0:12
What to Wear to Eat Aioli
Thank you to Marine Layer and Aerin for taking me on the most fab euro tour early in the season - a lot of content from this newsletter was captured thanks to them.
Much like Dua Lipa, everybody thinks I’m on vacation all the time, and I don’t mind! Summer is my favorite season and I will gladly stretch it longer if I can. It’s also the season I shop for the least: every year around this time I gleefully pull out the box of sarongs and crochets — the one box to escape my monthly purges — to reassemble the wardrobe I feel the best in.
I’m back from Formentera and Ravello by way of Paris, where it was even hotter than they say. I was welcomed back to America by ~Prime Day~, and I feel a great responsibility to tell you to only buy things you actually wanted, or stock up on what you already use all the time: my Riviera cookbook and Ghia are both on sale.
I purchased only some clean dishwasher soap, a Brick for my sister, Bala weights (I’ve been working out at home enough to feel like I deserve them), my favorite summer hair mask, which I apply generously top to bottom with every wash and before going in the sea. The Ghia team was excited about EADEM and Summer Fridays being on sale (on Amazon? Weird I know — apparently it is secretly HUGE for beauty). I’m partial to the Violet Grey experience and selection, where MELANIE15 gets you a discount any day of the year.
I love a June vacation, the great amuse-bouche of a euro-summer. If I’m lucky and get some downtime, I use it to take stock of the year as it hits its halfway point.
The first leg was spent in Formentera, hosted by Marine Layer, the beloved California brand that makes great t-shirts and everything soft in general. They basically gave us a wonderful house, the best friends, our weight in aioli and a stack of well-chosen books: I devoured the spicy aioli and even spicier The Plunge, and am now making my way through the much less racy but equally delicious The Correspondent.
There are two aiolis on my mind. The one in my book is yellow like the sun and a perfect soft dip for lazily steamed artichokes and asparagus. The one they make in Ibiza is strong and dense like the crowd at Circoloco. It can easily be made with an immersion blender, and the trick is to use no eggs and half neutral, half olive oil for a lighter, purely garlicky taste. It wraps like a blanket on toasted sourdough.
The next leg took me to the Belmond in Ravello, on the most exquisite trip hosted by Aerin Lauder, founder of Aerin Beauty. I pride myself on being someone who sweats the details and I was humbled: custom branding just for the occasion adorned decks of cards, embroideries, hand-painted fans and even yoga mats! Aerin is so elegant and charming that she delighted all of us strangers with personal stories as if we had and would continue to know each other a long time. A skill I admire but do not possess. I loved their tuberose gardenia scent already, but this trip was all about Mediterranean Honeysuckle Soleil, which layers in touches of neroli and orange.
I was left to my own devices for all of 45 minutes and managed to spend 600 euros in a store owned by a nonna named Rosanna on a new collection of Murano glassware. No regrets!
The word is that when I left Ravello for Paris, Dua Lipa and her beau headed south to Il Pellicano. I wonder if she stole that beautiful ashtray from the room (I did). Stars, they’re just like us!
xx
Melanie
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4:31
Sticks and Stones
Mull of the day. One that I remembered anyway.
I heard an interview today with someone called Gracie Abrams (I think that’s was her name, embarrassingly I have no clue who she is but apparently she’s a big deal!) and she was responding to a question about how did she deal with trolls in the internet. She was fairly waffly about feeling sorry for them as they probably don’t have support like she does but she also said that any negative comments they throw at her, she has already had these thoughts and probably much, much worse.
I found it interesting. That this comes from someone, who by her own admission is super successful, a nepo baby - she’s dating one of the world’s most popular actors - and I just checked, she’s very beautiful. Even she doubts herself, hard. We are our own worst critics.
We women don’t need someone telling us that we are ugly or fat or too privileged or a bad person. That we can’t sing or we look bad on a horse. That we are can’t cook or we shouldn’t eat butter or that I belong in jail (that one got me yesterday - really? Why?!)
We will have already had terrible thoughts that tear ourselves down. You pointing them out is just a bit more salt in the wound.
