holy smokes, this is the coolest idea I’ve ever seen
A la fin du XVIIIe siècle, le déplacement total d’un vaisseau de 74 canons était de l’ordre de 3070 tonneaux soit environ 3000 tonnes.
La coque pesait 49% du poids total ;
L'artillerie et les munitions 12% ;
Les agrès et les apparaux de rechange 6,5% ;
Les vivres pour 6 mois de campagne 12% ;
L’eau pour 3 mois de campagne 8% ;
L’équipage et affaires personnelles 2% ;
Le vin 1,2% ;
Le lest 8,1% ;
Autres objets d’équipement 1,2%.
Source : La Marine à Voile de Louis XIII à Napoléon III, par Eric Rieth.
I applaud Daniel for his intellectual honesty, and I hope others will follow:
"In March 2025 I made a bet..that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers..at a level of the best few papers published in 2025..by 2030.
I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.
I've slowly updated my timelines over the past year
Despite all of the above, I think I was not correctly calibrated as to the capabilities of existing models, let alone near-future models."
The New York Times made news the loss leader for a $2 billion digital revenue machine, and this chart is the receipt.
News-only subscribers dropped 65% since June 2022. Bundle subscribers grew 227%. That looks like a news collapse. But the NYT deliberately killed its standalone news product. They stopped marketing it. They made it nearly impossible to buy a news-only subscription on their website. They priced the full bundle (News + Games + Cooking + Athletic + Wirecutter) at $2/month introductory, cheaper than a standalone Games subscription.
News-only ARPU is $13.33. Bundle ARPU is $12.92. Single non-news product ARPU is $3.36. Those 4.3 million single-product subscribers paying $3.36/month? They’re not the business. They’re the funnel. The NYT CEO said it explicitly on the earnings call: single products are “funnels to get people to subscribe” to the bundle.
Games now accounts for over 50% of time spent inside the NYT app. Wordle, Connections, and the Mini pull 10+ million weekly players who never intended to read a news article. But half of all NYT subscribers now pay for the bundle, and bundle subscribers retain longer, engage more, and accept price increases. The bundle just went from $25 to $30/month.
The result: digital revenue crossed $2 billion for the first time in 2025. Free cash flow hit $550 million. Adjusted operating margins reached 24% in Q4. Berkshire Hathaway just took a billion-dollar position. While the Washington Post cut 300 journalists last week, the Times added 1.4 million subscribers.
This chart shows a news company that built an attention ecosystem where Wordle gets you in the door, Cooking keeps you at breakfast, The Athletic owns your commute, and by the time you think about canceling, you’d lose four products instead of one.
The NYT figured out that the way to fund journalism in 2026 is to make sure you can’t quit the crossword.
Most people come to the Louvre for the art—few realize the museum sits on top of a medieval fortress.
Around 1190, it began as a defensive stronghold built to protect Paris: thick walls, a central donjon (keep), and a dry defensive ditch (not a water moat). Centuries later, the fortress lost its military purpose and the Louvre was reshaped into a Renaissance palace—by the 16th century, the old keep was gone. Today, the “Medieval Louvre” lets you walk these underground remains and see where it truly started: not as a museum, but as a fortress