Latest posts
- The war between fast and legitimate is hereMay 07, 2026JA Westenberg
The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of “high-risk” systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators
- Emotional regulation is a dying art.May 06, 2026JA Westenberg
There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. When bad news arrived at the dinner table, we finished the meal anyway. In hindsight, you could call
- Outrage is letting someone else set the frameMay 05, 2026JA Westenberg
William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers. Three years later, when his correspondent Frederic Remington cabled from
- On wintering.Apr 29, 2026JA Westenberg
The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.
- The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen againApr 27, 2026JA Westenberg
We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.
- Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decayApr 23, 2026JA Westenberg
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.
- How we lost the living NowApr 20, 2026JA Westenberg
Before 1840, noon in Bristol happened about ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much cared. The railway needed a common minute or it couldn't run - and that common minute is now a common nanosecond, shipped in real time.
- I truly hate mostpeopleslopApr 16, 2026JA Westenberg
In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence." That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a
- Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shitApr 13, 2026JA Westenberg
In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia - the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest military fuckups of all time. He had no coherent supply plan for feeding them, he had no realistic timeline for
- Optimism is not a personality flawApr 12, 2026JA Westenberg
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons raining from orbit, and schools held duck-and-cover drills. Eisenhower's approval rating cratered and the smartest people in Washington agreed that America had fallen
- Why I quit "The Strive"Apr 10, 2026JA Westenberg
I spent about a decade waking up at 6am and checking my follower count before I brushed my teeth. Refreshing analytics while the coffee brewed, reading Y Combinator essays, networking on Twitter and trying to reverse-engineer what made people break out. I'd look at every piece of creative
- The Hacker News tarpitApr 06, 2026JA Westenberg
Hacker News is a web application with the following features: a list of links, sorted by votes. Comments under those links, also sorted by votes. User accounts with karma. A text submission option. A jobs board. That's it; that's the entire product. The database schema would
- The AI writing witchhunt is pointless.Apr 04, 2026JA Westenberg
Alexandre Dumas ran what was essentially a content production house in 19th century Paris. His most famous collaborator was Auguste Maquet, who wrote substantial portions of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would produce drafts and outlines, and Dumas would rewrite and polish them, but the
- The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneursApr 03, 2026JA Westenberg
I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers. I made him say it twice. Jade face rollers. He'd found
- Time is a User-InterfaceApr 02, 2026JA Westenberg