Jonathan E Cowperthwait

Fuck, you people have me posting on LinkedIn now. LinkedIn! Look how they massacred my boy.

I finally got around to reading *that* Stratechery piece on Anthropic vs the United States. So should everyone else!, but I got all het up and wrote some words over on beardbro twitter.

www.linkedin.com/posts/cowper...

Anyway, congratulations to the summer 2026 class of Palantir interns.

“Gooning in Agartha”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/florida-international-university-racist-group-chat

[Exit Murderer.]

On November 18, 2019, Noem released a meth awareness campaign named "Meth. We're on It". The campaign was widely mocked and Noem was criticized for spending $449,000 of public funds while hiring an out-of-state advertising agency from Minnesota to lead the project.[219] She defended the campaign as successful in raising awareness.[220]

look what I really want to know is, what are the odds I live to see Ian Miles Cheong literally eaten by his servants

Maybe they could put a tip jar on Radar pages 💡

Screenshot of the Safari interface on iPadOS 26.3. The “+” control, for creating a new tab, now floats above and to the left of the other two windowing controls, “share” and “show all tabs.”

Let’s all donate to support indie developer “Apple” and their tiny but popular free software project “Safari.” Their UI broke again, for the obscure edge case “using it on an iPad,” and I’m worried they don’t have the bandwidth to fix it.

But just to rebuild affinity, let’s agree that anyone who 7️⃣’s belongs in jail.

You’re wrong and you should feel wrong. 1️⃣, baby.

Hello, internet hive mind! Seeking anecdata: did Apple AirPods Pro 2 suffer from some sort of structural defect, or have I just been exceedingly unlucky? I’m on my third AppleCare claim in 6 months. I would throw in the towel and just buy Pro 3s, but I’m a stubborn man.

One of Matt's Yglesias big theses is that Dems should be willing to sacrifice some virtue in order to win, because winning is a must-pass barrier to any good things at all.

Stated thus, it has a logic.

Except, he seems to mostly wield it to try to get Dems to sacrifice virtue for sacrifice's sake

Screenshot of two paragraphs of a New York Times article: “It was also unclear whether investigators should focus their attention on the actions of Mr. Biden's aides or on Mr. Biden himself, given that the United States Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in 2024, granted broad immunity to presidents for most acts undertaken as part of their official duties. “In recent months, prosecutors determined that despite Mr. Trump's desire to seek vengeance against Mr. Biden and his aides, there was no credible case to bring, the people said. The prosecutors never brought a potential indictment before a grand jury.” This portion is highlighted: “…given that the United States Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in 2024, granted broad immunity to presidents for most acts undertaken as part of their official duties.”

It’s like raaaaaaain…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/us/politics/trump-biden-autopen.html

“An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel.”

That time we wargamed a Hormuz conflict and the US got its hypothetical ass kicked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

My god, my god, the AA piece, my god. I haven’t yet decided whether Ben is a real person or an LLM trained on AM radio.

I love that when I attempt to plagiarize my own LinkedIn content, it prepends “hashtag” to each hashtag. Fuck it, I’m leaving that there. sfba.social/@cowperthwai...

Heated Exchange between Hillary Clinton and Nancy Mace

What the actual fuck is this

cool cool cool

Hillary Clinton goes off on Republicans after it’s revealed unauthorized images of her were released: I'm done with this. If you guys are doing that, I am done. You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home. This is just typical behavior.

Screen grab from “I Think You Should Leave”—an actor in a fat suit, gray wig, and low-quality latex “old man” mask stares downward. Caption, “I don’t even want to be around anymore.”

https://www.star-history.com/blog/openclaw-surpasses-react-most-starred-software

Hanlon’s Razor absolutely being a thing, congratulations to Anthropic ops for the most spectacularly lucky timing imaginable. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-02/anthropic-s-claude-chatbot-goes-down-for-thousands-of-users?embedded-checkout=true

Still frame of Cara Cunningham, 2007, asking everyone to leave Britney alone.

Continuing to find silver linings wherever possible: watching sentiment turn on OpenAI in real time. Not enough to materially move markets, but jusssst enough to get under Altman stans’ skin.

It seems to me that if this were an awesome business, Strava would be the “Strava of tennis.”

RE: https://sfba.social/@cowperthwait/116155949194030658

1: Just calling everything that doesn’t work “AI” now.

2: I’ll actually keep it around; who doesn’t want a little device that just says “no” on command?

Screenshot of a paragraph from a New York Times article: “As part of the move to abandon diversity efforts, Mr. Hegseth said Scouting America had agreed to do away with the ‘Citizenship in Society’ merit badge, which is earned by scouts who ‘realize the benefits of diversity, equity, inclusion, and ethical leadership.’ An advisory on Scouting America's website said that badge was discontinued effective Friday.”

Historians will observe that at the dawn of WWIII, America’s top civilian military leader was tweeting about 8 year-olds’ merit badges.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/scouting-america-dei-pentagon-hegseth.html

Bros getting hosed on a technicality by their proxy death market represents the tiniest silver lining of funny in this weekend’s news. https://www.theblock.co/post/391678/kalshi-ceo-defends-khamenei-market-design-after-backlash-says-platform-will-reimburse-all-fees