Anthropic and OpenAI are both telling engineers to write loops.
Not prompts.
Not agents.
Loops.
That is not a coincidence.
When the two most important AI labs on the planet independently converge on the same pattern — that is a signal worth paying attention to.
Most engineers are still thinking in terms of single calls.
Input → model → output.
The engineers winning in 2026 think in cycles.
Output becomes input. The model evaluates its own work. The loop runs until the result is right.
This is the complete breakdown of what loops are, why they matter, and how to build them ↓
This is biblical.
A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years.
Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin.
She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.
I know someone who got rich by hiring attractive female "researchers" to cold call founders and pretend to be conducting an industry study...
She's not a researcher. There is no study. There is no institution behind the calls
But when a 23 year old girl with a polished voice says "Hi, I'm conducting a brief industry study on [founder's exact niche] for a research firm. Can I ask you 4 quick questions about your current vendor stack?" founders answer every single time
The 4 questions are:
1. "What tools are you currently using for [category]?" (Now you know their stack)
2. "What's been your biggest frustration with your current setup?" (Now you know their pain)
3. "If budget wasn't a factor, what would your ideal solution look like?" (Now you know their dream state)
4. "Would you be open to hearing about solutions that specifically address the issues you mentioned?" (Now you have permission to pitch)
By question 4, the founder has voluntarily handed over their entire buying criteria, their current pain, and their budget psychology. And they think they just helped a grad student with a thesis
The "researcher" thanks them, hangs up, and passes the intel to the cold email team who sends a hyper-specific email 48 hours later
"[first name] - we work with [niche] companies that are dealing with [the exact frustration they mentioned on the call]. most teams we talk to say the same thing about [their current vendor]. we fix that specific problem in 21 days. quick loom?"
The founder replies because the email describes their exact situation with creepy precision. They don't connect it to the "research call" from 2 days ago. They think this company just really understands their market
She runs 4 "researchers" doing 30 calls/day each. 120 calls. 80-90 answered. 60+ complete the 4 questions. Intel on 60 companies per day fed directly into cold email
$127,000/mo from pretending to conduct academic research that doesn't exist
The girls get paid $2,200/mo each. The intel they generate closes $127K. And every founder who got "studied" thinks they helped a nice girl with her dissertation
He called it "weaponised politeness" which made me laugh and then feel bad about laughing
People will say the play is deceptive. Sure
But the cold email they receive afterwards genuinely solves a real problem they genuinely have. They just don't know how you found out about it
The research was real. The institution was fake. The revenue is very real
Few
ChatGPT has quietly built a file on you. You've never seen most of what's in it.
Every message you send feeds it. It studies your patterns to map your personality and habits, things you never actually told it.
Here are 7 prompts to pull up everything it has on you, and wipe what you never agreed to:
Howard Marks has been writing investment memos for 30 years that Warren Buffett says he reads first thing every time.
In 36 minutes he explains why every bull market ends the same way - and where he thinks we are right now.
36-min. Oaktree. TBPN.
Bookmark & watch - the clearest market cycle read you'll find in 2026
The more a man thinks he doesn’t need other people, the more isolated he becomes.
The more isolated a man becomes, the more powerless he is.
The more powerless he is, the more frustrated he feels.
But the more a man realizes he needs other people, the more he adapts to other people.
The more he adapts to other people, the more sociable, interesting, & playful he becomes.
The more sociable, interesting, & playful he becomes, the more he likes others & they like him.
The more he likes others & they like him, the better he works with other people.
The better he works with other people, the more easily he achieves his objectives.
The more easily he achieves his objectives, the more powerful he feels.
The more powerful he feels, the freer he becomes.
Freedom and power are about embracing other people and realizing you need them, love them, and enjoy them, and 1,000x’ing your own individual capabilities as a man.
Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI:
Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible.
1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun.
2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love.
Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI.
Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
@MoreBirths@FamStudies Having kids also makes you more conservative: you care about safe neighbourhoods, long term financial stability, making long term romantic relationships last, etc.
This tracks with a study from Finland which found that poorer mental health is linked to higher odds of childlessness.
Surveys consistently find that liberals tend to self-report worse mental health than conservatives. 2/2
Why do are liberals so much less likely to have kids than conservatives?
