What I'm paying attention to.

Covers a sports gambling-themed ETF alongside unrelated stories about an insider trading case and a company pivoting from poultry to AI.

Odd Lots episode with Barclays' Alexander Altmann on how leveraged single-stock ETFs, especially in Korea, have tripled in AUM and created what he calls 'terrifying' levels of notional exposure tied to the AI chip trade, alongside coverage of Samsung earnings and SK Hynix's US listing.

Lowenstein Sandler chair Gary Wingens argues AI could expand rather than shrink legal work by lowering costs and triggering a Jevons paradox in lawsuits and deals, while discussing the billable-hours model and training junior lawyers.

Quotes OpenAI's explanation of how ChatGPT's new 'Work' feature splits between cloud and desktop, noting cloud and desktop conversations and local files don't sync at launch.

Release notes for sqlite-utils 4.1, adding a --code option to generate rows via Python for insert/upsert, --type overrides for column types, a drop-index command, reading queries from stdin, primary-key inference for upsert, and strict-mode controls for table transforms.

Traces the term 'Directly Responsible Individual' to Apple via the GitLab handbook and argues that accountability for a project should remain uniquely human, not delegated to LLM agents, citing IBM's 1979 dictum that computers must never make management decisions.

Release notes for shot-scraper 1.11, improving the server-wait mechanism used by video/multi commands to poll for port availability up to 30 seconds, and adding a --js-file option and consistent --timeout flags across commands.

Jarred Sumner details Bun's rewrite from Zig to Rust, explaining the move was driven by memory-safety bugs (use-after-free, double-free) that Rust's compiler and RAII prevent, and describing how coding agents used Bun's TypeScript test suite as a conformance harness to automate much of a million-plus-line port.

Valerie Trouet explores how tree rings preserve a record of planetary shifts, cosmic events, and historical turning points that scientists are only beginning to decode.

Aeon video profile of Patricia Evangelista reflecting on journalism that documents crimes against humanity as both the worst and best possible job.

David Robson writes about being abandoned by his mother and how that rupture fractured the shared life story they had co-authored.

Devin Sanchez Curry reviews Josh Mugg's From Human Reasoning to Belief, which proposes the Soundboard Account of Human Reasoning as a new empirically grounded theory of belief fixation and revision.

Argues that dual-process theory's persistent appeal in experimental psychology is puzzling unless one accounts for the basic statistical constraints of null-hypothesis testing, framing the debate around H0/HA rejection logic rather than the theory's substantive claims.

Reports Andrew Ng's argument, made at a Berggruen Institute/Mozilla gathering with screenwriter David Goyer, that China's strategy of releasing open-weight AI models (like DeepSeek) is expanding its global influence, particularly in Africa, while the US's closed-weight, costlier models fall behind in adoption.

Marginal Revolution's Friday link roundup covering Jewish culture, the persistence of top surnames since 1790, Bernanke's appointment to Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, the India 1991 Fellowship, the UK Dynamism Fund, Peter Gray on phones and social media, Richard Hanania's new book, and Fed task force leadership under Warsh.

Cites research by Emanuel Saez, via Jeremy Horpaczewski (spelled Horpendahl), showing that European football provides evidence that high-income, high-ability individuals relocate in response to tax rates.

Tyler Cowen argues the Trump administration's rewrite of federal financial assistance regulations threatens America's decentralized science-funding system, and rounds up warnings from AAAS, Grayson Logue, Dan Drezner, and Noah Smith that the rule change would let political appointees cancel or redirect grants, opening the door to politicization and corruption in research funding.

Reviews several recent streaming titles: praises Spider-Noir for its Chandler-style writing and Nicolas Cage's Bogart-inflected performance, criticizes Project Hail Mary's adaptation for softening the novel and miscasting Ryan Gosling against Matt Damon's Martian benchmark, and briefly mentions The Sheep Detectives.

Podcast episode where Claire explains what an AI agent 'harness' is and walks through the custom Claude Agent SDK harness she built to automate Sentry bug triage at ChatPRD, arguing that opinionated, narrow tool adapters and encoded permissions beat general-purpose access for repeatable engineering workflows.

Profiles Alex Finn's 24/7 local AI setup running three Mac Studios, a DGX Spark, and a custom RTX 5090 build coordinated via a self-built fleet dashboard, covering how he allocates models like GLM 5.2 and Qwen 3.6 across machines, wires them into Claude Code build/review loops, and uses Tailscale to manage the fleet remotely.

Covers findings from the second annual Tech Worker Sentiment Survey led by Noam Segal, reporting that AI has split the tech workforce into four emotional archetypes, that burnout jumped 11 points in a year, and that most workers wouldn't recommend a tech career to newcomers, with discussion of what's really driving fear and what managers can do about it.

Weekly Generalist Intelligence briefing reporting that Samsung is pushing a further DRAM price hike of up to 20% after already raising prices 90% and 50-60% in the prior two quarters, as data centers absorb nearly all available memory supply and hand pricing power back to chipmakers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

Subscriber-only roundup of Slack community discussions covering negative network effects, managing overconfident colleagues, developers bypassing design decisions, and keeping stakeholder meetings focused.

Recounts the author's experience as a left-handed child mirror-writing letters by imitating right-handed teachers' strokes rather than reversing them, describing a lasting natural pull toward mirror-writing.

Drexel chemical engineer Thamires Lima uses extensional rheology—stretching viscous liquids like polypropylene and crude oil between metal plates—to discover that some simple fluids, long assumed to only flow, can actually fracture under stress.

Neurologist Gayatri Devi joins Peter Attia to discuss how earlier detection, personalized treatment plans, and emerging therapies are reshaping care for Alzheimer's and other dementias, arguing that early diagnosis can meaningfully alter a patient's cognitive trajectory.

Peter Attia examines a new meta-analysis linking sleep loss to mortality, unpacking the limits of what such observational data can actually establish about causation while offering practical takeaways for sleep habits anyway.

UCLA psychologist Alan Castel discusses the science of memory and cognitive aging with Andrew Huberman, covering mnemonics, eyewitness memory reliability, neuroplasticity, and why so-called "superagers" maintain and even improve cognitive function later in life through curiosity, exercise, and retrieval practice.