Welcome to the weekend.
My October playlist leans into folk and country, with Noah Kahan, Sam Barber and a pairing of Wynonna with Iron & Wine.
Prime Numbers
323.9 - The average drive-thru took 323.9 seconds to serve a car in QSR’s annual study, while A.I. ordering was five seconds slower than the non-A.I. baseline and produced lower satisfaction.
80 - Electric-truck sales in China rose 80% in the first half of the year, with one-third of trucks sold now electric and a 200-kilometer journey costing about $21 when charged off-peak, compared with $101 for a diesel truck in the United States.
10 - California became the 10th state to approve plug-in solar since 2025, allowing small systems that plug into a wall outlet, cost $300 to $2,000 and can recover that cost through lower utility bills in a year or two.
100 Hometowns
Mexico’s middle class has never been bigger or more shut out of the housing market. It has added 12 million people in recent years and now outnumbers Mexicans in poverty, yet new home registrations have dropped by more than half in a decade. “There is no one building houses,” says Enrique Mezo Herrera, who spent years in Mexican housing and finance before co-founding Hometown with Brett Hagler, the entrepreneur who ran the housing nonprofit New Story. Launching this month, Hometown builds entire towns for working-class buyers in cities of 20,000 to 150,000 people: titled lots, homes designed to take a second story as a family’s income grows, mortgages, and a town square with a clinic, childcare, church, and cafes, about 500 homes per community. Unlike the subsidized developers whose remote subdivisions left at least 842,000 homes abandoned, Hometown only wins if families keep paying and stay. Backed by a $6.5 million seed round, the plan is 10 hometowns in two years and 100 across Latin America in a decade. I’m proud of the work Mezo and Brett are doing, and proud to call them friends and clients. Praxis Press (8 minutes)
Is A.I. Making Us Lazy?
A.I. can help you produce better work while leaving you less able to do the work yourself. The difference is whether you use it to skip thinking or to practice it. Researchers examining millions of online math sessions found that after ChatGPT arrived, students answered chatbot-friendly questions faster and more accurately. On proctored tests away from their computers, however, performance declined. Another experiment found that adults accustomed to automated help became more likely to abandon difficult questions they could otherwise solve. But a study of more than 200 undergraduates suggests a better approach. Students with A.I. wrote stronger essays and scored higher on an initial test. A week later, working without it, those who had let A.I. draft their entire essays saw their test scores fall. Those who had used it to explain concepts and clarify ideas retained their gains and wrote better essays. These findings are preliminary, but the distinction matters: getting an answer and learning how to reach one are different accomplishments. A useful tutor keeps you doing the thinking. New York Times (4 minutes)
Mosquitoes Are a Choice
We have ways to suppress disease-carrying mosquitoes without spraying everything around them. Getting permission to use those tools can take longer than developing them. Oxitec’s engineered males pass on a gene that prevents female offspring from surviving. Sustained releases reduced mosquito populations by about 95% in one Brazilian trial. But its U.S. application bounced from the USDA to the FDA to the EPA, taking a decade just to obtain permission for field trials. Another approach uses Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacterium. Infected males mating with uninfected females produce eggs that don’t hatch. A randomized trial in Singapore reduced mosquito populations by 85% and dengue infections by roughly 70%. MosquitoMate received nationwide commercial registration in 2024, after fifteen years, and local districts are beginning to deploy its insects. These technologies still need safety review and local approval. The case for reform is that a process built around older categories can leave effective disease prevention waiting for years while the diseases keep spreading. Works in Progress (10 minutes)
The State of Libraries
Libraries are becoming the place people turn when the rest of the safety net doesn’t know what to do with them. You can come in without buying anything, get help applying for a job, find somewhere to cool off or simply have a place to be. In Wyoming, a librarian helped a retired man who had neither email nor a phone apply for work at Walmart. Months later, he found him pushing carts there. In Colorado, library records helped people displaced by a campus development establish their eligibility for tuition-free schooling. Yet the librarians providing these services are also contending with book bans, harassment and budgets that can’t keep up with costs. One Idaho director runs her entire library, including payroll, on $80,000 a year. A Minnesota school librarian still has books that describe Pluto as a planet. It’s easy to call libraries obsolete if you can afford to buy books and never need their other services. For people who do, losing the library means losing somewhere to turn. New York Times (14 minutes)
Let Them Get Obsessed
Parents can’t predict which careers will be safe twenty years from now. They can help their children become people who know how to learn something difficult. That means exposing them to different pursuits, then letting genuine interest determine where they go deep. A chess-obsessed child learns persistence from losing a tournament and coming back. A child who loves music or puppeteering develops memory, confidence and a sense of what she can do. The pursuit doesn’t have to become a profession to matter. The newly launched Horowitz Andreessen Academy applies a similar idea to college-aged builders: live with ambitious peers in San Francisco, work on real things and take responsibility early. Traditional college can provide lasting friendships and room to discover your interests. An alternative might offer those experiences through shared work. The question for parents is whether they’re preparing children to follow a prescribed path or helping them develop the curiosity and resilience to find their own. Not Boring (11 minutes)
The Joy of Ownership
The things we love owning often become more valuable to us as we use them. Visvim’s Toshiyuki Ueno wants the products he makes to inspire that kind of attachment five, ten or thirty years later. In this short film, he talks about a car he drives regularly, despite its scratches, dents, peeling paint and rust. Those imperfections are part of what makes it his. Caring for something includes enjoying it in everyday life, allowing the way you use it to become part of its character. That’s the relationship he hopes people will develop with his products: something worth keeping because of the years you’ve spent together. Type 7 / YouTube (5 minutes)
Control Room Envy
Before everything fit on a screen, operating complicated machinery could require an entire room of switches, gauges and lights. This collection gathers photographs from Flickr’s Control Rooms group, inviting you to pore over the details of all those panels. Follow the related links for seafoam-green control rooms, NORAD’s 1960s command center and the miniature interfaces on Lego pieces. A good rabbit hole for anyone who enjoys the places where technology becomes something a person can see and touch. Kottke (1 minute)
Most Read Last Week
Claude’s Conscience - Anthropic asks religious scholars how to teach Claude right from wrong, raising questions about whose morals it should reflect.
You Just Got a Promotion - As A.I. makes execution cheaper, choosing the right work and taking responsibility for it become more valuable.
Lights Out - Aging, hard-to-replace transformers expose the fragility of America’s power grid.
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
Well done is better than well said. — Benjamin Franklin