February 2026 Links
Everything I read in February 2026, ordered roughly from most to least interesting.
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me: An OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot)) agent goes wild on a developer for rejecting a pull request. Plenty of follow-up material.
Best Of Moltbook: Related to the above, Moltbook is a Reddit-like community for OpenClaw bots to gather and “act” (?) like Redditors, but with an AI agent twist.
AntiRender: “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it’ll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November. No sunshine. No happy families. No impossibly green trees. Just cold, honest, depressing reality.” Now just apply this to Zillow listing so I’m less disappointed when I roll up to the house and see it doesn’t have 50,000-lumen bulbs in every fixture!
How dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from years of harm: Some things are just suuuuuuper unique. Like bricks. Specifically, bricks that are very pink, have a charcoal overlay, is modular eight-inch, and square-edged.
Deep in China’s Mountains, a Nuclear Revival Takes Shape: China has performed construction indicating they are expanding their nuclear arsenal. This comes soon after the U.S. accused China of conducting and covering up nuclear tests in 2020.
The $2.43 Billion Question: Podcast Advertising in 2024: 10% of podcasts are ads (after which conversion rates drop); 30% of people left because of ads; a crazy amount of listeners. I don’t know why hosts (and the people paying them) aren’t a bit more subtle, and instead name drop the product casually throughout the episode. Of course, this may throw off the flow and be too forced.
G-force induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC): “a loss of consciousness occurring from excessive and sustained g-forces draining blood away from the brain causing cerebral hypoxia. The condition is most likely to affect pilots of high performance fighter and aerobatic aircraft or astronauts, but is possible on some extreme amusement park rides.”
Pit Bulls Part I: Identification: Cremieux debunks the claims that pit bulls can’t be identified. See also Pit Guesser.
How AI helps break the cost barrier to COBOL modernization: COBOL is an ancient programming languages mostly used by financial institutions for business use cases. According to the Wikipedia page, “COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses often result in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability.” This sentiment combined with the blog post helps explain why IBM shares plummeted -13% upon this news. Sorry, COBOL engineers—AI is coming for your job, too.
Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon: Inverted yield curve, precious metals going up, countries dumping the dollar because of US government debt and potential bubbles (AI).
Ten years sober: Alex talks about the beginning of his drug days to the end of them. (Thanks to Daily Links for the find!)
list animals until failure: A game where each correct answer gets you more time. Animals must have a Wikipedia article. There are even some fun easter eggs depending on the animal name you put!
AI social network Moltbook grows, US-Iran tensions simmer, Nipah pandemic unlikely || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #5/2026: Sentinel is by far the best current events compiler I know of.
Bárány chair: “a device used for aerospace physiology training, particularly for student pilots.” “The chair is used to demonstrate spatial disorientation effects, proving that the vestibular system is not to be trusted in flight. Pilots are taught that they should instead rely on their flight instruments.”
Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of my First Hardware Product: In case you think software is difficult (which it can be!), this may help put things in perspective.
Storing Food: Jeff makes a good case for storing large amounts of food in case of disaster.
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward: See the top post.
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic: Scott explains the then-ongoing Pentagon-Anthropic feud.
AI makes you boring: Outsourcing thinking to someone (something?) else is not necessarily good, especially if you’re just gonna parrot the output and treat it as gospel. The atrophy of critical thinking skills is something I’ve been concerned about with LLMs for some time now.
Judy Shelton: “known for her advocacy for a return to the gold standard and for her criticisms of the Federal Reserve (which she has compared to the Soviet Union’s economic planning)”. I found out about her when she came out of nowhere on Polymarket at a whopping 4% (compared to Kevin Warsh’s 96%). She was nominated to the Fed in 2019, but failed with a 47-50 vote.
The Latest Dangerous Trend: Swerving: Kids ride wheelies straight towards both incoming and outgoing traffic to try to get as close as possible without hitting them. If you watch r/CrazyFuckingVideos enough, you’ll see a kid get smacked by a car.
Hawaii Invasive Species Council page on mongooses: I didn’t realize mongooses (not mongeese) were so prevalent in Hawaii. Originally introduced to control the rat population that was causing problems for the sugar cane industry, it turned out that they do way more damage to other populations. Whoops!
METR’s 14h 50% Horizon Impacts The Economy More Than ASI Timelines: It appears that we are on that timeline.
The only man Elon trusts to look after his $240 billion: Secretive friend who runs Musk’s family office controls his wealth - but also helped him investigate ‘pedo guy’ and was fired by Merrill Lynch: Jared Birchall was recruited by Musk out of Morgan Stanley and quickly became his right-hand man.
The Private Equity Boogeyman: Wall Streeters discuss why private equity is villified in today’s day and age.
Pauline Newman: A 98-year-old (as of March 2026) judge who was suspended in “2023 due to concerns about her productivity and cognitive ability, which she disputes”.
CIVIL CASE NO. SA-26-CV-415-FB: Judge Fred Biery, known for writing humor-laden opinions, hands down an opinion and order criticizing the government’s MO around deportation methods.
