Read Before Monday

Second heatwave of the year is here in Europe, and the irony of it all just scorches deeper when you line up everything else on fire. Teslas, paraded as eco-icons, might just be rainforest-clearing, lithium-thirsty machines dressed in green. Meanwhile, Ai now comes with a terrifying twist: chatbots fuelling delusions so real they’re landing people in psych wards. Just as we're scrambling for tech ethics, Creative Commons is out here with CC Signals. But, speaking of rigged systems, try untangling your credit history when FICO and the Big Three bureaus hold your financial narrative hostage. And if all that isn't choreographed enough, remember Balanchine and Graham; two giants of dance who shared a stage but not a vision, proof that even genius collaborations can collapse without a shared rhythm.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Orwell’s slogans are now a reality, but the contradictions we navigate in tech, business, and science feel just as twisted. Phil McKinney’s webOS tale shows how visionary tech can be strangled by chaotic leadership. Leif Weatherby argues that clinging to “human-only” intelligence limits our understanding of language itself. David Crawshaw reveals how humble little agent loops, nine lines of code, can quietly rewire software development. Bram Adams reminds us that software is built on promises, not features, and that trust scales better than code. And then Beata Halassy: a virologist who injected herself with lab-grown viruses and lived. Each of these stories confronts a system, corporate, symbolic, or clinical, and rewrites the rules not by waiting, but by building. Progress, it seems, often begins with a refusal to play by inherited scripts.

Summer’s already here! You can feel it in London, can’t you? It’s not just the weather that’s shifting, so are the ideas reshaping how we build, think, and reuse. From Ink & Switch’s vision of malleable software that users can bend to their will, to Calvin Chua’s take on Asian cities as political, layered organisms resisting easy redevelopment, it’s clear that agency; whether digital, urban, or intellectual, is at the core of our next design challenges. Michael Bennett’s “Stack Theory” dares to explain consciousness as computational orchestration, weaving biology, AI, and abstraction into a theory of feeling machines. Even myth-busting visuals like Common MythConceptions and Boston Review’s critique of Bad Economics echo this theme: we’re overdue for tools, models, and policies that adapt to us, not the other way around. A summer stack of ideas worth bookmarking.

Another week full of great stuff! From Dutch chip labs to Hollywood sets, TikTok feeds, and Detroit garages, one theme pulses through: evolve or be sidelined. ASML, long the silent backbone of chip innovation, now finds itself in the crosshairs of trade wars and tech rivalries, forced to navigate politics while safeguarding a global supply chain. Meanwhile, enterprise AI is finally out of its proof-of-concept phase. In entertainment, Christophe Nuyens’s work on Andor shows that even in an age of LED rigs and 3D previs, true storytelling still hinges on invisible craftsmanship. Then as automakers pivot to software-defined vehicles, abandoning legacy systems and even Apple CarPlay, they face a reality where updates, not engines, define value. Also, the EU Data Act’s demand for open vehicle data only sharpens this shift. So, adapt fast or risk becoming yesterday’s machines...

Welcome to the new subscribers! AI may be the engine of the future, but its energy costs are staggering, soon to eclipse Bitcoin mining and rival entire nations. Meanwhile, Amazon workers are writing sci-fi to reclaim a future their employer seeks to monopolise, and we’re being nudged to trade the gospel of productivity for a saner ethic. Meta’s treating the global internet like a single machine, raising both eyebrows and infrastructure stakes. And as AI outpaces knowledge work, we’re left to ask: is wisdom, emotional clarity, connection, discernment, the last frontier of human value? This week is all about from datacentres to dystopias, and probably the next revolution may be more philosophical than technological.Btw; did you know that you can subscribe to this newsletter on Substack? Now you do!

Welcome to another edition! It's a long weekend in the UK, so I decided to take it easy and just share some good old topics, that some might forget, some might not even know. Let’s start with why every movie feels like déjà vu, turns out the hero’s journey is a narrative template older than your Netflix backlog, and despite our craving for originality, there’s something primal and oddly comforting in the loop of ordinary → chaos → rebirth. Then, get into the pixel soup of HDR: your phone’s sneaky wizardry that rescues blown-out skies and sunken shadows by mashing multiple exposures into one “perfect” image. It's technology trying to mimic our eyes, but sometimes it feels like overdone makeup on reality. Speaking of overconfidence, Intel once ruled the silicon kingdom but watched the mobile revolution speed by like a motorbike past a cruise ship, because being big doesn’t mean being nimble. Meanwhile, the humble numeric keypad, that unsung 3x3+1 hero, owes its layout quirks to 19th-century inventors and a few ergonomics studies in the 1960s that still control your muscle memory. And finally, a shoutout to Visual Basic, the OG Lego kit for coders, before Microsoft dropped the manual and scattered the bricks with .NET. All in all, it's a tour through the quiet revolutions in design and code that still shape our lives; one keystroke, camera click, and plot twist at a time.