Weekend Briefing No. 641
Sparta on the Potomac -- AI Is Making Devs Dumber -- The Doomsday Organism
Welcome to the weekend.
Thanks to everybody who came out to the Weekend Briefing happy hour in San Francisco this week. It was a blast hanging out with y’all.
Prime Numbers
71 — A new Gallup survey found 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their area — a higher share than the 53% who oppose nuclear power plants nearby — driven largely by concerns over energy and water consumption.
83 — The UK’s landmark generational smoking ban is backed by data showing 83% of smokers worldwide started between ages 14 and 25 — making early intervention the most powerful lever for eliminating tobacco use entirely
2,304 — After Burning Man 2025, cleanup crews sweeping 3,800 acres found 2,304 lag bolts — the single biggest debris category — left behind by the 70,000 attendees who anchored tents and art installations into the playa dust.
Sparta on the Potomac
Two nuclear-armed superpowers sat down in Beijing this week, and China’s leader opened with a history lesson from 431 BC. The Thucydides Trap, a concept named after the ancient Greek historian, holds that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, war becomes nearly inevitable, just as Athens and Sparta’s rivalry eventually exploded into decades of bloody conflict. Xi used the reference as both a warning and an olive branch, cautioning that mishandling Taiwan could push the two nations into “conflict,” while also suggesting that China’s rise and America’s renewal don’t have to be a zero-sum game. Whether the classical allusion landed as diplomacy or provocation may depend entirely on which side of the Pacific you’re reading it from. The Guardian (4 minutes)
AI Is Making Devs Dumber
Tech executives are racing to brag about how much of their code is now AI-generated, with Google claiming 75 percent, Microsoft targeting 95 percent by 2030, and Anthropic reporting 90 percent across most of its teams, but the developers actually writing that code tell a much darker story. On forums like Reddit and Hacker News, programmers report that AI tools are slower and more frustrating to use than advertised, because they spend more time auditing and fixing AI output than they would have spent just writing the code themselves. Worse, many say they’re actively de-skilling, losing the ability to think through hard problems independently because the muscle goes unused, while simultaneously inheriting massive piles of unreviable, AI-generated tech debt. The productivity boom that was supposed to shorten work weeks and improve products has mostly just given executives cover for sweeping layoffs at Meta, Microsoft, and Snap. 404 Media (5 minutes)
The Doomsday Organism
Some of the same scientists who spent years trying to build mirror life, a synthetic bacteria with a molecular structure opposite to every living thing on Earth, are now the loudest voices demanding it never be created. Because life evolved in one chiral direction, a mirrored organism would be essentially invisible to immune systems, indigestible by predators, and resistant to the enzymes that break down foreign substances, meaning nothing in nature’s arsenal could stop it from replicating indefinitely. It wouldn’t need to be toxic to be catastrophic: multiplying unchecked in soil, oceans, and the bloodstreams of every plant and animal on Earth, it could quietly crowd out the biological processes that underpin food chains and ecosystems. Thirty-eight prominent scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have called for a halt, and the UN has echoed their alarm, but the harder problem may be philosophical: once you understand that some knowledge can’t be unlearned, you have to decide whether to stop looking before you find it. Noema (25 minutes)
Bourbon’s Brutal Hangover
Kentucky is sitting on 16.1 million barrels of bourbon, the largest reserve in history, enough to last a decade, and almost nobody saw it coming. The pandemic sent Americans on a spirits-buying binge that convinced private equity, banks, and distillers large and small to pour money into new capacity, but demand peaked in 2022 and has been sliding ever since, squeezed by inflation, GLP-1 drugs, the sober-curious movement, cannabis competition, and Trump’s trade war dampening exports. Jim Beam’s flagship still has been idle since January and won’t restart until at least 2027, barrel prices have cratered from $285 to $50, Brown-Forman is cutting 12 percent of its workforce, and Stoli’s Kentucky Owl venture ended in bankruptcy court. The bust is a clean case study in how quickly a “lifestyle boom” industry can overcorrect when it mistakes a pandemic anomaly for a permanent trend. WSJ (5 minutes)
Quakers Had It Right
Long before developmental psychologists were publishing studies on intrinsic motivation and restorative discipline, Quakers were raising kids according to principles that happen to map almost perfectly onto what modern research now recommends. The faith’s core testimonies, grouped under the acronym SPICES (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship), align with findings on everything from reducing materialism to building empathy to the power of positive reinforcement over punishment. A Quaker mom praising her daughter for honesty after a microwave fire, rather than punishing her for starting it, turns out to be textbook behavioral science. The deeper implication is that some of the most rigorously evidence-based parenting advice isn’t new at all, it’s nearly 375 years old and has been quietly practiced in meetinghouses the whole time. The Atlantic (6 minutes)
Romance Is Not a Lottery
The internet has convinced a generation of young men that dating is a rigged game where only a handful of genetically blessed, high-status “Chads” attract women, but the actual survey data says otherwise: sexlessness rates are nearly identical for young men and women, most people are monogamous with one partner in a given year, and the inequality on dating apps is far smaller than incel forums claim. Economist Noah Smith argues that most men fail at dating not because they’re undesirable, but because they’ve either been blackpilled into not trying or have never clearly thought about what they actually want, and that the three things women genuinely want from men, companionship, good sex, and a reliable partner for raising kids, are things any ordinary guy can provide. His most practical advice is deceptively simple: use the word “date” when you ask someone out, because it removes ambiguity, bypasses the friend zone, and forces a quick, honest answer. The bigger point is that fringe online ideologies about romance thrive precisely because they give lonely people a coherent explanation for their pain, but the explanation is empirically wrong, and believing it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Noahpinion (12 minutes)
Why We Cry for Fun
It seems contradictory that people who dread sadness in real life will voluntarily queue up a breakup playlist or watch a film they know will wreck them, but new research from Yale suggests the answer lies in something called appropriation: when we label an experience as “art,” it gives us implicit permission to experience someone else’s emotions as our own. In a series of experiments, participants consistently liked identical sad texts more when told they were song lyrics or a screenplay than when told they were a diary entry or a tweet, and the effect wasn’t driven by fiction making things feel safer, in fact people liked sad art more when they believed the emotions described were real. The mechanism seems to be connection: hearing Nick Cave sing about addiction or Taylor Swift sing about heartbreak lets us feel that someone else has already mapped our inner terrain, and that sense of being understood is genuinely comforting. Far from being a red flag, reaching for a sad movie when you’re feeling low may be one of the healthier things you can do. Psyche (6 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
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Is that hipster lorem ipsum I spy at the end?! Love it!