This week’s question comes to us from April Piluso:

My daughter turns 3 this month. I want to help her have fewer troubles than I did by teaching her about boundaries, values, independent thinking etc. I think if more kids learned this stuff, we’d have more good humans and fewer jerks. What do YOU think every kid should grow up knowing?

Every kid should grow up knowing they are loved.

Everything else is pretty close to a rounding error. Ok, maybe not a rounding error. I’m exaggerating to make a point. But honestly, there is nothing a child needs more in life than knowing they are loved. Love can make up for a lack of a lot, but a lack of love is very hard to make up for.

Regular readers of this newsletter will now be familiar that I didn’t grow up in the best household. I grew up in an abusive household. I also grew up poor. And when I look back on my childhood, growing up poor wasn’t really a big deal. It was just a fact of life. And to be clear, poor is very subjective. We always had a roof over our head. We didn’t miss meals. I knew we were poor because every Sunday my parents would pile us in the car and go for a drive around the rich neighborhoods in town, getting progressively more upset about our own circumstances, and blaming each other—and their kids—for not being able to live in one of those fancy houses. Meanwhile, my brothers and I sat in the back seat, being as quiet as possible so as to not draw my father’s growing anger. We didn’t know we were poor until my father started hitting us for being poor.

I’ll tell you a story, but first—some cultural background: in Portugal, where my parents grew up, if you had a house for rent you’d make a paper cutout and tape it to the windows. (This was pre-internet, obviously.) The cutout could be any of a number of things, probably made by whichever kid the landlord deemed to be “the artistic one.” No, I don’t know how this started, and it’s not the point of our story so I’m not looking it up.

One Sunday afternoon, we’re driving around doing our routine wealth tourism on The Mail Line, and my dad stops the car. He pulls over.

“Go see if that house is for rent.”

I turn towards the house he’s pointing at. This thing was an old-school two-story mansion. Very old-Philadelphia money. Whoever built it probably has their name on a hospital now. Anyway, I ask him why he thinks the house (that we obviously cannot afford) is for rent.

“You see the cut-outs on the window?”

“Yeah, it’s Christmas. Those are snowflakes.”

The slap came before I finished the sentence. Followed by the scream to get the fuck out of the car and do what I was told. So off I went, crying. I rang the doorbell. Some unsuspecting stranger opened the door, wondering why some crying kid was standing there and asking if the house was for rent, even though I knew it was not. He seemed understandably confused, but politely told me it was not, then closed the door. Receding, I’m sure, to a nearby curtain that he could peek out of. (Or possibly straight to the phone to call the police about immigrants in the neighborhood.) I walked back to the car, knowing what was coming. And when I told him the house wasn’t for rent, sure enough—it came. Right across the face. We drove home in silence, where he dropped us all off and went off to do something else with people who were not his family, who he hated.

So yeah, when I think back on growing up, it’s not the lack of anything—except the lack of love—that I think about. Love and safety. Made all the more worse because every once in a while I’d get a glimpse of what those things were like. Sometimes he’d come home in a good mood. Sometimes he’d muss my hair on the way in. But those times were rare, but the fact that they existed at all let me know that they were possible, which made it that much crueler.

Fast forward decades to a therapist’s office where my therapist—who I’m sure isn’t reading this—is telling me that my own relationships are falling apart because how am I supposed to love anyone else when I never learned what love was like growing up. (Yes, my therapist is RuPaul.) If you were raised in a similar environment, please believe me when I tell you that it is never too late to learn how to love. You don’t have to carry your parents’ sins into your relationship with your own children.

Every kid should grow up knowing they are loved.

Telling a child you love them is free.

Also, while I by no means an expert in the field, and my opinions should be treated with much salt, I tend to believe that children are born good. They’re born full of love. They’re born full of confidence. (How fucking confident do you have to be to take that first step?!) They’re born curious. They’re born wanting to be part of a community. It’s not so much that we need to teach them these things, as much as we need to encourage them to keep believing these things. And protect them from people who would work to destroy those things.

Yes, this is about AI. The AI industry can only succeed if it separates people from their joy and their confidence. An industry run by people who were not raised with love, attempting to steal it from others.

I’ve written about this before, but every child is born loving to draw. They draw on everything. They demand crayons in restaurants. They draw on your walls. You should let them do so. Fuck your walls. It’s easier to eventually paint over a wall, than to rebuild a child’s confidence.

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved. Children are so ready to love you back. For every cruel thing my father did to me, anytime he walked through the door and mussed my hair I was ready to give him another chance. I was so ready to love him.

Congratulations on your daughter turning three. The fact that you’re worried about this stuff is usually a sign that you’re on the right path. The funny thing about parenting is that the people who are most worried about messing it up, are the ones most likely to get it right. I’m old enough that I’ve seen a lot of my friends have kids, and those kids are now adults in their own right. And one of the first things I noticed was that the folks who were the most chaotic, the most fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, the most worried about fucking things up… they were the ones who ended up incorporating their kids into their messy lives, encouraging them to be themselves, giving them the space to be curious, to climb trees, to draw on the walls, to ask their neighbors for help. And ultimately, hold everything together with love. While the friends who made plans, and spreadsheets, and made lists of goals, and fretted about their kids not being able to tie their shoes yet, or read at a certain level yet—and by the way, I totally understand wanting to do these things, and worrying about these things—they were so concerned with how things were supposed to be going that they totally missed how things were actually going. Which is that this new amazing human was unfolding before your eyes, and while it might not be the human you were expecting… aren’t they amazing?!? And if you don’t understand them, well child what happened to your curiosity?!

