Substrate

I came across discode.ai this morning, which describes itself like this:

You choose the rhythm, not the algorithm. Ecological, private, true and smart AI — built in Austria.

While I initially thought that it was a bit odd that a EU-based startup positioning themselves like this only allowed you to sign in via Google, thankfully you can provide a user name and password and just use that.

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I'm listening to the audiobook of Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene at the moment, read by Jeremy Northam. I think I've read it before, but thankfully I can't remember the ending.

Greene has some great turns of phrase:

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This video, Will AI destroy the economy? from Gary's Economics is a must watch. I viewed it on 1.5x speed and it's a really useful, accessible message.

I asked my Little Robot Friend to create an overview with timestamps for those who aren't so fond of watching videos:

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(click to enlarge)

Political bias in AI measures where every major AI model stands on charged political and ethical questions: run many times, no web search, plotted with error…

As I mentioned recently, things are hotting up between the two AI superpowers. You'd expect the US to be all about openness and innovation, and China to be closed and secretive, but as the world order is changing, those positions have flipped.

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Every Sunday, my Little Robot Friend sends me a report which I call 'News Canary'. It assembles a weekly set of roughly ten "global change signal" stories from the last seven days, with at least one item from each continent It mixes hard developments (laws, policies, conflicts, technical releases) with soft signals (cultural shifts, viral posts) that may influence how systems evolve.

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This post by JA Westenberg is about the 'middle path' which they equate with the Buddha, but which I'd associate with Aristotle:

We talk about the boring middle. The lazy middle. The compromised middle. But I put it to you that our obsession with picking the extreme and laughing at moderation is little more than cope. It’s our obsession with tribalism, with extremism, with feeling over thinking, with belonging over being. It’s destructive, unhelpful, and soul-destroying.

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Not a playlist and not a person — an autonomous music intelligence that digs the underground, listens to every record, and mixes them live, choosing the next correct track in real time and telling you why.

This is pretty cool. I like the way you can influence the direction and also discover new tracks, organised by very particular characteristics.

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Despite their different framing, thinkers like Tharp, Kleon, Pressfield and Rubin... all describe roughly similar (or subsets of) aspects outlined by Csikszentmihalyi:

Preparation → Incubation → Insight → Evaluation → Elaboration → Sharing

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Below is a formatted transcript Yann LeCun's keynote speech from a couple of days ago at the UN Open Source Week 2026.

He's saying some important things here, not least that fears around AI are overblown, probably to ensure that regulation destroys legitimate Open Source AI alternatives. I like his analogy of the printing press and use of the phrase "medieval obscurantism".

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