Pär-Ola Zander

That's one way to get a foreword.

Less than 24 hours ago, Anthropic dropped Claude Fable 5. Minds are blown. And people are already coming up with wild use cases. 10 examples:

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write. This is the article: volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2…

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy. Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes. The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled. The conclusion is one sentence. "At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand." An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody. Here is how you get there. A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself. Because the workers who were fired were also customers. When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation. The loop has no natural exit. The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements. Every single one failed in the model. The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger. No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it. Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion." Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem. Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it. Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place. Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·

Make no mistake: destroying world-class universities, like the US just did with Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, isn't just an attack on Iran but it's literally an attack on all of us, on all of humanity. It's not Iran that "won" when Maryam Mirzakhani made her discoveries that won her a Fields Medal: it's all of mathematics, and everything mathematics is used for. Human progress won, technology won, we all won. It's the same type of stuff the Mongols did during the sack of Baghdad and their destruction of the House of Wisdom: we ALL lost something irreplaceable back then, entire fields of human knowledge set back. That's what bombing a university does. It doesn't just destroy buildings. It destroys us, all of us.

Figure 03. Impressive. 🤖🦾🦿@adcock_brett

TRUMP: EPSTEIN FURY 2/28: War is about nukes 3/1: Declared victory 3/3: War is about US elections 3/4: War is about human rights 3/7: We’re winning war 3/11: Declared victory 5x 3/14: War is won, allies need to help 3/13-15: War is won & liberating LGBTQ 3/16: Khamenei is gay

Across many countries that maintain the formal structures of democracy, press freedom has steadily declined over the past decade. Global indices, including those from Reporters Without Borders and V-Dem, show a clear regression: the worldwide average score for media freedom has fallen significantly since the mid-2010s, reaching levels where journalism faces “difficult” or “very serious” conditions in more than half of all nations. The most pronounced deterioration is occurring not in outright dictatorships, but in electoral democracies. Rather than outright banning or imprisoning journalists en masse, governments increasingly employ subtler tactics to constrain independent reporting. These include harsh rhetorical attacks; floods of strategic lawsuits designed to drain resources and intimidate outlets; economic pressures such as redirecting state advertising to friendly media, encouraging advertiser boycotts of independent voices. Statistical analysis reveals a strong bidirectional relationship: reductions in media freedom reliably predict subsequent increases in corruption, while rising corruption further incentivizes tighter controls on scrutiny. This creates reinforcing cycles of weaker accountability, diminished reasoned public debate, and growing abuse of power—often amplified by populist styles of politics that prioritize emotion over institutional checks. The cumulative effect erodes transparency gradually, with the full consequences of weakened oversight frequently becoming visible only years later. economist.com/briefing/2026/…

Something is happening to journalism. And it’s ugly. This week the Washington Post gutted itself—over 300 people laid off, offices shuttered, including the bureau in Ukraine. The despair was loud and real. I feel for every colleague who got the axe. I wrote op-eds for the Wapo for a year and was genuinely proud of it. Then they quietly stopped running non-staff opinion pieces. That was the first loud warning sign. The paper was turning in a different direction. From then on, voices about Ukraine mostly came from safe, Washington-based commentators—people who said exactly what the algorithms and the dominant online mood wanted to hear. Convenient. Predictable. Approved. Here’s the harder truth: convenient journalists have always existed, but now the addiction is different. Too many reporters are hooked on social media the same way their audiences are. They crave approval so badly they won’t touch anything that might get them ratioed, attacked, or called out—even when it’s true. They repeat lines they don’t believe because the alternative is being uncomfortable, ostracized, or “canceled.” They end up prisoners of whatever the current consensus happens to be, even when that consensus is visibly detaching from reality. On Ukraine especially, the journalists who say the uncomfortable things—the ones who get piled on—are frequently telling you more truth than the ones staying safely “on message” for certain politicians and their online cheering squads. Journalism is in freefall. Trust numbers are grim: Gallup’s latest (2025) shows only 28% of adults have real confidence in newspapers, TV, and radio to report fairly and accurately. Historic low. The old business model is broken, social media has rewired how people consume information, and audiences have walked away. Blaming Jeff Bezos or any one villain misses the point. The problem is deeper. Until we face why journalism can’t sustain itself financially and why it keeps losing trust, the bloodbaths will continue—and the truth will keep getting quieter.

Poor delivery robots :(

Almost all discussions I read about China focus on its military expansions—fleet growth in the South China Sea, advanced missiles, and tensions around Taiwan. But a more fundamental risk lies in China's concerted efforts toward technological independence and superiority. The true concern for Western interests is not immediate armed conflict, but interconnected initiatives that could undermine economic foundations, innovation edges, and strategic positions: scalable, cost-effective nuclear fusion; domestic chip lithography rivaling ASML's standards; indigenous AI hardware; and AI systems potentially outstripping Western counterparts. Unveiled in late 2025, the 15th Five-Year Plan shifts toward "high-quality development" and technological self-reliance. It channels resources into "new productive forces" with support for AI and chips, aims to broaden AI use across sectors, and foster original breakthroughs in foundational tech. Energy resilience is also key, with pledges for sustainable technologies like fusion. Central to China's energy strategy is its push for nuclear fusion reactors providing abundant, clean, and eventually cheap power. As of 2026, China leads globally, with facilities like the EAST tokamak sustaining plasma toward commercial viability. Funding has surged from $1.5 billion to $13 billion since 2023, supporting public and private efforts. The 15th Plan commits to "extraordinary measures" for fusion. Viable fusion could grant China energy self-sufficiency and near-limitless cheap energy for industry and computing. China's ambition to match or exceed ASML in chip-making equipment underscores its semiconductor self-reliance drive. By 2026, reports indicate a prototype system which crosses the EUV threshold, that will eventually enable advanced chip production. Integrated into the plan's chip focus, it prioritizes manufacturing autonomy. While doubts remain about quickly closing the gap, the prototype represents substantive progress toward ending ASML's dominance. Alongside lithography, China advances homegrown AI chips to challenge Nvidia. In 2026, companies like Huawei are closing the gap. The plan reinforces this through investments, aiming to bridge the compute divide—U.S. at 75% global AI capacity versus China's 15%. China's AI chip sector is booming, projected to exceed $31 billion by 2030, risking market erosion for firms like Nvidia as China builds separate ecosystems. China's AI goals extend to systems superior to Western ones. By 2026, models like DeepSeek demonstrate efficient performance, with deployment leads via the "AI+ Initiative" across industries. The plan sets targets for AI integration in core sectors by 2027, prioritizing practical application. Though the West holds frontier leads, China's scale advantages could reverse this, with revenue surges signaling upgrades. Each initiative is strong alone, but interlinked under the 15th Plan, they pose a powerful threat. The West risks complete tech subordination. The implications are more than just far-reaching.