A new piece by @FamStudies finds that beyond ideology, liberals are filled with worry -- about their mental health, whether they might pass on bad genes, and whether they will be good parents. 1/2
He got married with good intentions and almost no formation.
He knew how to work. He knew how to provide. He knew how to keep going when life was hard.
But he did not know how to live with a woman.
So marriage became confusing very quickly.
Nobody had taught him how to handle conflict without shutting down or lashing out. Nobody had shown him how to lead a conversation, repair after an argument, hear criticism without taking it as contempt, or make his wife feel emotionally safe.
He thought being a decent husband meant paying the bills, staying faithful, and not doing anything obviously wrong.
But his wife kept telling him something was missing. She said she felt alone. She said he was distant. She said every serious conversation turned into a fight, or else into one more dead, unresolved silence.
From his side, it felt maddening.
He was trying. At least he thought he was trying. He would come home tired, already carrying the pressure of work, money, and responsibility.
Then one small comment from her would hit him like an accusation:
You’re not leading. You’re not present. You don’t hear me. You don’t understand what I need.
He did not have words for what was happening inside him. He only knew that he felt cornered.
So he did what many men do when they have never been taught better. He got defensive. He counterattacked. He explained. He minimized. He withdrew. Sometimes he went cold. Sometimes he got sharp. Sometimes he acted as if the problem was her tone, her timing, her emotions, her expectations.
Anything but the deeper truth:
He was out of his depth.
He loved his wife, but he did not know how to respond to her pain without feeling like a failure. He wanted peace, but every attempt at a real conversation seemed to end with both of them feeling further apart. He began to dread serious talks because they exposed how unprepared he was. She would bring up a specific hurt, and within minutes the whole thing would turn into a battle over his character, her delivery, old wounds, and mutual resentment.
Nothing got solved.
Over time, they started living like polite co-managers of a home. They handled the children. They discussed logistics. They got through dinner, chores, schedules, and sleep. But the marriage itself felt thin. Functional on the surface. Starving underneath.
He could sense her disappointment.
That was one of the worst parts.
He knew she wanted more from him. More steadiness. More initiative. More emotional strength. More spiritual seriousness. More clarity. More direction. More tenderness. And because he did not know how to become that man, her desire exposed rather than inspired.
So he stalled.
He told himself things would improve when work got easier, when stress went down, when she became calmer, when they had more time, when the children were older.
But the years kept passing, and the same patterns kept returning. The same circular arguments. The same distance. The same lonely feeling in the house.
He started to feel like he was failing at the one thing that mattered most.
Because no one had given him practical guidance for the daily work of marriage. He had never learned the habits that make a husband trustworthy in conflict, present in conversation, strong without harshness, and clear without domination:
- How to listen without collapsing.
- How to lead without controlling.
- How to speak without escalating.
- How to take responsibility without self-hatred.
- How to respond to his wife as a man, not as a wounded boy defending himself.
Why TF does AI-optimised metal look like bone?
Ask AI to optimise a bracket for strength and weight and it hands back something that looks grown, not built.
The physics behind this is very cool:
•What the software does. You give it a bounding box, the loads, and the anchor points. It models stress through the block as thousands of tiny springs - finite element analysis - then reinforces the cells carrying load and dials down the ones sitting idle. Over hundreds of iterations only the load-bearing material survives. It’s called topology optimisation, and the output is the most efficient distribution of material for that exact load case.
•Why does force moves in arcs, not straight lines? Any sharp corner creates a stress concentration - a local spike that fails first. The path of least resistance through a loaded solid is always curved, following the principal stress trajectories. Like water finding its way downhill, force takes the smoothest route. Lay material on those arcs and you get maximum strength per gram. Which is why the result always curves.
•Why does this look natural? Because evolution runs the identical loop: it deposits bone along stress lines and dissolves it where it sits idle and wastes energy.
The shapes aren’t biological or mechanical. They’re optimal. Evolution converged on them because wasting energy gets you outcompeted.
Different processes, same selection pressure.
What’s cool is we proved that these shapes were optimal in 1904. We just couldn’t build them until 3D printing arrived.