Some weeks have a shape. This one had twelve things published across the network and no thesis holding them together, so here they are in roughly the order I stopped arguing with them.
The one that took the longest to write was about agreeing with Trump on the AI race with China, which is not a sentence I enjoyed typing. The Coxon warning makes the concession harder, not easier, and that's the whole reason the piece exists. If the warning is right about the risks and the race is still real, you have to hold both, and most commentary refuses to.
Then a cluster that's really one question wearing three hats. What is an AI development platform, actually? Ask two developers which tool they use to design an API and you get answers with nothing in common, because spec editors, SDK generators, MCP builders and gateways have been shoved into one category by marketing. Same problem downstream: the app builders get ranked as a single leaderboard when sorting them by what they actually produce is the only honest way to do it. The head-to-head on Lovable, Base44, Bolt, Replit and v0 takes the other cut, which is that generating a running app from a sentence is settled and boring now. What separates them is the bill, the lock-in, and what happens on day forty.
Adjacent, and personal: why static site generators beat WordPress for almost everything I publish. I still run about twenty WordPress installs and I'm not burning them down. It's competent software that solved publishing for people who never wanted a terminal. That's a different claim from it being the right default in 2026.
Two market pieces, both about the gap between a number and what the number means. SanDisk's bear case reduces to one decomposition: fiscal 2026 revenue grew 175% while bits shipped grew in the mid teens, which tells you exactly how much of that was price. The supply answer to those prices doesn't land until 2029. Meanwhile the market spent about fifteen minutes deciding what Lululemon's quarter meant, took the stock down 18% and briefly under a hundred dollars. Two outlook cuts in one year is not a weather problem. Alo and Vuori are taking the customer who used to pay full price.
The one I keep thinking about is why social unrest stopped being an event and became a standing condition on both sides of the Atlantic. It opens on a French square seven years ago, a man mid-argument in a red shirt, riot police fifty metres off and nobody paying them much attention. That's the tell. Nobody was paying them much attention.
Art, twice. The triptych outlived the altarpiece by shedding everything devotional about itself, which is why three stacked frames from a protest still read as one. And a painting I found by accident: Francis Harburger's 1977 view of Paris property speculation as birds of prey, a naked woman in a heap of wreckage with three eagles working the air around her and the sky filled edge to edge with flat office blocks.
Housekeeping, sort of. Five names came up for renewal and all five stayed, which is worth writing up because renewal and build used to be separate decisions for me and aren't anymore.
And to finish somewhere pleasant, Largo do Chiado at night: A Brasileira lit up, the bronze poet sitting outside it not being asked for anything, and the calçada underfoot laid in waves so the whole square looks like it's moving slightly. Phone at chest height, late, near the top of Rua Garrett. Some frames you take without thinking and they turn out to be the best thing you did that week.
