“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…” Henry David Thoreau |
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| 1 | | Israel’s election ends with no bloc at a majority With about half the votes counted, Netanyahu’s bloc had 55 seats and Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc 49, short of the 61 needed in the 120-seat Knesset, according to partial results reported by Ynet. Arab parties had 16. WHY The vote was widely framed as a referendum on Netanyahu after the Oct. 7 attack. Eisenkot says the public “chose change” and wants Netanyahu to step down; Netanyahu is calling on Zionist parties to unite. Next: a final count that may run into Friday, then President Herzog’s consultations. |
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| 2 | | Houthis claim missile strike on Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery Yemen’s Houthis said a ballistic missile caused a fire at Ras Tanura on Tuesday. Saudi authorities have not confirmed the attack; Bloomberg, citing a source, reported a fire near the terminal was contained. WHY The Houthis have escalated attacks on Saudi Arabia since September, opening another front in the US-Israeli war on Iran. Nearly all Saudi oil exports pass through Ras Tanura and Yanbu, which the group has also targeted. Watch whether Riyadh confirms damage and how it responds. |
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| 3 | | A local ceasefire opens Oleshky to aid and evacuations Russia and Ukraine began a localized ceasefire on Tuesday around Oleshky, a Russian-occupied town on the Dnipro opposite Kherson, to allow aid deliveries and evacuations. WHY The town faces acute shortages of food and medicine. Russia’s defense ministry says it halted shelling toward Kherson; Ukraine’s negotiator Dmytro Lubinets says Kyiv is honoring its commitments. Next: whether the humanitarian operation completes and the pause holds. |
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| 4 | | A hidden cause of severe bowel disease, found in the blood An Oxford-led study of more than 4,900 people with inflammatory bowel disease found that about 3.5% carry antibodies that neutralize IL-10, a protein that normally holds gut inflammation in check. WHY It explains why a gene variant linked to severe IBD 30 years ago matters, and suggests a blood test could identify these patients. Next: treatments aimed at the antibodies, or the cells that make them. |
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S&P 7,722.6 +0.60% | NDX — — | 10Y 4.99% +0.4bp | BRENT $113.88 −1.67% | BTC $81.2k +1.81% |
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| Tech led a rebound, with the Nasdaq Composite up 1.18%, as investors lined up for Big Tech earnings after Anthropic’s IPO filing. Brent slipped as attention turned to Middle East talks, and the Fed’s two-day meeting ends today with no change expected. |
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| Two pieces today make the same case from different rooms. Kristen Freeland opens a half-renovated house to her family and finds that the mess is what let people in. Robin Sloan spends a week building an app with four users, all of them his family, and calls it cooking. Neither cares about scale. Both suggest the useful question is not how to remove friction from life, but which friction is holding something up, and what small, slightly inefficient thing you could make for the people already near you. |
Today’s question Which inconvenience in your life would you keep on purpose, because it keeps someone close? |
ESSAY Substack · Kristen Freeland Freeland argues that loneliness may depend less on how many people we know than on how willing we are to be inconvenienced by them. Her daughter’s fourth birthday, held mid-renovation with store-bought food, put cousins who mostly knew each other through FaceTime at one table, and became a monthly “(not)Perfect Potluck” with paper plates and no cleaning. She admits she loves convenience and is not giving it up, so the real question is which interruptions to protect. Feeds your note on convenience eroding connection. |
ESSAY robinsloan.com · Robin Sloan Sloan argues that software made for a handful of people, with no plan to scale, is closer to home cooking than to a product. He built BoopSnoop, a family-only messaging app, in about a week (half of it lost to code signing); it has four daily users and they still use it years later. With agents, a week of work shrinks toward an afternoon, which leaves the harder question of what you would build if your only users were people you love. Feeds your note on building when ideas feel scarce. |
Go deeper |
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WORKFLOW Claude Academy Anthropic’s free course teaches Claude Code in 12 lessons and about 90 minutes and covers the Explore, Plan, Code, Commit workflow. The second half covers the pieces that make an agent yours: a CLAUDE.md for your conventions, subagents and skills for repeated tasks, MCP connections and hooks as guardrails. You finish with a setup tuned to your own projects rather than a demo app, which is where most of the speed in vibe coding comes from. |
A home-cooked app for six friends Build a tiny shared board for a monthly low-effort dinner, where anyone can claim a date and say what they’ll bring, so gathering gets one tap easier without getting any less real. | 1 | In Claude Code’s Plan Mode, describe one page: upcoming dates, who is coming, what each person brings. Ask for a single HTML file backed by PocketBase. | | 2 | Run PocketBase locally, have Claude wire the page to it, and write a CLAUDE.md with your conventions so the next session starts where you left off. | | 3 | Put it online, text the link to six friends, and claim the first date yourself. |
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AI MODELS BleepingComputer OpenAI’s new mid-tier model is built for agents that click through software. It costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output, half its predecessors, runs more than three times faster, and scored 50.3% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 versus 21.5% for GPT-5.6 Terra. When computer use gets this cheap, the bottleneck in automating your own chores moves from cost to knowing what to automate. |
PREDICTION MARKETS OPB / NPR Shana Bautista, a former FBI official, runs a 16-person team that cross-checks traders against social media, FEC records, banking partners and statistical models, and says it sees “hundreds of alerts a day.” The tension for anyone in the industry: a market exists to pull private information into a price, so the line between informed trading and insider trading is something each platform now draws for itself. |
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Blog One-line rules from Wired’s co-founder, like “the right time is right now.” Each is a seed for a one-minute video. | | Tool An open-source backend in one file: database, auth, file storage and an admin panel. Enough for any home-cooked app. |
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Until tomorrow. Wed 28 Oct · 09:36 ET |
