbearable. The founder of Cluely, who admits to an “indescribable fury” when anyone tells him what to do, has staked his career on software that feeds people their words, thoughts, and actions in real time. His viral blind-date ad captures the irony perfectly: a tool designed for the highly agentic, sold to people who can’t get through a date without being told what to say. Silicon Valley’s new meritocracy doesn’t reward intelligence, expertise, or craft. it rewards the specific personality trait of just doing things, regardless of whether those things are good, useful, or even functional. Cluely routinely crashed during its own demo. Roy’s deeper contradiction, though, is loneliness dressed up as dominance. Beneath the protein bars, the minimalist bedroom, and the fratty bravado is someone who spent a year alone in his childhood room after Harvard rescinded his offer, and who walked up to strangers asking them to start companies with him because everyone else said no. He wanted friends. He built the most despised startup in San Francisco instead. Harper’s Magazine (19 minutes)
Antarctica’s Gravitational Sinkhole
East Antarctica has the weakest gravity on Earth, which is strange because it’s also one of the highest-elevation regions on Earth — more mass should mean more gravity, but the math runs the other way here. What’s underneath matters more than what’s on top: when cold, dense mantle material sank and warmer, lighter material rose in its place, it effectively hollowed out the gravitational pull of the entire region from below. This process began at least 70 million years ago and is still evolving — the same mantle convection that punched this gravitational hole also coincided with Antarctica freezing over 30 million years ago, which means the forces shaping sea levels and ice sheets aren’t just climate, they’re geological in ways we’re only beginning to map. If you’re modeling sea level rise and you’re not accounting for a gravity anomaly the size of a continent, your model has a hole in it. Popular Mechanics (5 minutes)
European Regulatory Drag
European car companies didn’t lose to Tesla because of energy prices, taxes, or a shortage of engineers — they lost because firing someone in Germany costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary, and in Spain, 62. When failure is that expensive, you stop making bets that might fail. That’s the knife in the argument: Europe’s labor protections don’t just raise costs, they rewire what kinds of businesses get built. Innovative jobs are risky jobs, so companies rationally migrate toward slow, incremental work — perfecting combustion engines year after year — and away from the messy, discontinuous leaps that produce Teslas or Waymos. The problem isn’t unemployment; it’s that the jobs that exist are the wrong ones. Denmark already solved this. Employers can hire and fire freely, while the government funds generous retraining and two years of near-full income replacement — protecting the worker, not the job. If you’re building something today, the implication is sharp: the institutional environment shapes which risks are even thinkable, and Europe has quietly made whole categories of ambition unaffordable. Work In Progress (24 minutes)
Another Layer of Abstraction
Coding has always been a story of abstraction — each generation automating away what the previous one sweated over — and the current moment is just the latest layer, except this one abstracts away the code itself, leaving developers to describe intent in plain English while agents handle the rest. The insight with real leverage: AI didn’t kill coding, it promoted it. The work that remains is architecture, judgment, and knowing what “good” looks like — which means the people who can’t yet judge (junior developers who never learned to write) are the ones actually exposed, while veterans discover they’re more productive than ever. The Jevons paradox swallows the anxiety whole: when software gets cheaper to produce, the world orders more of it, not less. If you’re building something today, the practical edge isn’t writing faster — it’s knowing when the agent is wrong, which requires the fluency you can only get by having once done it the hard way. New York Times (20 minutes)
Friction Is The Feature
Only one in three American students are genuinely engaged in school — and that number hasn’t moved in a decade, which means AI didn’t cause this problem, it just made it impossible to ignore. The reframe worth keeping: the “friction” of learning — sitting with confusion, pushing through difficulty, working something out yourself — isn’t a design flaw that better tools should eliminate. It’s the mechanism by which agency gets built, and agency is precisely what neither passive students nor AI assistants currently have. Students who learn to outsource thinking don’t just get worse at the subject; they get worse at wanting to learn anything. If you’re building educational tools or managing teams of young people, the uncomfortable implication is that reducing effort isn’t a feature — it’s the thing you’re selling that does the most damage. After Babel (8 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
The most important thing in life is to be uncomfortable. The person who never feels frustrated is the person who never tries anything hard enough. -Nassim Taleb