Social media is such a bizarre concept. We post a teeny, tiny fragment of our lives. Sometimes raw. Sometimes over-the-top curated. But it’s an isolated moment of time. It might pour one’s very essence into a nutshell but most likely it’s a bit exaggerated and most likely it’s not an accurate description of your character. A character that will be ever changing and evolving.
And why is it so much easier to listen to these horrid comments than the nice ones? Why do we take the nasty ones and fester over them? Why do we hold the nice ones closely to our chest for a moment before sadly disbelieving or discarding them?
You can’t know someone from these squares. Not truly. You most definitely cannot form a reliable opinion of someone and write a responsible character summary from one reel. Why try? But people do, apparently the world is rife with them.
Is it jealousy? Is that where this need to hurt and jab like picador comes from? Is it boredom? Is it simply malicious?
I don’t know. I just hope that things might change. That these faceless, gutless keyboard bullies might find something else to do. Like read a book. Or go for a walk. Or at a push, maybe they could try putting something kind out into the ether instead?
I think the fresh air and a good book might be the better path. Less Fortnite and doom scrolling.
Then perhaps they might tread slightly lighter over other people’s fragile lives on their roughshod feet…
7:37
Bathe yourself in boredom...
I was standing in my kitchen the other morning, waiting for the coffee to revive my aching corpse, and I caught myself reaching for my phone.
Nothing had happened. No buzz, no notification, no summons from the wider world. The coffee-maker simply had the audacity to take ninety seconds, and my hand went for the phone the way a smoker’s hand goes for the pack: not a decision, a reflex. A small, sad, fully automated reach toward a glowing rectangle, because the alternative, standing in my own kitchen with my own thoughts, had become genuinely unbearable.
I put the phone down. Then I picked it back up. Then I put it down again and watched the coffee maker, as if it owed me money.
This, I have come to understand, is what I do now. I do not have moments. I have content gaps.
For most of last year, I had earbuds in for roughly ninety per cent of my waking life. Walking back from the gym: podcast. On the subway: more podcasts, or a man called Tim explaining how to live. Or the NYT Crossword app. Colouring a cartoon at the drawing board? Netflix going in the background, doing nothing but flickering, a televised nightlight for a grown adult. The remaining ten per cent of the day, the bit where my brain might actually catch up on the firehose of input I’d been aiming at it, did not exist. I had outsourced all of that processing to sleep, which is presumably why I spent the year sleeping like a guilty man being interrogated by detectives.
I did not think of this as a problem. I thought of it as being efficient. Optimised. A productivity hack, which is a phrase I have used unironically and out loud, in front of other adults, and for which I can only apologise.
Then, in one of those productivity newsletters I was almost certainly listening to instead of experiencing my own life, I came across the computer scientist Cal Newport, who had a phrase that lodged itself in me like a splinter: embrace boredom.
Read more
9:57
Bon Weekend: 26 June 2026
An early series on my original Habitually Chic blog was a Friday Bon Weekend post filled with things happening that weekend. In recent years, they morphed into a long monthly New and Noteworthy post. I brought the Bon Weekend post to Substack so you don’t miss anything worth seeing, doing, or trying this weekend and next week.
I hope those of you who are experiencing the current heatwave in Europe and the UK are surviving. I know a lot of my Parisian friends are melting in the canicule and I feel especially bad since we’ve had beautiful weather in NYC for most of June. But our own heat wave looks to be arriving next week so turnabout is fair play.
Whether you are looking to beat the heat inside or looking to get out, there is plenty to do this weekend and next week.
“It’s June after all and you’re young until September.” - Ocean Vuong
I look forward to visiting these first two when I’m in London in July.
Hermés London Flagship - I feel like you’d have to be very offline to not have seen the news that Hermés has recently opened a new flagship store at 166 New Bond Street in London. Six 18th-century Grade II listed buildings that formerly belong to Asprey were combined into offices, workshops, and retail space by Foster + Partners. You can read a detail feature on the new space here.
Anya Hindmarch Travel Shop - Anya Hindmarch has opened a new travel shop in London. The culmination of years of creativity and exploration, Anya Travel celebrates the art of seamless, streamlined luxury travel. Each piece is elegant, practical, considered and crafted to build joy into your journey, whether you’re traveling by plane, train or automobile.
