Starting a new initiative this summer, weekly live events on Substack about the core issues facing our democracy, featuring great speakers. This Thursday, 1PM ET, an hour with the great @jasmine.bsky.social on all things work, AI, and the emerging populist backlash. Event link in replies.

Really thoroughly reported piece here, impressively done www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/o...

I found this enlightening and disturbing, with an unexpected silver lining: “The technology is an opportunity for gutsy politicians… to push ideas that are usually too radical for moderate voters to swallow.” (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/o... Kudos to @jasmine.bsky.social

AI is moving faster than anyone can keep up with — including the people building it. So we're bringing in reinforcements. On April 9, join us for a live taping of “Pacific Standard Time," with journalist @jasmine.bsky.social to make sense of the chaos. Enter to win tickets: bit.ly/3QfhdYU

"Sam Altman has predicted that large language models will soon be capable of 'fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics" — but, "might be able to extrude only something equivalent to 'a real poet’s okay poem'" @jasmine.bsky.social on what sets writing apart

the real AI alignment problem is Pete Hegseth. here’s my explainer & take on Anthropic vs. the Pentagon — jasmi.news/p/ai-pentagon

Today’s pod is with one of my favorite writers covering the culture of technology in the Bay Area. @jasmine.bsky.social came on to describe the AI boom/hype from ground level in SF and we get deep into what the people building these tools actually believe www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/202...

incredibly fun lede by @jasmine.bsky.social about the DCA perimeter rule (a favorite topic of mine) and the rest of her observations about SF/DC divide and similarities jasmi.news/p/ai-populis...

If you're intrigued by Claude Code but also feel overwhelmed, I can recommend this more personal account of trying it out by Jasmine Sun: jasmi.news/p/claude-co...

A self-identified “engineer” went viral on Reddit (& on social media) w/damning allegations about one of the food delivery apps. Then they circulated a legit-looking “internal document” to journalists, including me. The whole thing was an AI-generated scam intended to smear Uber. Here’s the story

The Peptide Craze in the US. It's reckless and unfounded. erictopol.substack.com/p/the-peptid... Today @nytimes.com @jasmine.bsky.social goes deep into the use in Silicon Valley, the supply from China, and the reasons this biohacking is popular t.co/lQXUBHNEaG

I’m quoted in today’s @nytimes.com on the "Chinese peptides" trend in SF. She asked about the "founder mindset" applied to biology. My take: "The entrepreneurial parallel isn't funding a scrappy start-up. It's wiring money to an unregistered offshore entity based on a pitch deck." buff.ly/n5nEob

Reporting live from the legendary Bimbo’s in SF, @elirosenberg.bsky.social on the Substack AI debate party with @jasmine.bsky.social, @bcmerchant.bsky.social and others, where the vibe was … surprisingly congenial? www.hardresetmedia.com/p/live-debat...

jasmi.news/p/ai-friends... This is very good, and close in some ways to the Fourcade and @kjhealy.co account of social media, under which it's co-constituted by users rather than being forced on them.

"If the world is going to split into the techno kings and the techno peasants, I better prove that I'm gonna stay on top" - @jasmine.bsky.social describing veiled AI anxiety in San Francisco for The Indicator

Everywhere you look these days in San Francisco, there's a new zine, magazine, literary journal, or newspaper. At Chat Room: Analog on Nov. 19, @cydhayes.bsky.social will sit down with @jasmine.bsky.social, @laurenmarkham.bsky.social, and @ovillalon.bsky.social to discuss SF's print boom.

A rare first-person account of experiencing AI-induced psychosis, from a young tech founder who "should have known better" joinreboot.org/p/ai-psychosis

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are racing to grab a chunk of AI capital and equity as it races upward. Meanwhile the rest of us face a dilemma: "Are you going to be the piggy or be the one making the slop?"

“Neo-hustle-culture is a modern twist on Weber’s Protestant ethic: if the world is soon to be divided into the blessed and the damned, the techno-kings and the techno-peasants, anxious technologists should work as hard as they can to prove they deserve to end up on the right side of that divide.”

