Ghost in the Machine
Valerie Veatch premiered this at Sundance in January and it has since been picked up by Independent Lens. It examines artificial intelligence through the longer history of human technological advancement, and it is not a friendly film toward the current moment. One critic described it as a Molotov cocktail thrown into the middle of our overinflated AI hype, which gives you a sense of the register. I am invested across this sector and I still think the strongest skeptical case deserves a real hearing. This is that case, made well.
Machine God
John Greer and Lei Huang have been building a documentary on accelerationism and the people pushing hardest toward artificial superintelligence, and the trailer alone tells you the register they are working in. Watch it back to back with Ghost in the Machine and you get the two poles of the current argument in their strongest form, which is a more useful education than reading another hundred posts from either camp. The interviews behind it include some of the most committed accelerationists working today.
The Oldest Person in the World
Sam Green spent more than a decade following successive holders of the title of oldest living person, which means the film keeps losing its subject and finding a new one. What starts as a documentary about extreme longevity turns into something closer to a meditation on time, luck, and what it actually feels like to outlast everyone. It premiered at Sundance in January and reviews have been strong. For a category I spend real money and attention on, this was a useful corrective. Living longest is not the same thing as living well.
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The Art Of Winning Requires One Thing Most People Won't Give
Arnold Schwarzenegger has told versions of this story for forty years and it still works, mostly because he is not selling anything abstract. The thing most people will not give is the unglamorous volume of reps, done when nobody is watching and nothing is happening.
How To Explain Anything To Anyone
Sharran Srivatsaa packs a genuinely useful communication framework into about sixty seconds. Clarity wins when you give people four things: context, understanding, practical guidance, and one obvious next step.
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The Anthropic Hive Mind
Steve Yegge spent years as a senior engineer at both Google and Amazon, so when he says something unusual is happening at Anthropic, it's worth paying attention. His argument isn't just about the models. It's about the organizational culture, the caliber of people, and the way the company thinks collectively. Interesting read regardless of where you stand on the AI race.
Meet the Startups Trying to Build Military-Specific AI
A wave of veteran-founded startups is now building AI trained exclusively on military and combat data, designed to work without cloud connectivity in denied environments. Companies like Smack Technologies just closed a $32M seed round on this thesis. The bet is that the Pentagon will never fully trust a general-purpose model for critical decisions, and that purpose-built systems are the only real path to adoption.
How to Design a More Meaningful Life
Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, the Stanford professors who wrote Designing Your Life, join Dr. Laurie Santos on The Happiness Lab to make the case that major life decisions shouldn't be planned, they should be prototyped. The idea is to treat your own life like a design problem: run small experiments, iterate, and let the data tell you what works. Practical in a way that most self-help conversations aren't.
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