Z.d.G at L’Epicuriste - Zoe de Givenchy’s tabletop line Z.d.G can be found at L’Epicuriste in Bridgehampton this summer for all your hostess needs. My friend Ryland Hilbert also has a clothing and cashmere store in Bridgehampton called Hank so make sure you visit him too.
Pouchard - Perfumer Pouchard has opened a new boutique at 50 rue des Saint-Pères in Paris if you want to pick up a new scent on your next trip.
Bus Palladium Hotel - The legendary club Bus Palladium closed in summer 2022 but has now reopened as a sexy 5-star hotel if you are looking for a new place to stay in the 9th. Owner Christian Casmèze tapped Nicolas Saltiel of the hotel group Chapitre Six who in turn hired Studio KO to reimagine the building as a hotel and event space.
Also, Claudette (not pictured) has reopened in NYC at 24 Fifth Avenue.
“There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear – the city of London and the South Seas.” – Herman Melville
Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions - The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has a surprising exhibition exploring the origins of tarot in Renaissance Italy and its contemporary relevance as an enduring source of inspiration to artists. There is also an accompanying book if you can’t make it to the show.
Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur - Through September 8, 2026, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in co-organization with the Fondation Giacometti, brings together work by Alberto Giacometti for the first time in one of The Met’s most iconic spaces. The installation of 14 works in bronze and plaster, emblematic pieces from the collection of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris together with three from The Met collection, places the work of one of the great sculptors of the 20th century in dialogue with the ancient civilization that strongly influenced his art and his practice.
Lucian Freud - If you’re headed to Copenhagen this summer, you may want to make a pilgrimage to the Louisiana Museum. Their Lucian Freud exhibition focuses on Lucian Freud's lifelong preoccupation with the human face and figure in all its forms. From pencil, pen, and ink to charcoal and etching on paper, the show also highlights the special dialogue between Freud's drawings and his painting.
WOW!house - This popular showhouse at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, in London is back for the fifth year through July 2, 2026. It features 22 rooms and outdoor spaces created by an international group of A-list designers including Young Huh, Max Rollitt, and The Gardenists, among others.
“It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.” - Alberto Giacometti
Romeria - This Spanish film by Carla Simón is one of those foreign features that’s about nothing and everything all at once. It’s in theaters today but I watched it on a UK website with my VPN and appreciated its quiet beauty. It follows an orphaned teenage girl as she meets her paternal family for the first time and discovers her late parents’ complex and secret history.
Savage House - This black comedy is about a gloriously unscrupulous social climber (Richard E. Grant) and his razor-sharp wife (Claire Foy) who are preparing to host a dinner party for a duke and duchess in 18th-century England.
15:43
Where is Churchill Today?
The gap between rhetoric and action has become Europe’s defining strategic weakness.
Consider Friedrich Merz. He ran on a platform of strength—strong support for Ukraine by sending Taurus missiles, a strong economy, and strong borders for Germany and Europe, promising a clear break from Germany’s era of strategic ambiguity.
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Yet in practice, Berlin still moves cautiously on the most consequential questions.
Taurus missiles have not been delivered to Ukraine. Probably at this point Ukraine, having after years of hellish war developed its own tech, doesn’t need them.
This is what ambition looks like: not reacting to threats, but shaping the environment in which they emerge
Meanwhile, Germany continues self-destructing its strong industrial base by refusing to return to nuclear power and by continuing its tradition of German overregulation, and the scale of sustained military support for Ukraine remain slow, incremental, and heavily conditioned by domestic constraints. The language may have slightly sharpened, but the pace, less so.
Churchill’s defining quality was not his eloquence alone, but his refusal to disguise reality.
In the United Kingdom, Sir Keir Starmer, who this week resigned as Prime Minister, pledged steadfast support for Ukraine, yet his broader foreign policy posture reflects a broken country that has lost any sense of direction. The now-failed attempt to hand over the Chagos Islands, home to a critical joint U.S.-U.K. military base, to a China ally, shows that London still does not understand the geopolitical value of hard power in an increasingly contested world.
The result is a Europe that supports Ukraine and apparently does want to take care of its own security, but much too carefully, incrementally and always one step behind what the situation demands.