Your kid is going to be alright. With enough love, your kid is going to be alright.

Don’t judge your children, love them. Because they will, in turn, love you back. And when they do—holy fucking shit, it’s just amazing.

My daughter’s coming over for dinner tonight. I can’t wait to hug her and tell her I love her.

I love you for asking this question.

🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it!

📕 My new book, How to die (and other stories), is now available for pre-order! It’s stories from this newsletter. It’s very handsome. Yes, you want it!

📆 Related, but secret… if you’re in the Bay Area, please circle May 21 on your calendar. All will be revealed in time.

📣 There’s a couple spots left in next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop. Sign up, we’ll have fun hanging out, we’ll make fun of AI slop, then I’ll help you get a job.

💰 If you’re enjoying this newsletter please consider joining the $2 Lunch Club! Writing is labor and labor gets paid, right?

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. The ceasefire is a lie.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline, and for fuck sake if there is a trans child in your life PLEASE tell them you love them, they are SO ready to love you back.

Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI coding experiments. But as usual with claims of AI-related achievement, you'll find some key caveats ahead.

On Thursday, Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post describing how he set 16 instances of the company's Claude Opus 4.6 AI model loose on a shared codebase with minimal supervision, tasking them with building a C compiler from scratch.

Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing about $20,000 in API fees, the AI model agents reportedly produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

Read full article

Comments

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the world. I mean, look at … everything. Massive ongoing wars everywhere, Fascism on the rise, exploding inequality. Shit is fucked up and more fucked up on a global scale than it ever was in my life time (I was born in 1979). And with the media landscape and notifications and 24 hour news it’s hard to not feel overwhelmed. Every morning when waking up is basically:

And it is important to be informed. To at least try to see what is going on in order to decide where one can make a difference or maybe at least help? Someone? Anyone?

But this is also no way to live. For a bunch of different reasons. I think given the state of the world it’s fair to let certain crises go into the background (without going full ignorance): You just mentally cannot dive into every crisis all the time. Not just because you don’t have the hours in the day but also because it will destroy your mind.

I have this tendency to believe that if I just dig for more information and understand, that if I can make sense of something, I will feel better and it will create some form of path towards resolution. That it would allow me to send a letter to a politician or support an organization or write or do something that can help turn things around. I believe that knowledge and understanding creates agency. Which isn’t 100% false but in the way I apply it is basically delusional.

And I do that because I am scared. I am scared by the consequences of the chaos. I’ve learned enough about history to understand that when shit hits the fan it’s rarely the powerful and wealthy who suffer the most. That it starts hurting at the bottom and then quickly moves up. And that scares me. Not in the abstract but in my bones. Even more now that I have a son who I just want to be able to live a life full of joy and love.

But being scared is not all I feel (even though it is a big part of it). I am grieving.

I realized that a few days ago when I took some time off of the news and all that. I was exhausted and burned out and took a walk. And understood that I was literally grieving. I was sad for the structure of the world that I see crashing down.

And don’t get me wrong. The structure wasn’t perfect. Or even great. We built a world order based on exploitation of the planet and each other. With some good things bolted to it here or there, some remnants of socialist and human rights thinking. Certain safety nets, certain conventions. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And now that they are being dismantled in record time I am grieving for those tiny things.

Because while that system was in place it did – at least to me, and maybe that was naive – feel as if we could use it as a platform to build something better on. Drive back the inequality and exploitation through collective action. The road to “fully automated luxury space communism” was still very long but it felt like there might be a floor to it all. And that floor was still too low and did not include everyone, probably a minority even. But from my privileged position as someone living in Germany it felt like a foundation to build on. A consensus.

And I miss it. It hurts to see it being killed. To see that in fact there is no consensus that includes any commitment – even a surface level one – to human rights and the will to build something better than “billionaires can get even richer while the world is burning”.

This is not a feeling I am planning to dwell on for too long. But I think it’s important that during the storm of news and notifications and whatever we sometimes take the time to understand how that makes us feel and why?

I am grieving because I had felt like there was sort of a “emergency break” kind of thing that would ensure things would be going too bad. And coming from a family where I inherited my parents’ fear of the threat of downwards social mobility that gave me a lot of emotional support. It was about more about a feeling than it was about facts.

It’s important to understand how the world makes you feel. And share it. Otherwise your emotions are gonna catch up with you at some point.

Now is the time to get back to it. Even if the rules-based order that I grew up in and relied on all my life is crumbling, maybe we can redirect that momentum towards something better. Or at least stop some fascists. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and all that.

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. 

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades. 

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.

The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no. 

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwind Labs—the company behind an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwind Labs is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwind Labss head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”

Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.

According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”

The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”

This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”

He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.

The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software. 

“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”

The Steam Machine was supposed to be out pretty soon, along with the Steam Controller and Steam Frame, but Valve announced today that not only has all this hardware's release been delayed, but that it'll probably be more expensive whenever it comes out, too.

The announcement reads:

When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.  The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).

Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible.

Those "memory and storage shortages", if you haven't heard about them, are a result of AI data centre usage--or, not even usage, but planned usage--fucking with global production and supply chains so much that the cost of everything from SSDs to RAM has shot through the roof.

Here’s why RAM prices are skyrocketing and SSDs and GPUs could soon follow suit

The answer: AI of course.

PC GamerJacob Fox

This news has moved me from "maybe computer use should be regulated" to "Butlerian Jihad Now" on the radicalisation scale.