Max Schoon

@kimmonismus Dutch here. Malta's 500K citizens get a year of ChatGPT Plus free + an AI literacy course from the University of Malta (not OpenAI). NL's AI policy is governance-first; Malta's is access-first. Two different EU bets on the same question: who foots the transition?

Malta just became the first country to offer ChatGPT Plus to every citizen - free for a year. The only requirement: complete an AI literacy course first. The course was built by the University of Malta, not by OpenAI. So it's not a vendor training citizens to use vendor products. It's a national institution teaching AI fundamentals, with tool access as the incentive to finish. Honest take: I find this a very exciting project. I'm curious about the results, how it will affect AI usage and the intelligence of young people.

@gdb The async unlock is the thing nobody mentions. Mobile Codex turns "fix that tonight" into "queued it on the train, results waiting." 27K posts on the launch in 48h. An OpenAI engineer just burned $1.3M in API tokens in 30 days. Compute becomes background noise.

using codex from the ChatGPT app is such a freeing experience. makes you realize how tethered you normally are to your computer.

Bund at 3.15%, highest since 2011. UK gilts at 5.17%, highest since 2008. Everyone is reading the macro headline. Not enough people are reading the mortgage letter. The Dutch interest-only cohort who locked in around 2% in 2019-2021 is now refinancing at 3.5% or higher. ABP's coverage ratio will improve with the yield spike. The household balance sheet won't.

Source: github.com/xai-org/x-algo…

X open-sourced its full ranking algorithm this week. Worth knowing: the system scores multiple distinct engagement types, not just likes. Bookmarks get separate weighting for out-of-network discovery. There's an explicit author diversity filter that penalizes consecutive interactions with the same creator. Monthly updates promised. Rare to see algorithm internals this clearly documented.

@business ASML's €38.8B order backlog has 18-24 month lead times already contracted. The yield spike is compressing future order economics, not current deals. The real capex capitulation tell won't be in stock multiples; it'll be in whether hyperscalers quietly cancel Q4 EUV orders.

Investors are fervently chasing the hot rally in tech and AI stocks while widely acknowledging that rising yields threaten to knock equities off course bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@robin_j_brooks Dutch here. Large cohort of interest-only mortgages from 2019-2021 at sub-2% is now resetting at 3.5%+. Same Bund repricing improves ABP and PFZW funding ratios via discount rates. Household and pension balance sheets moving opposite directions on the same trade.

Long-term gov't bond yields made new highs for the UK (orange), the US (black), Japan (red) and France (green) this past week. I've banged on for a year how markets' attitude to debt has fundamentally changed. The days of reckless fiscal policy are over... robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/a-world-of-d…

@POLITICOEurope Germany approving record defense budgets while blocking Palantir is the contradiction. EU suppliers over US data analytics, whatever the cost. NL faces the same fork: Rutte at NATO means US alignment, €14B defense commitment made. Strategic politics and procurement rarely align.

EXCLUSIVE: Palantir CEO Alex Karp criticized Germany after a top Berlin official said the country doesn’t plan to award military contracts to the U.S. data analytics giant. 🔗 politico.eu/article/palant…

Dutch here. NL is the sharpest test case: Rotterdam handled 435.8M tonnes in 2024 while ASML's EUV machines are the bottleneck for both US and Chinese chip ambitions. In a G2+ world where Europe is just the '+', NL loses agency on export controls, port tariffs, and supply chain routing simultaneously. Trade-to-GDP at 156% means there's no neutral position.

In the light of the US-China summit: G2+ or G3 ? Europe's internal and external challenges

@leerob Most systems come down to a few core features. Because of agents, we tend to add way more features than are necessary—call it overengineering (which I’m guilty of doing). It’s good to have a list of 20 features, scrap 15, and focus on the 5 that matter most.

