NYT - Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself

Ezra Klein’s analysis in NY Times cuts through the noise to explain what we’re actually witnessing: not crisis management, but crisis generation as governing philosophy. The Bannon playbook (move fast, flood the zone, overwhelm attention) worked until it didn’t. Now the administration drowns in its own turbulence.

I try not to get into the daily news thrash from Trumpistan, but I occasionally find articles that elevate above the din and provide insight. This is one of them.

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The community model for news

Watching from Australia as American journalism tears itself apart, it’s hard not to feel a strange mix of recognition and regret. Each week brings another round of layoffs, another editorial board overruled by its owner, another reminder that the people who fund news are not the people it’s meant to serve. Dave Winer wants news to work. So do i. And reading his proposal for community news organisations, I found myself thinking: we’ve seen this model succeed before.

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• Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses (tech.slashdot.org) Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis have faced at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since 2025, with the company’s voluntary software update failing to fix the problem.

• Post-Brexit sales of British farm products to EU fall by 37% (theguardian.com) British farm product exports to the EU have fallen by 37% in the 5 years since Brexit in 2021. Rebuilding demand for British products in Europe will take time. IMHO it was needless economic suicide driven by popularism and bankrolled by external forces.

• Claude Code is the Inflection Point (developers.slashdot.org) Anthropic’s Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent, now authors about 4% of all public commits on GitHub. SemiAnalysis projects this figure will exceed 20% by 2026.

• 3 ways to fix Australia’s affordability crisis (firstlinks.com.au) There are no easy fixes but we need to look at options. This outlines three ways to address Australia’s affordability crisis: increasing housing supply, reforming planning laws, and improving public transport.

The week that was

Busy week. 19 blog posts. 99 articles stashed for deeper study. It’s sometimes too easy to get buried in detail and lose sight of the bigger picture. So I had Claude Code help me out with a word cloud (above) and summary below.

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Automated cover-up fails

In one of the siloed social media cess pits Quadcarl said this

I’m not a very smart man but it looks to me like a computer thought this said Don and redacted it. In case you don’t realize it yet this is a big cover-up.

I had to go to original source and verify.

The original file is available for your inspection at: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02440040.pdf

Update: The easiest access to the “Epstein Files” is via The Jmail Suite - an interactive archive that lets you explore Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, documents, photos, flight logs, and more as if you were logged into his accounts. What started as a viral project in November 2025 has grown into a full suite of apps, powered by three major data releases.

The dirty work nobody wants to do is suddenly getting done

Every programmer knows the code rewrite conversation. The codebase has drifted. Security vulnerabilities are piling up. The platform you’re running on is three versions behind. It needs fixing, but nobody wants to touch it.

The economics are brutal. Thousands of hours rewriting working code to do exactly what it already does. Management looks at the spreadsheet and sees massive cost with zero new features. Engineers look at the backlog and wonder why they signed up to translate code line by line when they could be building something new.

This is where agentic AI tools are starting to shift the calculation.

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• So the Epstein scandal is about politics? Silly me for thinking it’s about the mass abuse of women and girls (theguardian.com) Hyde dismantles the partisan point-scoring around the Epstein files, arguing it lets the powerful escape accountability while victims are sidelined yet again.

• We had s*x in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands (bbc.com) Eric and his girlfriend unknowingly had their intimate hotel stay in Shenzhen, China broadcast to thousands of strangers on a social media channel.

• Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files - Martin Alderson (martinalderson.com) Anthropic’s legal tool, a collection of 13 markdown files, caused a $285 billion sell-off in SaaS company valuations on the public markets. Over-reaction? Or the first volleys in a new battle?

• Introducing About the Song, a New Way to Explore the Stories Behind the Music — Spotify (newsroom.spotify.com) Spotify’s new feature on iOS/Android provides stories and context about the music users are listening to. The feature, currently in beta, displays short, swipeable cards in Now Playing View. Available in 6 countries including Australia.

The Economist has been quietly sharing its data since 2018

I only just found out. While we’ve been wringing our hands about media transparency and reproducibility, The Economist has been publishing its data sets on GitHub for the better part of a decade. They’ve been building this out steadily, adding more repositories and refining their approach.

The centrepiece is the Big Mac Index. First published in 1986 as a tongue-in-cheek guide to currency valuation, the index uses Big Mac prices across countries to measure purchasing power parity. It’s become one of the most cited informal economic indicators in the world. Since 2018, you’ve been able to download the complete historical data set going back to 2000, along with the R code that crunches the numbers.

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  • GPT 5.3 Codex vs. Opus 4.6: The Great Convergence (every.to) Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex are converging in capability, making model choice increasingly about workflow fit rather than raw performance gaps. A detailed comparison of where each still differentiates.

  • Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions (code.claude.com) Claude Code now supports multi-agent orchestration — spinning up teams of Claude Code sessions that coordinate on shared tasks via inter-agent messaging. Moves Claude Code from single-agent tool use toward managing parallel workstreams.

  • First solar-battery hybrid sends power into evening peak (reneweconomy.com.au) Potentia Energy’s Quorn Park facility in South Australia is the first solar-battery hybrid to dispatch power into the evening demand peak — when solar alone can’t contribute. A proof point for the co-located storage model that could reshape grid economics across the National Energy Market.

  • The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams (slashdot.org) The European Commission is piloting a Matrix-based messaging platform as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Teams, citing inflexibility and digital sovereignty concerns. If adopted, it would be one of the largest institutional deployments of the Matrix protocol to date.

New AI apps are Mac first

It’s a long time since anyone called Apple “beleaguered.” That word followed the company like a shadow through the late 1990s. Now Apple Silicon machines are the default launch platform for the most significant AI tools being built.

In the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic released major agentic desktop apps exclusively on macOS. Not Windows. Not Linux. Mac only.

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