Zvi Mowshowitz & Mentorship Anti-Patterns: Vishal discusses Inkhaven mentors, pointing out that Zvi was especially antisocial and unhelpful.
STFU: “a tiny app that plays back the same audio it hears, delayed by ~2 seconds.” This is for when people are listening to stuff out loud in public places and you are too shy or scared to speak up. It feels like asking someone can turn their audio down can go one of two ways: pain and suffering on your part (because they were praying someone would say something) or embarrassment on their part (because they were too oblivious to know or hoping nobody would say anything). It’s probably obvious which way it will go based on how the person looks.
How I Taught My Neighbor to Keep the Volume Down: The author finds that his TV remote also controls his loud neighbor’s TV remote. He then proceeds to turn the neighbor’s TV off if it gets too loud, training him to keep it low in the process. “Pavlovian conditioning at its best.”
Epstein-related links:
Jeffrey Epstein gets removed from Xbox Live for being a sex offender
The time I didn’t meet Jeffrey Epstein: Scott Aaronson talks about how Epstein tried to meet with him, but never did.
Job Hunters Are So Desperate That They’re Paying to Get Recruited: I can actually imagine a nice market for this where job finders get paid well for making sure job hunters (the client) actually find and keep work. There’s certainly a reputational component of the client not being a shitty employee and the finder finding decent jobs for the person who hired them. I’d also imagine that the finder can do very well if they have excellent relationships
Odd Lots Recommended Books: Every book ever recommended on the Odd Lots podcast, complete with filters. I wish they had a link to purchase, preferably BookFinder.
The Singularity will Occur on a Tuesday: Pedersen uses MMLU scores, tokens per dollar, frontier release intervals, arXiv “emergent” papers, and Copilot code share data to determine the singularity will happen on Tuesday, July 18, 2034 at 02:52:52.170 UTC. I hope this turns out like 2012 where everyone has parties and stays up.
La Linea Cartel in Possession of a Guided Missile Launcher [Redeye MANPADS]: “In mid-April Mexican authorities seized weapons, drugs, and exotic animals in possession of La Linea cartel in Nuevos Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. Among the weapons was a guided missile launcher recovered from a stolen vehicle located outside an apartment complex.” I can’t actually find how they got the Redeye.
Karen Dunn: Lawyer who represented high-profile clients (Apple, Oracle, Uber) or argued high-profile cases (Apple vs. Epic, civil lawsuit against Unite the Right rally organizers). She’s “a specialist in debate preparation in Democratic politics, particularly for candidates for president and vice president.” She’s also worked in government as White House counsel and assistant U.S. attorney.
How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard: “Over the past decade, I’ve worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe. Combining calendar, weather, and smart home data, it’s become an important part of our daily lives.” This reminds me of when Magic Mirrors (which he quickly references) became a big thing in the Raspberry Pi community. I guess the reflectivity (mirror vs. paper) changes the purpose!
Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel: Basically a hit piece on Brian Lucey with some extra discussion on unethical publishing.
The Whole Thing Was a Scam: Gary Marcus argues that OpenAI’s DoD contract was rigged for them from the start thanks to Brockman’s $25MM PAC donation. “In capitalism, the market decides. In oligarchy, connections and donations decide. It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.”
The happiest I’ve ever been: Coaching middle school basketball.
The Children of MAGA Speak Their Minds: “The daughters of Ted Cruz and Kristi Noem talk to Vanity Fair about life in the shadow of their politician parents.”
SeaWorld Orca-related deaths:
Tilikum (orca): Icelandic orca who was responsible for three of the four fatal attacks by captive orcas. You’d think they would’ve pulled him after the first! Or second!
Trio of Deaths: Sheriff’s Report on the Death of Daniel Dukes: Tilikum’s second victim, a vagrant and supposed animal lover who was hiding out in the park and decided to say hi to the orca.
Dawn Brancheau: Tilikum’s third victim. No video was ever released out of respect for the family.
Death of Alexis Martinez: Massive internal bleeding caused by getting rammed in the chest by another SeaWorld orca, Keto. This was two months before Dawn Brancheau was killed.
Video Of SeaWorld Whale Attack Released: “The video shows trainer Ken Peters being pulled underwater when a whale, Kasatka, grabbed his foot and wouldn’t let go.”
Harry Markopolos: The man who discovered Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Punxsutawney Phil: Groundhog that predicts if winter will continue.
Slugburger: “a sandwich with a deep-fried patty containing beef or pork and a plant-based filler ingredient such as potato or cornmeal. It is a traditional Southern food originating in northeast Mississippi.” Yum..?
Brad Karp’s apparent Reddit burner account: r/biglaw now calls him “Handsome Brad Karp” any time he’s mentioned.
Absurdly high pay at Qatalyst, any truth to the rumors?: Bankers and wannabe bankers talk about how much Qatalyst Partners pays, and apparently it’s a lot.
What a great image for the post!