“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” Seneca |
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| 1 | | Iran says more tankers burned in Hormuz as Trump weighs strikes or a deal Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say five tankers and a tugboat caught fire on Thursday and two more today after hitting mines near the strait. Maritime officials have not confirmed this; US Central Command says it has cleared all mines. WHY Iran says it will not settle until the US ends its naval blockade, stops fighting on all regional fronts and eases sanctions; Trump says he has no immediate plans for strikes but remains “locked and loaded.” Qatari mediators expect feedback on a new proposal within days. |
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| 2 | | Toll from Russian strike on Ukrainian aid centre reaches 42 before Abu Dhabi talks Ukrainian police put the death toll at 42 from Monday’s bombing of a humanitarian aid centre in Komyshuvakha, in the Zaporizhzhia region. US envoy Steve Witkoff says trilateral talks with Russia and Ukraine will be held in Abu Dhabi on November 10–11. WHY Zelenskiy seeks Article 5-style US guarantees backed by a vote in Congress and rejects neutrality; Russia’s deputy foreign minister says Ukraine must drop its NATO ambitions and bar foreign troops. |
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| 3 | | An implant lowered blood sugar in diabetic mice without insulin or drugs ETH Zurich researchers reported in Science a device whose inorganic catalyst converts excess blood glucose into gluconate, which is excreted in urine. It regulated blood sugar in diabetic mice over six weeks, and the animals lost weight. WHY A glucose sensor signals a phone or watch, which switches the entirely inorganic catalyst on and off in a closed loop. It has not yet been tested in humans. |
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| 4 | | Montenegro could sign its EU accession treaty by June 2027 The European Commission set out an indicative timeline this week that would have Montenegro close its remaining 12 negotiating chapters by year-end and sign in June 2027. WHY The Commission calls the date indicative, and Germany is pressing Croatia to settle disputes that could block entry. Six chapters are due to close this month; all 27 members must then approve the treaty. |
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S&P 7,353.7 −4.36% | NDX 26,629.8 −6.36% | 10Y 4.84% −6bp | BRENT $98.29 +3.9% | BTC $76.1k — |
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| The S&P had its worst day since April 2025 as chip and AI-infrastructure stocks collapsed, with the Philadelphia semiconductor index down more than 12%, on fears that Democrats’ midterm wins will slow data-center construction. Brent recovered part of Wednesday’s drop of nearly 9% on renewed Iran supply risk. |
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| Two people who built their lives on hard skills are asking what remains once a machine can do the skill. Vijay Pande says we became robots first, and AI merely reveals it. Benoit Henry says the loss is real and he is grieving it. They disagree about whether that is good news, but share a premise: worth tied to output was always rented. |
Today’s question What would you refuse to hand to an agent, even if it did the job better? |
ESSAY Substack · Vijay Pande Pande, a protein-folding professor turned investor, argues that modern people became “a robot with a person attached”: we know ourselves through what we do, so AI taking over the doing exposes who is left. He leans on a German panel of more than 24,000 people in which job loss lowered life satisfaction even after reemployment. His test is blunt: do the hours AI returns go to a longer list or to the person? Feeds your note on agents buying mental freedom at the cost of autonomy. |
ESSAY Proofs and Prompts · Benoit Henry A working mathematician writes partly to mourn: with AI he solved in hours a statistical problem he had estimated at years, and he has not written code in about a year and a half. His conclusion is that mathematicians should stop owning results, work openly under team names, and drop publication counts in hiring. The grief is the real subject: what do you do with a skill that stopped being rare? Pushes your note that taste now outranks technical ability. |
STORY opentextbc.ca · Katherine Mansfield On a bright, cool afternoon, a solitary woman takes her fur from its box and goes to the public garden to listen to the band and overhear strangers, composing them into a story with a place in it for herself. Mansfield (1920) stays so close to her mind that the reader sees only the world she has imagined, which is why it has lasted: it tests how a private picture of one’s life holds up in front of others. Connects to your notes on mental paths and Sartre’s gaze. |
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WORKFLOW jxnl.co · Jason Liu Liu teaches agents through one job everyone understands: a daily briefing that gains one capability at a time. It climbs from asking what’s on today, to a saved preferences file, a recurring run, separate briefs per project, drafted replies, and finally a vault of inspectable memory files read before each run. His firm line is that the agent drafts and the human sends. Same author as the taste essay you liked. |
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MARKETS Reuters via Yahoo Finance An election result got priced as an AI input: investors sold the data-center chain after Democrats won Congress and states where opposition to new centers is growing. About $3 trillion of S&P value went in a day. One portfolio manager called it capitulation but said the moves looked outsized, leaving open whether voters or sentiment set this price. |
PREDICTION MARKETS Covers Kalshi and Polymarket had Democrats at 93% and 95% for the House and 75% each for the Senate, and both calls landed. The misses are the interesting part: Annie Andrews beat a roughly 70% favorite in South Carolina, and Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott, priced near 65%. A lost favorite isn’t necessarily a wrong price, which is the catch in reading collective belief. |
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Tool The Python animation engine behind 3Blue1Brown’s math videos, maintained by a community. Suits a short video essay built on one precise visual. | | Newsletter Aaron Mazel-Gee’s memoir of leaving academia, and of giving his whole self to math, “an abstract entity” that couldn’t love him back. Start with this introduction. |
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Until tomorrow. Fri 06 Nov · 09:36 ET |