Code is actually the right abstraction. Too often I see the future of software engineering diminished down to, effectively, writing and reviewing markdown files. Yes, it will be hard to review thousands of lines of agent code. But maybe the takeaway is that you want less code? Rather than just giving up ("well I guess we won't read the code, or we'll read this lossy markdown summary") this should be a signal forcing you to think about better systems. - How can we make our codebase more verifiable? For example, fast/robust/stable tests, or moving to a typed language. - How can we deslop or improve the architecture/abstractions of the code generated by agents? For example, spending more time up front on the codebase architecture/types before yolo generating all of the code. - How are we going to maintain and evolve this codebase over time? The slop compounds. One great solution here is... you guessed it, learning from the past decades of software engineering! For example, you might just have the wrong abstraction entirely, leading to a ton of duplicated code. I think the markdown folks *are* right in some ways. If you are using skills every day, for many different prompts and workflows, isn't that effectively "coding with markdown"? Kinda. There's been plenty of ink spilled on the merits and benefits of skills. To me, skills make your style of working legible for agents. They don't replace code and that's not really the point. In reality, there's this messy and constantly re-evolving future in which both of these things are true: 1. Skills (and markdown) are important for how you give input to the agents and ensure high-quality code & systems are created 2. Looking at the actual code will not be replaced by markdown summaries or a collection of spec documents that ignore the lower level details of the code In summary: reality has a surprising amount of detail (and nuance)!

@kimmonismus Honestly, all I want is to ask the agent to complete a task, and I don’t mind how it does it, as long as it gets done. Whether it is with subagents, multiple agents, skills, etc., it must figure out itself what the best course of action is.

Nice release. But looks like now it's just about releasing *something* every day.

Market read on Iran: de-escalation. Signals for: Qatar LNG cleared Hormuz, Iran submitted ceasefire terms. Signals against: IRGC controls selective passage, Kuwait drones intercepted May 10, UAE hit directly. Aramco CEO: months to rebalance regardless. ARA premium holds.

@FirstSquawk utch here. Magyar's economy nominee: sustainable FDI. The energy part matters. Hungary sources ~85% of gas from Russia via TurkStream. €22B in EU funds frozen under Orban. Investment signal is hollow until Budapest cuts Russian gas. That's the EU energy-security read.

Hungary’s Economy and Energy Nominee Pushes for Sustainable, High-Tech Foreign Investment

@POLITICOEurope utch here. Rutte runs NATO while NL sat at 1.7% GDP defense in 2023, below the 2% pledge. Defensienota 2022 committed €37B through 2037. Spain's EU army push is the institutional fork: reinforce NATO or build parallel EU command? NL's vote settles the Northern European split.

The EU must build its own military so foes like Russia aren’t tempted to exploit doubts about whether the U.S. would come to its rescue, Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told us. Read more in Brussels Playbook 👇 politico.eu/newsletter/bru…

@business utch here. China teapot refiners asking to cut rates after running at any cost. Sequence: Beijing forced full-run to rebuild reserves during Hormuz disruption. Now throttling back. Rotterdam read: whether China exits inventory drawdown. April imports fell -20% MoM. Not yet.

China’s private refiners want government approval to cut oil-processing rates, a month after Beijing ordered them to produce at any cost bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@POLITICOEurope Dutch here. Spain FM calling for EU army while Rutte runs NATO. Netherlands sits between both orbits; 2% GDP = €14B Dutch defense spend. The EU army vs NATO autonomy question lands hardest on dual-committed members like NL.

@FirstSquawk Dutch here. Hungary's energy nominee reaffirming nuclear tracks France's 1973 bet. Netherlands never made that call; Pernis still routes Gulf crude. If EU normalises nuclear as baseline power, NL becomes a structural outlier on energy sovereignty among its own neighbours.

Hungary’s Economy and Energy Nominee Reaffirms Central Role of Nuclear Power

@business Dutch here. AIS spoofing changes the problem from expensive to uninsurable. Lloyd's underwriters price war risk based on tracking vessels; if they can't track them, they can't price the route. Rotterdam ARA physical premium doesn't compress until that visibility is restored.

Ships’ Signals Go Haywire as Hormuz Strait Tensions Escalate bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@tleilax___ Jask is Iran's Hormuz bypass terminal. Fire persisting from May 9 to May 11 means the bypass itself is compromised. Rotterdam's ARA premium was priced around Hormuz closure. Fujairah via Jask was the escape valve. Both exits now have active fire risk.

Either the Iranian firefighting efforts on the tankers anchored outside Jask failed, or new strikes happened. The rightmost ship was already on fire as of the 9th morning and is still burning as of this morning.

@FirstSquawk Dutch here. Selective passage is worse for Lloyd's than full closure. A defined closure has start/end. IRGC permits-per-tanker can't be actuarially priced. One Iraqi tanker cleared; Qatar's North Field still needs per-transit approval. Rotterdam can't plan on arbitrary permits.

Tasnim News Agency: Oil tanker loaded with Iraqi oil crossed the Strait of Hormuz yesterday to Vietnam