Meanwhile, across the continent, leaders such as Giorgia Meloni have maintained formal support for Ukraine while moving cautiously on defense spending and military commitments, constrained by domestic politics and economic pressures.
The result is a Europe that supports Ukraine and apparently does want to take care of its own security, but much too carefully, incrementally and always one step behind what the situation demands.
This is not a failure of resources. It is a failure of mindset.
Europe today has an economy comparable in scale to that of the United States. Its combined industrial capacity is formidable. Its technological base is advanced. And yet, its military posture remains fragmented, underfunded, and strategically incoherent. Defense budgets are rising, but from a low base and without a clear, shared doctrine, while the corresponding procurement remains nationally siloed and without any clear strategy.
The French only build for themselves, the Germans want to work with the French but are ignored out of historical reasons, and the Poles do not buy European altogether, instead looking for salvation in the US and South Korea.
The debate over rearmament is still much too stuck in pre-2022 framing. This is a problem. What Europe lacks is not just spending, but ambition and vision. Four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with war in the Middle East raging on and off and the transatlantic partnership breaking, this is not a time for petty fights over whether the next tank factory should be built in Germany, France, or Slovakia. There is simply no time for that anymore. Politicians refusing to see and act on that are gambling with European lives.
Europe should be learning from battlefield innovation in Ukraine rather than studying it from conference panels.
A serious European defense posture would begin with a comprehensive, European wide strategy for industrial mobilization. Not national, incremental procurement cycles, but a wartime-scale, Europe wide reorganization of production. Europe should be producing drones in the millions, not the thousands, learning from Ukraine’s battlefield innovation rather than studying it from conference panels. It should be building integrated air defense systems that protect entire regions, not just capitals. It should be standardizing equipment across armies so that interoperability is real, not theoretical.
And Europe can think bigger still.
A place of Europe’s size and economic weight should not rely on a handful of aging platforms and American guarantees to project power. It should be building multiple carrier strike groups, not as vanity projects that are announced for the year 2055 and then scrapped anyway, but as instruments and visible demonstrations of European strategic autonomy. It should be investing in next-generation missile defense, in space-based capabilities, in cyber resilience at a scale that deters adversaries before a single shot is fired.
The message should be clear: Europe will shape its own destiny, by force if needed.
21:30
Things I Loved Lately: Wet Laptop Edition
Oh my God, the relief, the bliss, hello, here I am. There is cloud cover! I am in a place where the pollen is a little less virulent! I have three kinds of hayfever medication and at least one of them appears to be working! And I am here writing my letter at last.
Before I forget and people yell at me: my book is on a crazy deal right now and I would love you to either buy it (buy another copy!!!!) or, if you hate Amazon but love me, leave me a juicy little 5-star review if you have had a nice time with the book. I would be extremely grateful. I think the book is going very well, it feels like it is, but I am powerless before the might of the Publishers and they care so so much about rankings and reviews which I try to avoid at all costs. I Do Not Want To Look! But you can look and review it if you want, just don’t tell me what it says. But if we please the review gods maybe I can do another one? Not yet though, I’m very tired.
The last two weeks have been kind of a disaster on two fronts. First, the heatwave, which has turned me into a kind of thick bad human soup, and second, as a direct consequence of the heatwave: while I was in Essex meeting some lovely booksellers, my new waterbottle proved itself to have an insufficient seal, and it proved this by leaking one full pint of water into my laptop case. I discovered this on the floor of the bookshop so I suspect the people of Maldon think I am certifiable now: I howled like a beast.
I took the laptop immediately to a computer shop, where the man used what appeared to be a hot-air gun, familiar to me from the world of, for example, drying off ceramics, and aimed this heat gun directly at the heart of my precious and quite new laptop. Then he turned it on. It turned on! And then, of course, as anyone who knows anything about computers could tell you, it never worked again.
These are the worst possible things a person could do to a wet computer! The man in the computer shop did exactly the wrong things! If I hadn’t taken it to him, I would have a laptop today! Humbling to have tried to trust an expert and to have the expert wreak such total havoc. If I had simply left the laptop in my wet bag— it, the laptop I mean, really was so wet it was dripping onto the bookshop floor— it might have been ok.
