Asbjørn Kruuse

Engineer diving deep into the trends shaping tomorrow.
Reading and thinking about the past, present and future 📚🧠

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

Over the past year, I’ve gone deep into books, papers & ideas to understand the forces shaping our future.
Many in my generation feel pessimistic.
I don’t. Here are 11 macrotrends I believe will define the 21st century—and why there’s still reason for hope.

[Historical Chronicles @HistoriaJack]

On Saturdays we post Bierstadt

- Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm, 1869

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@pensandpoison Interesting list. I've read the Hayek and Popper books this year and really enjoyed them, though Popper was dense at times. Will have to check out the rest.

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@nonewthing How come you don't have Calafiori as a maverick? I would say he qualifies as a 2/3 with ball progression and box impact?

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

Look at Iran on a map and one thing becomes pretty obvious: its geostrategic importance.

There’s a reason Zbigniew Brzeziński singled it out in his book "The Grand Chessboard". Here’s what makes Iran so geographically important (and annoying) to the West.

1/n

[Henrik Dahl @SociologenHD]

Are there actions that are indefensible in principle?

That is to say: actions for which there are no valid premises on which they can be regarded as acceptable.

I believe there are. The Third Reich committed crimes for which there are simply no premises that could provide a justification. The same can be said of communist regimes such as the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China.

The Jason Arday affair cannot in any way be compared with the Third Reich, the Soviet Union or Mao’s China.

But in my view, it does provide an example of actions that cannot be defended on any conceivable premise. First and foremost: copying another researcher’s work - without any form of attribution - and passing it off as one’s own.

What possible premise could justify that? There is none.

Another action that is extremely difficult to justify is an outright lie. I am not talking here about the white lie (“The food was delicious”) or the strategic omission of certain facts (“The house is ready to move into” - although the roof is a hundred years old). I mean deliberately misleading other people about what is or is not the case.

Jason Arday claimed that he had written his PhD thesis himself. He had not. And he included a number of things on his CV that had never taken place.

None of these things can be morally defended under any circumstances.

And yet there are literally thousands of people defending Jason Arday’s thoroughly indefensible actions.

This bears witness to a moral crisis so profound that I genuinely do not know how we, as a society, are going to overcome it.

How can a society survive the existence of thousands of people who are capable of defending things that cannot, under any conceivable circumstances, be morally defended?

And it is an aggravating circumstance that some of these people occupy positions of authority and responsibility in their societies: members of parliament, professors and holders of similar positions of trust.

Furthermore: How are we, as a society, to survive when the person who has so far been subjected to the most vicious persecution is the whistleblower who exposed Jason Arday - Nathan Cofnas?

The persecution of Nathan Cofnas is one of the most morally outrageous things I have ever witnessed. Because the people persecuting Cofnas consistently subject him to the very actions of which they accuse him.

Cofnas is accused of conducting a “witch-hunt” - while he is himself subjected to a witch-hunt. He is accused of making people feel unsafe and causing them mental distress. Yet he is himself subjected to actions that must inevitably make him feel profoundly unsafe and cause him intense mental distress.

I will be honest and say that people who defend the indefensible; who hound whistleblowers; and who inflict upon a person the very actions of which they accuse that same person, frighten me.

We are dealing here - and I mean this very seriously - with people who are probably capable of almost anything. And who possess no moral restraints of any kind.

The challenge facing us as a society is therefore perfectly clear: Among us live some deeply disturbing people who do not inhabit the same moral universe as ordinary human beings.

And who, moreover, occupy positions of trust in our societies.

These are urgent problems to which we must find a solution.

[hadia @allabtjyu]

rip king of norway thank you for the best speech of all time

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@nonewthing @alexfrco The movies I've watched on here are all good movies. The Shawshank Redemption is my all-time favorite. So seems I have some movies to watch.

[AI @nonewthing]

Your entire life is currently powered by a data center. The entire internet depends on data centers.

The idea that you need fewer data centers is going to make you poor. Resist the demon.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@CoachDanGo Indeed. I think there is much to be learned from it. MMOs like WoW can teach teamwork and communication skills. Personally I owe a lot of my fascination of history to playing grand strategy games. As with anything, too much can be detrimental, but the right amount can be valuable

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@SoulCultivated Looks like a great read. With the disruptions (or opportunities) to education from AI and screens in general it seems like a good idea to go back to the roots of education for perspective.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@JoshPhillipsPhD Have it on the way. Looking forward to reading it.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Libraries are supposed to elevate the soul.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

@EBL2017 Thank you for some good recommendations.

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Watching short-form videos is associated with decreased cognition and increased anxiety.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

Good news from Germany.

[Holger Zschaepitz @Schuldensuehner]

Good Morning from #Germany, where a founder boom is defying the economic gloom. A record 3,053 startups were launched in H1 2026, up 88% YoY. 1 in 3 focuses on AI, while VC funding jumped 44% to €5.8bn. Germany’s next growth engine may be emerging.

[Gita Gopinath @GitaGopinath]

A takeaway from the National Bureau of Economic Research meetings: The premium on research that is mainly about computational complexity has dropped sharply owing to AI. The pendulum is swinging back to 'new insights,' 'new mechanisms,' 'new measurements.' Not a bad thing.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

10/ Reunification is still possible, but it would not be a reunification between equal partners. South has eclipsed North and would bear the heavy burden of integrating the poor north. A united Korea could return from the pages of history, but with each passing year, the chances it will remain there increases.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

1/ Book of the week: Korea: A New History of South and North by Victor D. Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo. For more than 500 years the Korean peninsula was united under the Kingdom of Joseon. Today, the peninsula contains two societies as different as night and day.

[Asbjørn Kruuse @AsbjornKruuse]

9/ The authors outline scenarios for reunification: 1) The collapse of the North Korean regime. 2) War. 3) Gradual change. 4) Status quo. Young South Koreans are increasingly sceptic and see reunification as an economic burden, whereas North Koreans are more positive.