Markham Nolan ☘️

Cormac McCarthy on not overthinking it

Reese's Pieces have no chocolate in them. The peanuts had their oil pressed out and a cheaper fat put back in. Sugar is first, then partially defatted peanuts, then hydrogenated palm kernel and soybean oil, then corn syrup solids. Everything after that is 2% or less, and it's the dyes, the glaze, some vanillin and a little milk. There's no cocoa anywhere. Partially defatted just means the peanuts went through a press. The peanut oil comes out one side and gets sold as peanut oil. What's left is a dry peanut flour, and that's what the center is made from, because flour holds a shape in a panning drum and doesn't go rancid. Then they put fat back in, and the fat they picked is hydrogenated palm kernel oil, which is solid at room temperature and costs less than peanut oil. You can see the swap on the panel. 38 pieces have 6 g of fat and all 6 are saturated. Peanut oil is mostly unsaturated, so that number isn't the peanut. The shell is sugar with 4 dyes and a coat of shellac.

We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent. It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.

15 muse takeaways from Meta's q3 call today: 1/ 10m+ muse setups in US/CA in 1.5 month 2/ shopping is the #1 use case, 25%+ of weekly actives 3/ average purchase size is $200+ 4/ week 1 volumes were so high they had to raise credit limits with stripe 5/ plaid said they had not seen connector activity like this on any other service 6/ zuck expects muse ARPU to beat family of apps over time because of commerce, that base is several hundred dollars per US user per year 7/ business model is free for people, commerce fee paid by businesses, plus subs for power users and business owners 8/ previewed personal agent protocol with walmart, shopify, stripe, sierra. consumer agent to business agent, with controls on both sides 9/ zuck on friction: businesses are overwhelmingly excited so far. expects uneven adoption, many flows stay AI assisted before fully autonomous 10/ next most used connectors after shopping are email and calendar. productivity is the 2nd wallet to win 11/ about 25% use muse daily, retention gets better the longer they use it. 2x+ threads start 12/ #1 in the App Store almost every day, wonder model lifts engagement further 13/ trust layer is secure VM now, confidential VM next where even meta cannot see content 14/ business side already live: assistant plugs into shopify, quickbooks, meta ad accounts, drafts campaigns and replies. vermont maple brand got 57%+ purchases and 36% lower CPA from longer copy it suggested 15/ scale plan is serve over a billion people, cut compute cost 10x in a year. stated endgame is billions of muses transacting get ready for the biggest transformation in marketing's history folks

“When did you realise that we had completely lost the run of ourselves as a nation, grandad?” “Well, child, just before the big 2027 crash the Irish government used our money to pay for a nationwide campaign which ….. hang on… I’ll show you….”

A scoop from me: CBS-owned local stations' election coverage will be sponsored by DraftKings, a deal that has stirred concern inside the company. status.news/p/cbs-draftkings…

The current state of apps on iPhone Duo: youtu.be/ESABTN4VtrA

Hello from Dublin airport as I'm leaving the International AI Summit with something close to existential dread from being exposed yet again to the parallel reality in which much of Europe’s political establishment appears to be living. The summit was literally organized around the theme of European competitiveness. Yet from the plenary stage, I heard from mostly American companies (fair play to them, Ireland is home to their international HQs) coupled with European politicians advancing claims that the AI Act, DFA, CADA and other digital rules somehow make European startups more competitive and that regulation is what will stop AI agents from “escaping their sandboxes." Meanwhile, you could walk around the innovation hall and struggle to find any of the major European AI companies that are actually trying to compete at the frontier. Panel after panel returned to the same comfortable and boring platitudes about trust, values, guardrails and responsible innovation. There is an huge disconnect from the real world. In a desperate pursuit of sovereignty for sovereignty's sake and an ever-growing digital maze of bureaucracy, Europe will fall behind in AI. We will have fewer frontier companies, less capital, less compute and dramatically less appetite for risk than the US or China. We will also be incapable of grasping (or, at a minimum, understanding) the opportunities ahead of us. Instead, we keep congratulating ourselves on having built a telegraph cable in the 1800s (!?) and now the world's most elaborate regulatory framework and call that a competitive advantage. One of the few genuinely refreshing interventions came from Siemens CTO and Chief Strategy Officer Dr. Peter Koerte, who spoke frankly about some of the real obstacles European innovators face. I will keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: Europe does not have an AI values problem, it has an AI competitiveness problem. But I’m increasingly worried that many of the people supposed to solve either don't have the intellectual capacity or curiosity to do so. To end on a positive note: the event was super slick, and the logistics were very straightforward. Congrats to the Irish government for their ability to put together a great experience for their guests, for being so welcoming, and attracting a very high caliber of speakers. #AISummitIE #Ireland2026EU