Anyway: on my laptop is everything, all my passwords, all my logins, fifty thousand words of a novel. My partner, like the treasure he is, has found the insurance details (thank GOD, thank GOD) and says that he can retrieve everything off the hard drive. To actually action these things, though, requires significantly more mental resources than I currently have spare; and so I’m typing this on an Apple keyboard thing with several keys missing that I have never seen before (why was it in the tech box with my old laptops? Unclear!) and an elderly tablet I use almost exclusively these days for playing D&D. (A recent life update: we are attempting to get into D&D. So far: superb, no notes, like a board game but no reading of tedious rules and you can do whatever you want. Anarchy the board game, minus the board.)
Either the tablet or the keyboard seeks desperately to correct my spelling, sometimes to words I have never seen or read before in my life. “Van—pertúrbeme”, it has just suggested, though as to what that could possibly mean I am deeply in the dark. Van—pertúrbeme? I am sort of intrigued by the linguistics of this technological set-up but it doesn’t make writing easy. I persevere. (Or, as the keyboard just suggested: I prefer beer.)
Anyway, on my laptop also: my Substack log-in.
I kept thinking: there will be a way to get back, there must be a way home; and there was, but I needed— again— mental resources that were being absorbed entirely by thirty-seven degree heat. I have been at home for TWO of the nights in the last fourteen and one of those nights was last night and our house was so moist and hot it was like being inside a steaming mussel.
26:10
A Fantasy Weekend in Hong Kong with Zoe Suen
Zoe Suen, a Hong Kong‑born writer who now splits her time between the city and London, walks us through her perfect weekend at home. She’d begin with a gentle stroll through a nearby country park, pausing at a farm shop to pick up fresh produce, then head back to the kitchen to assemble a series of bright, seasonal salads.
Between bites she’d drift into the city’s lesser‑known vintage boutiques and tucked‑away eateries, savoring the blend of old‑world stalls and sleek new bars that only locals seem to notice.
The whole plan is a quiet push to log off, let the weather in, and replace the endless inbox with a simple, sensory routine that feels like a personal holiday.
For the full itinerary and more of Zoe’s insider tips, the newsletter unlocks the details behind a modest monthly subscription.
27:12
How I Learned To Be Alone
A few weeks ago I was making myself a coffee in the kitchen and, for reasons I still can’t quite explain, I found myself smiling as I watched it slowly filter into my espresso cup.
Nothing particularly exciting was happening in my life. There was no big news, no huge project and nothing had changed overnight. I simply felt... happy. It struck me that, a few years ago, the version of me who was desperately trying to figure life out would’ve looked at that perfectly ordinary little moment and thought, “One day, I hope I feel like that.”
Five years ago, life looked very different.
I’d just come out of a ten-year relationship. Until then, I’d never really lived alone, and suddenly I wasn’t just navigating the end of a relationship, I was trying to imagine an entirely new way of life.
I still remember the day I moved into the apartment I live in today. It was the beginning of September, a time of year that has always filled me with a quiet sense of dread. I don’t know whether it’s because summer is drawing to a close, or whether it’s the memories of returning to school, but September has always made my heart sink a little.
I should’ve been excited. I’d just moved into a beautiful apartment that would become my home for the next chapter of my life. Instead, I felt frightened and incredibly lonely.
My ex-boyfriend helped me move everything in. Once we’d carried the last of the boxes, he asked me to stand in the empty living room so he could take a photograph.
“Welcome to your new home,” he smiled. “How exciting.”
I smiled for the camera.
Inside, I felt desperately sad.
He was about to move to South Africa and our life together had quietly reached its conclusion. There hadn't been a dramatic ending. We still loved each other very much, but we'd both reached the difficult realisation that our relationship had run its course. We were no longer saying goodbye because we wanted to, but because we knew it was time.
This was during Covid, when travelling meant taking a test at the airport before your flight. The day before he left, we drove there together for his test and afterwards decided to have breakfast. It was a warm day, so we found ourselves sitting outside in the peaceful garden of a little hotel.
Neither of us said very much. We didn’t really need to. The weight of what was about to happen sat silently between us. After a while, he looked at me with the saddest eyes and said something I’ll never forget.
