Rick Vugteveen

Hot take: Apple knows touch is a bad interface for laptops They’re using the new MacBook pro as a test bed for touch support on MacOS and they plan to have the iPad replace the MacBook and load MacOS in the future

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

Yes, this result cost millions of dollars. But remember that when @OpenAI announced o3 it cost ~$500,000 to score 87.5% on ARC-AGI 1. Today, Astra scores higher for ~$20. In 2025 it took us and GDM an enormous amount of compute to achieve IMO gold. For the 2026 IMO, anyone with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription could do it. Massively scaling test-time compute gives us a glimpse of the future. I believe that a year from now everyone will have an AI at their fingertips capable of solving problems of this caliber.

Jean Chrétien: "It looks like they don't know what to do. When your big thing is to change the name of a lake, it's because you're running out of arguments. It is a very weak gesture, to be cheap and nasty. Lake Ontario is not suffering. It's a lake."

China's solar fleet (1,288 GW) just overtook coal (1,285 GW) as the #1 power source by capacity, the 1st change in China's dominant power source in 144 years China's solar capacity alone now exceeds the EU's entire power grid. Coal still generated 49.7% of actual electricity in H1 2026 vs. 24.6% for wind+solar. But: Capacity leads, generation follows Wires chewing pipelines scmp.com/economy/china-econo…

We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65. We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life". You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets. I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long. My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite. TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.

The huge mass-timber roof of Freedom Mobile Arch, the new #PNE amphitheatre, doubles as a programmable light show. LED lights in the ceiling can be synchronized with concerts, performances & even fireworks, as seen on opening night. #vanre #vanpoli 1/3 dailyhive.com/vancouver/free…

Wow, the S&P Dow Jones Indices has just officially announced that they will NOT be changing their inclusion rules to make it easier for “MegaCap” companies (such as @SpaceX) to be fast-tracked into the S&P 500. Their reasoning: "S&P DJI determined that exceptions to the financial viability, seasoning, and IWF requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization. The decision not to adopt the proposed exceptions preserves core index principles by maintaining consistent application of these key requirements. Although there may be trade-offs between strict adherence to these eligibility requirements and broad representativeness, the current methodology provides substantial market coverage and sector balance. As a result, the indices can continue to meet their stated objectives while preserving their role as representative and investable benchmarks for the U.S. equity market. No changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF, for the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, or S&P SmallCap 600 as a result of the S&P Dow Jones Indices consultation on the treatment of MegaCap companies. Accordingly, there will be no changes to existing methodology for this index family." This means that the earliest @SpaceX could be eligible to be added to the S&P 500 would now be June 2027. The requirements that will now remain in place are: • No changes to S&P 500 eligibility rules for mega-cap companies. • Mega-cap companies will still need to wait 12 months after their IPO before being considered for S&P 500 inclusion. • S&P will not waive profitability requirements for mega-cap companies. The company must have positive GAAP net income in the most recent quarter, and the sum of the most recent four consecutive quarters. • S&P will not waive minimum public float requirements for mega-cap companies. At least 10% of a company's shares must be publicly tradable ("free float"). The S&P rejected proposals that would have: • Reduced the IPO seasoning period from 12 months to 6 months • Waived profitability requirements • Waived minimum public float requirements

.@KahlonRav says he’s hoping dialogue with MLS was genuine on Whitecaps but with news about bid from Las Vegas he says “if they’ve already made a decision to move the team I’d rather they just tell us.”

His lips to your ears Canadians. Wake the hell up.

UNDEFEATED.

Checking in from the Little Penguins Golden Ticket clinic... If Sid taped your stick, would you ever re-tape it?

Box CEO @levie's defense of software over vibe-coded, n-of-1 internal tools: "If you're Ford, and you're doing your supply chain on an ERP system, you want that to work the exact same way every single time." "The billions of transactions going through that ERP system, you cannot take for granted. So the idea that you're going to go vibe-code that is not possible, or at least not likely." "The other point is: your company has a fixed amount of IT resources. And you have to decide what you're going to spend your time on as an organization." "Do you want to spend time on rebuilding something that the market can supply you, that's seen best practices thousands of times? Or do you want to go and build that out with your n-of-1 experience?" "Or do you want to spend your limited, scarce resources on building software, and building experiences, that will make you more money, and that will actually be used by your customers?" "I think on the margin the average enterprise is going to spend their time and energy on the latter." "I'm 100% bullish on vibe-coding, 100% bullish that we're going to have 100x more software. But that still doesn't cross the threshold where I would want to go build our own CRM system."

This UI still looks better than half the apps today.

MICHAEL BURRY WARNS OF ‘EARNINGS FRAUD’ FROM EXTENDED ASSET LIVES “The Big Short” investor Michael Burry accused major tech firms of inflating profits by extending the useful life of equipment. He said hyperscalers’ Nvidia-driven spending should shorten, not lengthen, depreciation cycles, estimating $176 billion in understated depreciation from 2026–2028. Burry claims Oracle and Meta could overstate earnings by 27% and 21%, respectively, with more details coming Nov. 25.

U.S. CUSTOMS TORONTO AIRPORT TOP: Spring Break, 2025 BOTTOM: Spring Break, 2024

Here’s the annual picture. •This isn’t Fri or Sat, it’s a weekday •It’s not primetime, it’s 1pm •It’s not pros, it’s high school •It’s not the championship, it’s a quarterfinal …and an NHL arena is sold out and buzzing. The Minnesota State H.S. Hockey tourney is amazing.