Something For the Weekend #48
Fruits of My Labor, The Johnson Society of London, and Cowork: selections from the weird and wonderful for the week ending May 22, 2026
Greetings, fellow DAUs!
I hope this finds you well and that we have at least some of what you are looking for for the weekend.
Once again, thanks for reading! Please support my work by taking out a paid subscription for the cost of half a loaf of fresh sourdough from a neighborhood bakery—just $6 a month.
Have a great one!
Loving your work!
Benj
Top 5 this week from the Daily Active User:
I was working at Micky’s Blue Room (don’t bother looking for it, it’s not there anymore) and playing in Marwood (yep, still not on Spotify) when Lucinda Williams dropped her magnificent album World Without Tears, which kicked off with the epic and beguiling track, Fruits of My Labor. There are so many great songs on the album, but I find myself singing this one endlessly. The production is gorgeous; so much space, everything where it needs to be. Although I first heard it on the bar jukebox alongside a lot of other questionable stuff we used to give Sean hell over, it wasn’t until I hit it with the headphones that it truly connected. Love this song and this record. I also love the hook in Ventura. Great record. Damn, it’s sounding good right now. Great album cover too!
One payment I absolutely love to make every year, on behalf of my father and myself, is to The Johnson Society of London. Everything about this, dare we call it, club, is fantastic—from the Richard Thrale Memorial Lecture to the annual wreath-laying ceremony on Johnson’s grave at Westminster Abbey (which sadly I have not yet been able to attend in person). I love their Zoom meetings and the way they look at Johnson and those around him with such fondness and reverence. As I’ve mentioned before, the other members I’ve met, from the Dr. Johnson’s House volunteers to those who keep the tradition of The Rambler and The Idler alive through the majestic The New Rambler, all seem to be just wonderful people. This is everything great about being a Johnson superfan, and I’m grateful to be able to support and participate.
It’s almost painful to write this, but I had the moment with Cowork (Anthropic’s agentic Claude product), and there is simply no going back. It is the most extraordinary thing to build an app (a fully functional Mac app) that coordinates two disparate pieces of software, optimizes its own workflow, and saves me literally hours of time, all while a coach is there to help a non-technical guy like me when I’m going wrong. It’s just mind-blowing. I’ve read multiple accounts of people having the same experience I’m describing here, and as I’m sure you can tell from my Luddite tendencies, there’s some contradiction in just how remarkable and useful I find this software to be.
And yet this genie does not go back in the bottle. As with the attribution technology I’ve been working so hard to bring to market for creators, I think this technology can and will be used for both good and ill. So while I would never let AI write what you read here, when it comes to building my own to-do list software that works just the way I want it to, or synchronizing meeting notes from one annoying software to another (work that used to require either an external connector or me cutting and pasting), the time saved (and the books and music I’ve been able to read and listen to instead) is hard to turn down.
The one struggle I’ve been having is blowing through my token allocation and budget, which means I’m also burning through data-center energy and water. This leaves me conflicted. So for the multiple tasks and workflows I set up, I asked Cowork to optimize and minimize the token usage and to schedule for optimal timing. So far, across the three workflows, it looks like that saved me 75-80% in usage, just by asking it to improve itself and its workflow. I have a lot more thoughts on this, and I’m in the middle of three pieces about technology use (surprise, surprise), but I must say if you had doubts about where this technology is going (as I did), its true power and potential have left me in no doubt. There is no going back from this. We are here. We need to understand what this means and what it will do.
Mokkiri-zake:
Stanford already had a shaky reputation for integrity when I arrived in 2022. It was the origin place of the Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes (now serving a 10-year prison sentence), the crypto fraudster Do Kwon (now serving a 15-year prison sentence) and the founders of Juul (which was forced to pay billions for getting kids hooked on vapes). All of these scandals were in the news when freshman year began. Many of my classmates arrived idealistic and hopeful, but among the strivers seeking a path to fortune, hustle culture was the accepted way of life. Now A.I. has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before.Cheating has become omnipresent. I don't know a single person who hasn't used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become. As freshman year went on, some professors suggested that the "nuclear option" might be called for: allowing faculty to proctor in-person exams, a practice banned at the university for over a century to demonstrate "confidence in the honor" of students.In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything. They would embezzle dorm funds to spend on their friends and lie about having Covid to get the UberEats credits that the school offered to those in quarantine. Some kids I knew published a paper that claimed a groundbreaking new A.I. advancement. Online sleuths quickly pointed out that it appeared to be just a stolen Chinese model, to which the two Stanford co-authors responded by blaming the plagiarism on the third author.In junior year, 49 percent of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail. A friend of mine captured the school's ethos while we were discussing the tech hardware and other items our student club neglected to return to corporate sponsors. It was all, I recall her saying, "just a little bit of fraud." - My Classmate, ChatGPT - New York Times - Theo Baker
In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn—a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns. - Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once - Financial Times - John Burn-Murdoch
One of Trump’s many weaknesses is believing he’s playing three-dimensional chess when he’s eating the pieces. - Coexistence or Confrontation? - profgmedia.com - Scott Galloway
Figure has been livestreaming an eight-hour “shift” of autonomous robots sorting packages in a factory, and it is soothing, unsettling, and impressive. It is almost algorithmic ASMR, as one YouTube viewer said. The sorting is fluid, dextrous, and agile, more human than humans in many ways.
Why is this important? Because it shows how much further along such tools are than people realize, and suggests societal, economic, and investment implications far beyond Claude Code for Excel, etc. - Livestreaming Autonomous Robots, the Implications - perfdrive.com - Paul Kedrosky
We might also be witnessing a new managerial theory for running AI labs emerge. The best parallel I can think of is the Toyota Production System (TPS), designed by Taiichi Ohno. Like Chinese AI labs, Toyota had little choice but to build its products a different way. Steel was expensive & capital was scarce. Toyota was a cash-poor endeavour. Using TPS, Japanese firms got to a cost structure Detroit couldn’t match, while progressively improving the quality of their products. Even as Japanese automakers saw their coffers swell with profits, the efficiency and cost advantages remained. An analogous process may be emerging among Chinese AI labs. A lab can’t run all three workstreams in parallel at full capacity. Instead, it must allocate compute to whichever team is most ready to use it productively at a given moment—and that allocation discipline ultimately becomes a capability. The US frontier labs, operating on effectively uncapped Nvidia silicon, find their forcing function much further out.I don’t want to overlabor the analogy. What is happening in China is not identical to the TPS in many ways, nor is it as mature. But we should not ignore the structural implications. If inference is where value will accrue next, and if one approach yields much more efficient inference, then the export controls achieved the opposite of their intent. - 🔮🇨🇳 Inside Chinese AI labs – American AI sanctions created its toughest competiton - exponentialview.co - Azeem Azhar
At present, more regulatory restrictions are imposed on nail salons than frontier AI companies. - AI desperately needs more adult supervision - Financial Times - John Thornhill