Weekend Briefing No. 635
The Open Web Returns -- Do Not Disturb -- Training Your Replacement
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
5,270,000 — China exported 5.27 million cars in 2025, fueled by affordable EVs priced below $10,000, up from just 1.08 million in 2020 when it trailed Japan and Germany. American automakers, meanwhile, doubled down on SUVs and trucks that don't sell well overseas, dropping U.S. exports to 1.30 million.
11,600,000,000 — Seven major hotel chains collectively owe their guests $11.6 billion in unredeemed loyalty points, with Marriott alone on the hook for nearly $4 billion to its 271 million Bonvoy members.
21,000,000,000 — Cyberscams looted $21 billion from Americans in 2024, according to the FBI’s annual report, which logged over 1 million complaints — with crypto-related fraud alone accounting for more than half the total losses.
The Open Web Returns
The early web had a magic trick: you could right-click any page, view the source, copy it, and build something new. No permission needed, no terms of service, no template. That spirit died twice, once when CSS and JavaScript made web-building technically complex, and again when social platforms made it pointless to bother. Agentic AI coding tools, the kind that actually write and execute code based on your plain-language description, are reversing both of those deaths at once. The author built a fully functional video conferencing platform in a single Saturday, while also building a fence in his yard, just by describing what he wanted. The deeper shift isn’t about AI replacing developers, it’s about moving the required skill from “write code” to “describe things clearly and precisely,” which happens to be territory that writers, editors, and domain experts already occupy. Techdirt (7 minutes)
Do Not Disturb
Every buzz, ping, and blip from a social media notification interrupts your cognitive processing for roughly seven seconds, and since most people’s phones are within a foot of their body at all times, that adds up fast into a day of spliced attention. A growing group of people have decided the obvious solution is to simply leave their phones on Do Not Disturb permanently, not silencing notifications during meetings or workouts, but as a permanent, default state of existence. The tricky part isn’t the silence itself, it’s the social contract it violates, since most people have quietly agreed to be reachable at all times, and opting out reads as rude until you explain yourself. Tell the people who matter what you’re doing and why, and most of them come around quickly, even if they’re still a little annoyed. Wired (10 minutes)
Training Your Replacement
Laid-off lawyers, history PhDs, and scientists are finding new work in the AI economy, but the job is training AI models to do the work that used to be theirs. Through a company called Mercor, white-collar professionals are recruited via AI-conducted video interviews to produce training data for the very systems that eliminated their roles. One former content marketer described the bitter irony: her job was gone because of ChatGPT, and now she was being invited to make ChatGPT better at the worst version of it. The gig economy has always extracted value from precarious workers, but this new chapter asks them to accelerate their own obsolescence. The Verge (8 minutes)
Bubbles On Command
Most cancer drugs are a form of friendly fire: less than one percent of an injected dose actually reaches the tumor, while the rest circulates through the body damaging healthy organs along the way. Microbubbles, tiny gas-filled spheres about the width of spider silk, offer a radically different approach, traveling through the bloodstream and then bursting on command when hit with a targeted ultrasound pulse. That burst does two things: it releases whatever drug or genetic material the bubble is carrying, and it temporarily forces open biological barriers that would otherwise block treatment entirely, including the blood-brain barrier that makes conditions like Alzheimer’s and brain cancer so notoriously difficult to treat. Early trials in glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer patients are promising, and researchers are exploring uses from dissolving stroke clots at the source to demolishing kidney stones from the inside, a precision medicine approach that could eventually replace the blunt, body-wide chemistry of conventional drug delivery. The Work In Progress Newsletter (6 minutes)
Trust But Verify
Quantum computers have long promised to simulate the physical world more accurately than any classical supercomputer, but there has been a stubborn problem: nobody could confirm whether their outputs were actually correct. Two independent research teams have now done exactly that for the first time, running quantum simulations of exotic magnetic materials and then cross-checking the predictions against real neutron-scattering experiments performed on those same materials in the lab. One team used a Pasqal neutral-atom quantum computer to model a thulium crystal, while the other used an IBM superconducting machine to simulate a copper-fluorine compound, and both matched their experimental data closely enough to validate the approach. The significance goes beyond these two materials: establishing a reliable method for benchmarking quantum simulations against physical reality is the missing scaffold that will allow researchers to trust quantum predictions once these machines start performing calculations that ordinary supercomputers simply cannot check. Nature (8 minutes)
Scarcity ≠ Love
The diamond industry was built on a single, carefully maintained illusion: that scarcity equals love. Lab-grown diamonds, chemically and physically identical to mined ones, now sell for roughly a tenth of the price, and even experienced gemologists can’t tell them apart by sight. In 2015, lab-grown stones were one percent of the market; by 2024 they had reached 20 percent and were pulling natural diamond prices down with them, as buyers increasingly shrug off the mythology of rarity and redirect the savings toward a down payment, a honeymoon, or a bigger stone. The real disruption isn’t the technology, it’s that an entire generation has quietly decided that the story diamonds used to tell, about sacrifice, scarcity, and status, is a story they didn’t ask for and don’t feel obligated to keep telling. Boston (8 minutes)
Holy Sh*t, The Moon
There is no graceful way to write about a photograph this good. On April 6, 2026, the Artemis II crew captured the Moon completely blocking the Sun from lunar orbit, a solar eclipse that lasted nearly 54 minutes of totality, roughly 50 minutes longer than any eclipse ever witnessed from Earth’s surface. From that vantage point, the Moon fills the frame completely, its dark silhouette ringed by the Sun’s corona blazing in every direction, a sight no human being had ever seen from that angle before this crew. NASA’s Flickr account, of all places, is currently hosting some of the most historically significant astronomical photography ever taken, and you should go look at it right now. Kotteke (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
From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.' - Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut