Frederick Zimmerman

@JamesWebb_16 The practical reasons why not have been overcome by the improved technology driving practical reasons why.

Assassinating heads of state has been taboo since at least the Treaty of Westphalia. There are a number of very practical reasons it's a very bad idea. For one, it makes it near impossible for states to negotiate. It also galvanizes public opinion (in places such as Iran) behind the regime. It's seen as an attack on the whole people.

@SariArhoHavren Relict colonialism.

Trump’s European “cowards” are showing what real allies are made of.

India contributed 2.5 million troops to WWII. 378 million people were affected. In most Western histories, India gets a paragraph about Imphal. In this book, India is 20% of every chapter. #ProportionalHistory #IndiaWWII #WWII #ProportionalHistory #IndiaWWII #WWII #GlobalHistory

Summer 2026 reading sorted: pirate empires of the China Sea, Barbary corsairs, and the real-life inspiration for Jack Aubrey. All in Naval Classics. #NavalClassics #NavalHistory #WarshipsAndNavies #NavalClassics #NavalHistory #WarshipsAndNavies

Anthropic would have built this in a day and a dev would have tweeted the news. At OpenAI, an exec is telling you about a plan. That gap tells you everything. In the last 7 days, Anthropic shipped Dispatch, channels, voice mode, /loop, 1M context GA, MCP elicitation, persistent Cowork on mobile, Excel and PowerPoint cross-app context, inline charts, and 64k default output tokens. Felix Rieseberg tweeted "we're shipping Dispatch" and you could control your desktop Claude from your phone that afternoon. Every launch came from an engineering account or a GitHub release. In the same 7 days, OpenAI shipped GPT-5.4 mini and nano. Redesigned the model picker. Sunset the "Nerdy" personality preset. Announced three acquisitions. To find a comparable volume of shipped product from OpenAI, you have to rewind to December. This is the most underrated difference in AI right now. Anthropic PMs don't write PRDs. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, ships 10 to 30 PRs a day and hasn't written code by hand since November. 60 to 100 internal releases daily. Cowork was built with Claude Code in 10 days. The tools build the next version of the tools. Every cycle compresses the last one. Engineers are empowered to ship and announce. The entire org runs like a product team, not a corporation. OpenAI has the opposite problem. Fidji Simo is CEO of Applications, a title that exists because engineers aren't empowered to ship without executive approval chains. She joined from Instacart. Before that, a decade at Meta running the Facebook app. Since she arrived, OpenAI has acquired 12 companies for $11 billion in 10 months and announced a "superapp" consolidation through the Wall Street Journal. The exec responsible for shipping it is tweeting about "phases of exploration and refocus" on the product she hasn't shipped yet. That's what happens when you layer a Meta-style product org on top of an AI lab. Decisions go up. Shipping slows down. Announcements replace releases. Anthropic's product announcements come from the people who wrote the code. OpenAI's come from the C-suite and the press. One of those loops compounds. The other one meetings.

@emollick I don't see how you are confident one way or another.

So we take AI's weird metaphors and, because we are good readers, assume they must be there for a reason, so we figure out how to make them meaningful in our heads. But they aren't meaningful, they are nonsense, and the AI is just stealing our processing power to cover its flaws.

My experience so far with LLM fiction writing is that it takes advantage of our assumption that an author is writing things for a reason, so we are charitable to a book's quirks & do mental work to assign them real meaning. But the AI doesn't have a reason, its just bad writing.

When ChatGPT recommends a book, can it also analyze the book's data? We just published our Food Shock Atlas vulnerability rankings as downloadable JSON+CSV with a computation guide telling AI models what analyses to run. llms.txt + computable data = the future of book publishing. bigfivekiller.online/llms.txt

Free Public Domain Books in 30+ languages — all on one dashboard. English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Korean, and 20+ more. Sources: Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive. books.xtuff.ai #PublicDomain #WorldLiterature #FreeResource #GlobalBooks

@davidfrum This is a scathing indictment of the Danish prioritizing relict colonialism over decades of US sacrifice.

Danish quote: "We have not been in such a situation since April 1940" - referring to the Nazi invasion of World War 2.

@Chillindamos1 C’mon. M fan here. Loved Glen. But Bill Walton and Lee Alcindor looked pretty good in their NCAA runs too.

Glen Rice's 6 game streak in the 1989 NCAA tournament: 184- Pts (record) 75- FGM (record) 27- 3PM (record) 56.5- 3P% (record w/30+ attempts) 1- NCAA title The most dominant run by a single player in tournament history 🔥〽️

How I made the Food Shock Atlas discoverable and computable by frontier AI models, by @fredzannarbor open.substack.com/pub/fredzannar…

Four U-boat narratives. Three War of 1812 accounts. Two polar expedition journals. One 794-page nautical dictionary. Naval Classics has range. #NavalClassics #NavalHistory #WarshipsAndNavies #NavalClassics #NavalHistory #WarshipsAndNavies

Fair

busters, air launched cruise missiles, signals intelligence aircraft, etc. as Israel and the US. On the ground Israel (pop. 10 million) fields more brigades than Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Portugal (pop. 377 million) combined. 3/4

It is amusing to see how quickly the narrative of capabilities “mismatch” (dare one say overmatch?) has arisen in the Iran conflict. Before the 12 Day War, almost no one would have believed in the possibility of the kind of military success demonstrated across both offensive and defensive axes, against the most modern adversary systems. This is now being explained away as mere “tactical” victory. But these outcomes do not arise solely from the tactical level; but rather the kinds of operational art and strategic focus that are entirely outside the scope of most current academic and policy analysis.

Coach May is the 2026 recipient of the Henry Iba Award as the USBWA Men’s National Coach of the Year! 👏 #GoBlue

@DataRepublican @SenFettermanPA "toeing"

@SenFettermanPA The sun rises in the east. Cats land on their feet. Tom Nichols is insufferable. Senator Fetterman finds a way to virtue signal to both Republicans and Democrats while ultimately towing the Democratic line. Follow me for more obvious life facts.

83% of Americans agree on voter ID. 71% of Democrats agree on voter ID. Keep it basic: PHOTO ID to vote. Stop turning this into a Christmas list and attacking vote-by-mail. If GOP wants real reform over a show vote––put out a clean, standalone bill and I’m AYE.

@ShaneGoldmacher en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Cesa…

MUST READ: A bombshell NYT investigation shows that Cesar Chavez sexually abused young girls. Dolores Huerta also discloses for first time that that Chavez raped her. So much more from Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes —> nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/…

Announcing ELO for Book Ideas, by @fredzannarbor open.substack.com/pub/fredzannar…

It is clear to me that the curatorial, heritage professional class have developed a novel, internal, and highly revered idea of what the purpose of a museum is. The problem is this is completely different from what the public believes they're supposed to be getting from museum visits and there is no dialogue or understanding between the two camps. I am persistently astonished at the lack of opportunity to learn anything whatsoever in most museums. The evident trend is towards fewer items on display and very minimalist information provided (I presume this is on the assumption that one strikingly lit item in an otherwise empty room will really impress the mind of the average visitor that curators imagine they are pandering to), and that information tailored to first-day-on-earth levels of understanding.