“Don’t you just wish we could sit in this garden forever?”
The following day, I drove him to the airport. I can honestly say it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Every time I tried to speak, the lump in my throat stopped the words from coming out. The reality was simply too painful to put into sentences.
When we arrived, we hugged each other tightly. He told me he was proud of me. Then he picked up his suitcase, turned around and walked into the terminal.
That was the last time I ever saw him.
There’s a reason I’m sharing this story. I hope it conveys just how significant this chapter was in my life. I was leaving one world behind and starting another, completely from scratch.
Even though I share my life every week on YouTube – there’s even a video from this exact period where I give a tour of my new apartment – the real story behind that video has never been told. What you couldn’t see was that, behind the camera, I was trying to convince myself that I was going to be okay.
That first evening alone, I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the apartment, so I drove through to Glasgow to watch a comedian. The show was dreadful. I didn’t laugh once. I remember sitting in a packed theatre thinking about something I’d once read: that loneliness feels worst when you’re surrounded by people. At the time, I couldn’t imagine a truer sentence.
As the days turned into weeks, I slowly began navigating an entirely new way of life. Looking back, it’s funny how resilient we all are. At the time you don’t feel strong at all; you simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. It’s only years later that you realise how much courage it actually took.
I remember making dinner for myself for the first time. It felt strangely pitiful. Setting the table somehow seemed ridiculous for just one person, so I balanced my plate on my lap instead. Looking back now, I realise I wasn’t just avoiding laying the table. I think I was avoiding accepting that this was my new reality.
Going to bed alone was another adjustment entirely. When you’re used to sharing a bed with someone, the empty side doesn’t just feel empty, it feels almost theatrical, as though somebody has left the stage halfway through the performance. It took me months to stop noticing it.
I also developed a completely irrational fear that somebody would break into the apartment during the night. I became so convinced of it that I had a lock fitted to my bedroom door. Even now, years later, I still lock it before I go to sleep.
33:00
The Chip That Broke Them All
Good afternoon,
OpenAI just built its own AI chip designed entirely by ChatGPT. Then less than 24 hours later, they were told by the US government that they couldn’t release their upcoming GPT5.6 model.
Meanwhile AI memory giant Micron printed the most absurd earnings report in history (even beating NVIDIA).
And Google had the worst week a frontier lab can have, losing a Nobel laureate AND its CTO in the same week.
Anyone looking at the news headlines this week would think the government restrictions is a nightmare scenario… it is, but not for the silent winner—open source (aka Chinese model labs) :)
Let’s get into the news.
-Ejaaz
This week OpenAI unveiled its first custom AI chip Jalapeño, built with Broadcom in just 9 months. This could be the fastest chip design cycle in semiconductor history.
The chip is designed for inference and is roughly 50% cheaper per token than today’s Nvidia GPUs. The whole idea is to stop paying the Nvidia tax (currently 40-70% margin per chip) on every ChatGPT reply.
But it seemed this was too spicy of an announcement (sorry I had to) for Trump. The US has reportedly reached out to OpenAI to stagger the release of their upcoming GPT 5.6 model, citing concerns of security risk similar to Mythos.
We’ve unfortunately reached a point where models are good enough to make better chips than the #1 company in the world, but 99% of us are excluded from using the thing.
Bears are cooked.
Micron did $41.5 billion in revenue last quarter, up 346% from a year ago. Sounds impressive right? It gets better: gross margins hit 85%… this is way higher than the industry average of 30%.
The stock rocketed 20% on the news. A lot of investors claiming the memory bottleneck trade was over need to figure out what their next excuse is going to be.
Next quarter Micron is guiding toward $50 billion.
The crazy part: their entire 2026 memory supply is already sold out. They also locked in 16 multi-year customer agreements that management says will eventually cover half or more of all company revenue. Oh, and they signed Anthropic this week, both a supply deal and an investment in Anthropic’s $965B funding round.
gg.
Google DeepMind lost four researchers to Anthropic and OpenAI in 7 days:
Noam Shazeer (co-author of the Transformer paper that all of modern AI is built on) left for OpenAI.