The latest episode of @kaiserkuo.bsky.social's essential Sinica podcast features @jasmine.bsky.social who is a great China tech watcher. This was one of the topics that they discussed and I very much enjoyed it. It's totally worth your valuable time.

really good exploration of silicon valley's collective nervous breakdown as its anxieties about deskilling, diminishing returns, etc manifest themselves in self-flattering memes. total sweaty desperation. look at my leading industry dawg we're all going to die

@jasmine.bsky.social excellent choice youtu.be/6TNg34K85-8?...

Congrats to @jasmine.bsky.social and all our friends at Reboot for 5 years of bold, optimistic thinking! We applaud this renewed manifesto, centering human agency in how technology is created and developed. Here’s to 5 more!

Stumbled into @jasmine.bsky.social's Kernel vol 5 launch party for joinreboot.org last night and boy oh boy was it a needle trip moment. Just when I was losing hope in finding the thread of moral imperative in the Bay Area tech scene! On to Open Sauce conf this weekend.

Some positive, growth oriented thinking about AI in creative endeavors. jasmi.news/p/32-notes-o...

Worth a read. A great list of short insights, thoughts, and observations on GenAI, creativity, and implications…

From @jasmine.bsky.social jasmi.news/p/32-notes-o...: 15. AI hallucinates, humans misremember. Yet neuroscience suggests that memory and imagination are one and the same. Per Demis Hassabis’s PhD thesis: amnesiacs make shoddy novelists."

I wanted to better understand (and complicate!) the “tech right,” so I interviewed an anonymous startup founder who supported Trump in 2024. He regrets it now. I found our conversation fascinating 🧵 jasmi.news/p/fit-to-rule

"Most of us have designed our lives around using the objects and tools that other people made. It takes a change of mindset to go from 'I wish I had an app for that' to 'Why not build it myself?'"

chatgpt 4o's sycophancy & genocide grok were problems of human/social misalignment — not model misalignment. unfortunately companies are much more incentivized to solve the latter than the former new essay on the hard problem of aligning AI: jasmi.news/p/alignment

very excited to be collaborating with Kevin on this book project!

“AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing.” [jasmi.news]

What if instead of The Terminator and The Matrix, we used Severance and South Park to think about AI?

Great stuff from @jasmine.bsky.social on the return to an "oral-first" culture... joinreboot.org/p/talk-is-ch...

new podcast — WHAT DOGE GETS WRONG ft. @audreyt.org Audrey is the anti-Elon: a prodigy hacker who joined the Taiwan government to improve efficiency she shows why *social intelligence* is needed to successfully leverage frontier tech transcript & video here: jasmi.news/p/doing-doge...

A heartfelt essay by @jasmine.bsky.social wsun about the fates of Taiwanese and American democracy. On the metaphor of Taipei's famous garbage collection, before 1994, it was just thrown onto huge gross piles on street corners. Doing it better was a civic choice. jasmi.news/p/taiwan-2025

Democracy isn’t something you have, it's something you practice — daily. 🔄 @jasmine.bsky.social beautifully captures Taiwan’s civic heartbeat and why active participation matters now more than ever. 🌻 jasmi.news/p/taiwan-2025

Stanford students want in on the military tech gold rush

My Stanford years were defined by heated protests against tech work for ICE and the US military 5 years later, defense-tech is cool again, and I returned to campus to find out why. New article for @sfstandard.com: sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/s...

Everything is vibes now? Great convo with Head of Design at Substack + @jasmine.bsky.social Bonus: No reading required open.spotify.com/episode/3W65...

really loved editing this essay from eileen ahn in reboot on the limits of biological data collection, phenomenology, and (literally) swapping spit joinreboot.org/p/my-biologi...

we’ll need a new personal ethic for living alongside AI open.substack.com/pub/jasmine/...

in search of: manifestos, explorations, and hot takes pitches for kernel magazine issue 5 are now open! this issue's theme is RULES🎛️ how we make them & how they make us; how they restrict & how they generate; how they arrive from above & below more info here: joinreboot.org/p/kernel-5-p...

Tech companies like OpenAI are in the grip of a new Red Scare — and talented immigrants are getting caught in the crossfire.

The obsession with Chinese spies is an own-goal for AI. Chinese scientists, workers, and founders *want* to work in Silicon Valley, but an atmosphere of hostility & suspicion is pushing them out. New from me for @businessinsider.com (1/7) www.businessinsider.com/chinese-spie...