Lachlan Markay

Are you a journalist/researcher/public affairs pro tracking foreign influence? You may be interested in a new product I’ve developed. Automated daily summaries of new FARA filings as they drop. Contact me for details: lachlan at faramonitor dot com. faramonitor.com

He who controls the spice controls the flavor

Remarkable thing about Paul Ehrlich is not just how wrong he was but that we was totally unphased and unchastened by his wrongness, just a total epistemic disaster zone — a pattern of conduct that is unfortunately shared by many prominent people from different schools of thought.

In this morning's FARA Monitor: interesting details of Israeli messaging on the Iran war

Some notable filings in this morning's batch of new FARA records, including a Taiwanese political party hitting its domestic opposition as Beijing-aligned and Nigeria looking to get White House meetings on critical minerals policy. faramonitor.com

@sahilkapur Acquired, incredible podcast on business history and strategy, just dropped a new episode on F1. Guaranteed banger

@lachlan wait what’s that mean

omg yes

Lots of activity on Richmond gun control bills over the last few days. If you're following the issue, check out the legislative tracking spreadsheet I set up. This pulls from VA legislature data and is updated automatically, in real time docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

Why is @gitlab's foundation funding the group bankrolling NIMBY opposition to domestic chipmaking?

The USA hockey freakout is a radicalizing moment. This is one of the greatest occasions in the history of American athletics. Jack's bloody grin is iconic, the kind of photo that defines a sport for a generation. Everyone trying to tarnish this with politics is my enemy.

Just so proud of this kid. Proud he’s an American. And a Jew. And a Devil.

This is the best hockey I’ve ever seen. But it’s not, like, fun. I’m not enjoying myself. Even a few cocktails in my blood pressure is in dangerous territory.

I did a thing with Claude! For folks interested in following the slate of gun control bills introduced by Virginia Democrats this year, I built this legislative tracking tool that monitors the status of 57 different pending bills. It's regularly updated with legislative developments, the most recent versions of legislative text, summaries of each bill. Support/oppose designations assume you share my antipathy to new regulations on Commonwealth gun ownership, but even if we disagree you may find it useful. This is very much a work in progress so please forgive any bugs or errors. I'm trying to sort them out as I find them docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

@VecchTweets I'm one of the good carpetbaggers

@lachlan All you other Yankees followed me down here and I have a soft spot for anything that sends you back to D.C.!

Parcel delivery 2 weeks after a snowstorm

Since this has inspired Discourse among people whose opinions I respect, some thoughts: - Advertising, particularly on web, is good, actually, despite being frequently annoying. The alternative is paywalls and subscriptions and other models that, on the whole, make information less accessible. We are watching an event on Sunday that costs tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars to produce precisely because Anthropic and other companies shell out to show us ads throughout. - Accepting OpenAI's description of its ads model, this is nothing like what it will look like. That said, it's not unthinkable that others in the space will in the very near future find ways to serve ads natively in chatbot responses themselves that resemble the sort of thing Anthropic is mocking here. And I think there's actually a case to be made for that model's consumer value! If I'm asking ChatGPT (or whichever) about the best cleaning supplies for my particular hardwood flood, it'd be sweet if I could, with one click, pick it up from Amazon right in the chat. But just because that's not OpenAI's model now, and just because there may be merits to it, doesn't mean it's an invalid target for Anthropic to skewer. - Whatever else can be said about this ad, it is just objectively really, really good. Amazing production value, amazing acting (not something often said about commercials, but come on the woman playing the therapist is so good and should get a prestige TV role after this), the writing and the timing are just spot on. And yes, it makes a compelling case against a top competitor in a way that most viewers will immediately understand and connect with. Total advertising slam dunk.

I'll withhold judgment until Sunday, but in all likelihood the best Super Bowl commercial contest has already been won

The scam call situation is out of control. I actually think this is one of the less appreciated indicators of state capacity: can a government effectively protect its citizens from organized, largely foreign criminal enterprises? We are not excelling at the moment

RENEWABLES -> REFUSE