John Jumper (who won a 2024 Nobel Prize alongside Demis Hassabis for AlphaFold) left for Anthropic.
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel (key Gemini team members) joined Anthropic.
The exodus wiped roughly $270 billion off Alphabet’s market cap. This comes at a time where their flagship model Gemini is not actively competitive with Claude or GPT. Despite having all the capital in the world, Google has failed to catch up and the market worries it’s too late.
The irony is Google owns ~14% of Anthropic. It’s basically funding the company poaching from them.
On a more positive note, Google just wrote a $75 million check to indie studio A24 to build AI tools for filmmakers, its first-ever stake in a Hollywood firm. The deal pointedly gives Google no access to A24’s film library. A24 is now valued at $3.5B.
SpaceX just agreed to lease Nvidia GB300s to open-source lab Reflection AI for $150 million/month through 2029, a deal worth up to $6.3 billion.
If you stack that on its existing deals with Anthropic (~$1.25B/month) and Google (~$920M/month), SpaceX is now pulling in roughly $2.3 billion a month renting out compute from their Colossus data centers.
SpaceX has officially become a legitimate neocloud provider to frontier AI labs and it’s finally helping them work towards justifying a $2 trillion IPO. But it’s still a stretch and the stock price is now suffering
The rocket + Starlink business does ~$19 billion a year, and added to these these neocloud deals still puts them at 150X earnings. For context, Anthropic at $1T is still only 20-30X earnings.
SpaceX stock has crashed to IPO listing levels, and the next few months will be interesting to watch with 54% of their stock unlocking.
Against all odds, the only company standing up to the U.S. government and refusing to ban their frontier models to the public is… Meta.
Still, it would be helpful if they actually had a frontier model, right? Well it turns out they’ll be releasing a Mythos-level model in…. 9 months from now.
Which means Meta’s AI investment of $25B in the last year will produce a model that gets beaten by free, open source ones.
Nothing to see here.
Thanks for joining us for another issue. Now go listen to our podcast :)
38:19
A Good Screw
For fine (and fine-ish) furniture work, when a screw is called for, I prefer to use slot-heads.1 But when it comes to kitchen cabinets, shop furniture, rot strips on the underside of tool chests, crates and the like, I much prefer self-drilling screws (who wants to drill clearance and pilot holes on a crate?!), ideally ones with a star-drive (Torx) recess, to reduce the chance of cam-out…assuming I’ve chosen the proper driver, of course.
But as I discovered while attaching the backs to the kitchen cabinets I’m in the midst of making, the choice of screws matters.
This isn’t a blanket statement covering all self-drive screws because I’ve not done a proper comparison of all of the many brands available (nor am I going to spend good money on screws I know I don’t like just for a photograph) at my local Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ace Hardware and Do-It Best Hardware. But I’ve used a lot of them, including SPAX (a former favorite), Hillman (atrocious), Grip-Rite (I’ve snapped lots of these), Simpson (does not completely suck)…and above all, I prefer the GRK R4 multi-purpose screws.2
While the GRKs can, like all self-drilling screws, fight you when you first try to start the screw into the wood, they put up less of a fight than most brands3 thanks to the super-sharp tip (the company calls it a “Fast Bite” and the sharp-edged channel (the “Zip-Tip”) that helps it beaver into the wood/plywood.
And these cause less splitting than the Hillmans I bought at my friendly local hardware store (where I wish they carried GRKs).
Also, the heads are crisp, which means that the proper tip (which is included in the package) fits snug in the recess; I can’t recall it ever camming out while I’ve driven a GRK. I’ve certainly had trouble with other brands, even with using the supplied driver tip.
The GRKs cost more per screw than the other brands mentioned – but they cost a lot less than the mental anguish of splitting your work, or fighting to get the job done quickly. And they’re widely available…though I’m sad they’re not stocked at my local hardware store.
1
I keep a goodly supply on hand from blacksmithbolt.com because that site carries new and used old stock – not the cheap-o looking zinc-coated crap you can get at most hardware stores. (Yes, I know you can strip the zinc, and I do when needs must.)
2
As does Chris.
3
A sharp rap with a hammer to set the screw in place before drilling can help to overcome that.
