Timeline

The frontier-vs-everyone-else gap is real – but “8-30b level” sells the floor short. Most people’s AI is Gemini 3.5 Flash, the default behind Google’s AI answers (2.5B+ users a month), or a free-tier GPT mini. Distilled last-gen flagships, a year behind and fast, not toy models.

And the wall’s lower than it was: GPT-5.6 went broadly public yesterday, Fable 5‘s back on paid plans. Except “public” skips free ChatGPT entirely – the elite part is who pays 50 USD a million tokens, not who’s let in.

Push back on myself: nobody’s baffled. 2.5 billion people use this daily – they just see something useful-but-mid, priced like a frontier they’ll never open. And the spend is real. Google alone: ~180 billion USD this year, up from 31 billion in 2022. Hundreds of billions isn’t hyperbole, it’s the floor.

Bobby Prince died June 16, at 81. Real name Robert Caskin Prince III – Vietnam vet, lawyer, and for one glorious accidental decade, the guy who invented what a PC game was supposed to sound like.

I didn’t grow up with him exactly – I grew up with Duke Nukem 3D’s strip-club synth-rock, Doom’s MIDI metal grinding through a Sound Blaster, and Duke Nukem 2’s weirdly chill loops nobody else seems to remember. That music didn’t just soundtrack my teenage years. It’s still in rotation on my machine right now, three decades later.

Library of Congress inducted the Doom score into the National Recording Registry in May. A month later, he was gone. Rest easy, Bobby – the frequencies you split so the effects could cut through the music still cut through.

Loop quantum gravity has this idea called a planck star, and it’s the most elegant fix to the black hole singularity problem I’ve come across:

Classical GR says a collapsing star can crunch down to a singularity – infinite density at a point, physics’ polite way of saying “the math broke”. Planck stars say nah. Once density hits planckian (5.1 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³, comically extreme), quantum gravity kicks in, the inward pull gets balanced by a repulsive force, and the collapse halts. You get a stable-ish ball at planck density. Not point-sized either – density triggers it, not size. Could be macroscopic.

And it’s not stable forever. It’s mid-bounce. Microseconds in proper time, billions of years from outside thanks to time dilation. What we call a black hole is just a very slow ball hitting the floor. PBS Space Time breaks it down nicely.

talkie: a 13B language model trained only on pre-1931 text. no modern web, no leakage, no awareness of anything after 1930. that last part is what’s wild.

think about what this unlocks – archaeology, historiography, counterfactual history, reviewing past predictions of the future from the inside. every historian alive is contaminated by knowing what came next. talkie isn’t.

it’s also, i’d argue, the closest thing to a time travel experience we’ll ever get. physics doesn’t permit the real version in either direction (forward you just wait, backward causality says no). a conversation with something whose worldview ends in 1930, with no memory of WW2, no Hitler, no internet, is functionally the same trick.

now imagine the 17th century version. that’s the door this opens 🤯

arte dropped a line last week that’s been rattling around my skull: “the countries of the global South will grow old before they reach the prosperity of the North.”

i went looking for counter-evidence. found none. France took 115 years to double its elderly share. Vietnam will do it in 17. Japan hit aged-society status at 40k USD per capita. Vietnam will hit it at 5k. of 40 countries that crossed 13% elderly since 1972, only three were poorer than Vietnam is now.

the horror isn’t that it’s unfair, though it is. the horror is that it’s already decided. the kids who weren’t born in the 80s and 90s can’t be un-not-born. no election changes this. no reform. the math was locked in before most voters were alive to vote on it.

demography as fate. with receipts.