“Our life is frittered away by detail.” Henry David Thoreau |
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| 1 | | Lula wins a fourth term in Brazil; Flávio Bolsonaro demands annulment Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took 51.8% to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.2% in Sunday’s runoff. Bolsonaro refuses to accept the result and is calling for the vote to be annulled. WHY Bolsonaro objects to a Supreme Court order, issued minutes before polls closed, that kept stations open two extra hours; Lula’s campaign had requested it over reported transport slowdowns, and Bolsonaro’s camp over rain in the south. Legal scholars quoted by ABC say the extension voids an election only if it impaired voters’ free choice. Watch whether he files a formal challenge. |
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| 2 | | Serbia’s Vučić concedes defeat to a student-led movement A projection by pollster CESID gives the Students’ List 138 of 250 seats and Vučić’s SNS 104, on turnout of nearly 70%, the highest since 1992, Reuters reports. Vučić conceded before final results. WHY The protests began after a station canopy in Novi Sad collapsed in 2024 and killed 16; students blame corruption. The list says it will root out graft and improve schooling, while Vučić calls the movement foreign-led. Next: who becomes prime minister, since the list’s candidates are largely unknown. |
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| 3 | | WHO launches the first vaccine trial against Congo’s Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak The TUMAINI Phase 2/3 trial enrolled its first participants in Bunia on Oct 23, testing vaccine candidates against the Bundibugyo species behind the outbreak. WHO counts 9,704 confirmed cases and 4,687 deaths in Congo as of Oct 20. WHY This outbreak is caused by a species that existing Ebola vaccines were not built for, so a trial run inside the outbreak is the fastest way to learn what protects. It uses ring vaccination of high-risk contacts; Oxford and Moderna candidates are expected to join next. |
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S&P 7,623.68 −0.52% | NDX 28,957.5 −0.00% | 10Y 4.99% — | BRENT $116.72 +3.14% | BTC — — |
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| Oil set the tone: Brent settled at its highest since April after fresh Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, reviving inflation worries and pushing the 10-year yield to just under 5%. Energy was the only clear gainer; chip stocks steadied after Thursday’s rout, which held the Nasdaq 100 flat. |
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Today’s question If convenience removes the friction of seeing people, what was the friction doing for us? |
ESSAY zarasurfs.substack.com · Zara Zaman A VC writing from northern Norway argues that rich societies optimised for speed, convenience and scale, and quietly priced out what best predicts a good life: other people. She traces the decline from village life through TV, cars, the internet and the pandemic, and frames loneliness as a coordination problem, not a personal failing. The hook is that she thinks the fix can be built, pointing to “JoyTech” startups like Timeleft and 222 that cap engagement and push people offline. Feeds your note: is convenience killing connection? |
ESSAY mishayurchenko.substack.com · Misha Yurchenko A mindfulness teacher near Tokyo drops his to-do list because it kept him anxious and always behind, and instead asks each morning what matters most; one day that meant a full weekday with his son. The experiments are deliberately small: improvising a hiking route instead of following the plan, writing without capitals. The candid part is the cost: he forgets chores, worries people think him lazy, and admits fear, not memory, is the real obstacle. Feeds your note: growth through surrender, not rigid plans. |
ESSAY Contraptions · Venkatesh Rao Rao argues computers were power tools, and AI is a motorcycle for the mind: it generates its own cognitive activity, so using it well takes surplus attention to supervise it. The core skill is learned self-regulation of attention, which he separates from “smarts,” the socially certified performance of intelligence. People fail with AI, he says, by driving it like a car, too slow and correcting too often. The open question: as models learn to balance themselves, balance is not direction, so the human job becomes intent and judgment. |
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WORKFLOW geoffreylitt.com Geoffrey Litt built a family butler that sends a morning brief to Telegram (calendars, weather, incoming mail, reminders) from one SQLite table of dated and undated “memories” plus cron jobs that call the Claude API. New abilities are just new importers: an hourly calendar pull, OCR’d postal mail, forwarded emails. His lesson is that shared context from many sources makes an assistant useful long before you need agent frameworks or retrieval. It is the clearest small blueprint for automating your own life. |
A friend-nudge butler Your notes say your purpose is building relationships and ask whether convenience erodes them; build a tiny bot that puts a little useful friction back. | 1 | On Val Town, create one SQLite table: name, last_talked, a line about what you last discussed. | | 2 | Add a daily cron that picks whoever you have gone longest without talking to and asks Claude to draft one specific opener from that line. | | 3 | Send it to yourself by email; replying “done” updates last_talked. |
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STARTUPS tech.eu Daytona gives each AI agent an isolated computer it can spin up, pause and resume through one API; FirstMark led the round. It names Anthropic, OpenAI and NVIDIA as customers and says its revenue run rate rose 25-fold from January to September. The bet: if companies run thousands of agents, sandboxes become a cloud primitive like storage. |
PREDICTION MARKETS federalregister.gov The CFTC proposes to classify sports, political, cultural and weather event contracts explicitly as swaps, arguing they already fit the statute. The point is jurisdiction: swaps sit under the agency’s exclusive authority, which it cites against states applying gambling law to exchanges, the fight Novig’s Ludlow is in with Missouri. Comments close Nov 18; the rule is already being argued in CFTC v. New York. |
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Tool Host small scripts at a live URL with cron jobs, SQLite and inbound email. It is what Litt’s Stevens runs on, and the fastest path to today’s Try. | | Blog A physicist’s personal essays on tools for thought, science and meaning. Start with “Developing creative identity.” |
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Until tomorrow. Mon 26 Oct · 09:36 ET |
