the best part of Dialectic was observing how meticulous and intentional @jacksondahl is about *his* craft he spent this pod pressing me on every single "why" behind what I do: why quit my job, why longform, why legacy journalism, why AI. the guy asks hard questions!!

Le populisme IA est en train d’arriver. Nous ne sommes pas prêts. L’une des nouvelles voix les plus influentes de la Silicon Valley, @jasminewsun dévoile, pour la première fois en Europe, son anthropologie sauvage de la révolution tech aux États-Unis. legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2026/…

we analyzed >100k posts from r/ChatGPT over 3 years on one hand, we saw ChatGPT quickly become normalized as an everyday consumer product, which is pretty cool on the other hand…

This has long been my advice to a young person looking to break into journalism. Three steps: 1) Find some public data that most people are ignoring. 2) Really learn what it measures and how to aggregate and present it. 3) Through posting, become the expert everyone turns to.

I think these are very very sound recommendations. Talk about it on here often, but some of the most fascinating people & rewarding friendships I’ve had came through cold outreach. EG I used to write physical letters to people I read about in the papers: “Read your piece in X, thought this bit was sound, this bit was off, can I buy you coffee and discuss?” Or through people DMing me here or elsewhere. Yesterday alone I met three people this way. I’ve also had job approaches that began with: “Hey, I know you know X person and they suggested you for this role.” I would add a couple of other points. 1) Humans are generally very kind. If you are kind, curious, and not weirdly transactional (key point btw), most people respond well. Everyone is going through their own thing and most people are far more open to connection than the internet makes them appear. Understand incentives. 2) Extroversion is a muscle. I spent a large part of my life being introverted. I now love speaking to humans from all over - it is literally my job. It is a muscle you have to work out - you need to be prepared to be wrong and not be embarrassed (followers on here will see I am often wrong!). However I still need alone time to recharge. But while you will find many of the most interesting ideas in life in old books, nothing beats yapping away with someone as a means of iterating them further (hence why I run Peripheries dinners.) 3) Find something cool, write about it. As my parents told me after a particularly terrible set of exam results when I was 15, the good news is you don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to be reliable, curious, and visibly interested in something/other people. For example, taking a niche interest in Private Military Companies (lol), researching and then writing about them has led to some absolutely bizarre conversations and meetings which I love. Writing about an issue publicly - avoiding LLM slop - is an evidenced example you can be bothered too, and a good jumping off point for strangers to get in touch too.

An honor to interview the novelist Benjamín Labatut about Von Neumann, his conversations with Demis, and what the AI industry misses — "Literature tries to weave the rainbow back together. It involves irrationality; it involves all of those things that science has, by its own method, left out. Literature presents a messier, darker, and perhaps more complete, if less powerful, perspective on the world." youtube.com/watch?v=C8rLRIhD…

few other curiosities, not all feasible: more polling from AI-native non-technical contributors. when do policy, marketing, sales, comms, legal, etc employees at anthropic think they'll see significant automation filtered to employees with adolescent or college-age children, how are they making decisions differently? what are they advising them to pursue? revealed preferences financially can be illuminating vs. stated. not exactly what you'd poll for, perhaps 401k contributions, modified rates of consumption? forecasting for more fringe milestones. not great examples but: writing a Booker Prize-level fiction novel, building a 100M company end-to-end, winning the Palme d’Or, a best paper award in Sociology, files an opinion-shaping amicus brief adopted by the Supreme Court ASI is oddly under-discussed nowadays, gap between AGI and ASI, how high is the 'intelligence ceiling', etc.

Feel the AGI (awareness, groundedness, introspection)

I think "being real with yourself" is the most underrated cognitive skill for the AI age — AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of thinking, productivity, etc. But you gotta actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does? Then you won't need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” If you pay attention and avoid self-deception, you'll be able to *feel* when you are doing real work!

How AI will change media: “The value of polish is going to go down and the value of personal charisma, style, and weirdness is going to go up,” says @jasminewsun