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Essays

  • 3 min read

Analyst on China's Spent Rocket Stages: Things Only Continue to Get Worse

Source: Ars Technica
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: Eric Berger

TL;DR

China's rapid expansion in orbital launches is being accompanied by a systemic failure to properly dispose of rocket upper stages, directly contradicting long-established international space debris mitigation norms. With China potentially launching over 1,000 rockets in the next decade for megaconstellations, the orbital debris problem is accelerating dangerously.

  • 3 min read

Council of High Intelligence: Multi-Model AI Deliberation

Source: 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence on GitHub
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: 0xNyk

TL;DR

A framework that convenes 18 AI personas (Aristotle, Feynman, Kahneman, Torvalds, and more) across multiple LLM providers for structured multi-round deliberation on hard decisions. The key insight: a single LLM gives one confident reasoning path, while the council surfaces structured disagreement, cross-examination, and synthesis across diverse intellectual traditions.

  • 3 min read

Your Ultimate Guide to Attention Mechanism, QKV, and KV Cache

Source: Your Ultimate Guide to Attention Mechanism, QKV, and KV Cache
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: Turing Post

TL;DR

A comprehensive guide to the attention mechanism that powers modern Transformers. The article traces attention from its 2014 origins in neural machine translation through the 2017 Transformer revolution, explaining QKV, self-attention, multi-head attention, and modern efficiency variants like KV cache, MQA, GQA, and Multi-Head Latent Attention.

  • 4 min read

How I Read

Source: How I Read
Date Published: 2026-05-27
Author: Rob Henderson

TL;DR

Rob Henderson reads ~40-50 books per year (plus ~100 excerpts/skimmed) without being a speed reader. His method: slow, active reading treated as a non-negotiable habit — not a productivity hack. Morning coffee + 25 pages minimum, phone discipline, multiple books cycling simultaneously, and the unflinching willingness to DNF (Do Not Finish) unworthy books.

  • 3 min read

A Boomer, But An Augustinian: On Magnifica Humanitas

Source: A Boomer, But An Augustinian: On Magnifica Humanitas
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: Jacob Phillips (Professor of Systematic Theology, St. Mary's University)

TL;DR

Jacob Phillips reads Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence through the lens of the Tower of Babel. The text presents a "decidedly Augustinian" vision that grounds human grandeur in our creaturely limits, directly opposing the "technocratic paradigm" and the "grandiosity of the machine."

  • 3 min read

Repentance and Forgiveness in a Pornified Age

Source: Repentance and Forgiveness in a Pornified Age
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: Liana Graham (Heritage Foundation) & Scott Yenor (Claremont Institute)

TL;DR

The ubiquity of internet pornography has created a quiet crisis that fundamentally undermines marriage. Neither total tolerance nor rigid judgmentalism works. The solution lies in a difficult, old-fashioned dynamic: male repentance and female forgiveness, modeled in classic literature and rooted in Christian mercy.

  • 3 min read

The AI Decoupling: How the Tech Economy Split in Two

Source: The AI Decoupling
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: Pierre-Carl Langlais, Vintage Data

TL;DR

Starting in May 2025, the tech economy structurally split into two: SaaS/Cloud suffered its largest sell-off since the pandemic, while AI Labs and Infrastructure soared into a separate high-margin ecosystem. This decoupling is driven not by hype but by hard technological breakthroughs in sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference, synthetic data pipelines, and Model-IP protections that fundamentally broke the economic assumptions of the previous software era.

  • 3 min read

The Shocking Truth About Fairness

Source: The Shocking Truth About Fairness
Date Published: 2026-05-26
Author: Lionel Page (Optimally Irrational)

TL;DR

Fairness norms are not universal moral absolutes. They are pragmatic social solutions that, in the long run, reflect the distribution of bargaining power in a given society. Using game theory and historical examples from feudal, slave, and patriarchal societies, Lionel Page argues that what we consider "fair" is shaped by who holds power — not by abstract moral principles.

  • 3 min read

The Timing of the Impending Crude Crisis

Source: The Timing of the Impending Crude Crisis
Date Published: 2026-05-22 (Amended May 25, 2026)
Author: Robin Brooks & Ben Harris, Brookings Institution

TL;DR

Despite a ~20% global oil supply shock from the Strait of Hormuz closure (the largest disruption ever), crude prices have not yet hit catastrophic levels. This is because rapidly depleting temporary buffers are masking the true scale of the crisis. The authors project a timeline: by mid-July all buffers are exhausted, prices could hit $150/barrel, and the shift from a contained shock to a full-blown global recession is mathematically baked in.