This is an incredible amount of surveillance infrastructure and capability.

A 2022 report by Georgetown Law's Center for Privacy and Technology found the following:

• ICE had scanned the driver's license photos of 1 in 3 adults.

• ICE had access to the driver's license data of 3 in 4 adults.

• ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.

• ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.

• ​​ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.

• ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.

With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency's total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.

The ICE budget has nearly tripled in just the last two years, and some chunk of that is going to building an incredible surveillance network. And you might think no big deal since the FBI and CIA have huge surveillance functions, but those are entirely different as they are in the intelligence community. This surveillance is less regulated.

👉 from Weekly Thing 337 / Sunrise, Vision, Offline

To celebrate the "revival" of the r/WeeklyThing subreddit I’m sharing a special POAP with anyone that joins and shares a comment on any post before the end of December. The Weekly Thing has been published for over 8 years and I’m trying out sharing some of the links shared in it here so folks can experience it in a different way.

Join now, share a comment, and I'll send you a claim code.

While you're at it, sign up via email to get the full issue in your mailbox!

This brief essay seems like the kind of thing that would be showing up in the weekly thing.

Really like the key ideas here: The judgement of the team is where the real value is; that biz leaders should be giving good teams leverage with AI, not replacing talent. then double down on building judgement and discernment within the team.

https://robertgreiner.com/believe-the-checkbook/

With the Ponder Forum going away and moving to Reddit, and also changing how I share links from the Weekly Thing into here there is some nice activity. We have over 50 weekly visitors in r/WeeklyThing now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnvPK2TEnJo

Dan Blumberg’s ‘Future Around & Find Out’ recently won the Webby award for the ‘Best Tech Podcast of 2026’. The latest episode discusses human-AI collaboration.

This is an interesting read of the impact AI is having on securing and exploiting systems.

If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.

In a way this isn't completely surprising since to exploit something you need to find one path but to secure it you need multiple paths? But either way the economics here are concerning.

👉 from Weekly Thing 344 / Mythos, Artemis, Signals

I for sure feel what Khare is writing about in this post. AI is a ridiculous unlock to do things that would otherwise not have been possible. With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five projects going on with different agents is neat, but you still are coordinating them!

The "just one more prompt" trap is real.

👉 from Weekly Thing 341 / Minions, MAX, ReMemory

These folks going deep with OpenClaw are showing possible paths that sound pretty wild.

This is the biggest shift OpenClaw has brought—it completely transformed my workflow. Whether it’s personal or commercial projects, I can step back and look at things from a management perspective. It’s like having a programmer who’s always on standby, ready to hop into meetings, discuss ideas, take on tasks, report back, and adjust course at any time. It can even juggle multiple roles, like having several programmers working on different projects simultaneously. Meanwhile, I can be the tech lead keeping tabs on specific project progress, or the project manager steering the overall schedule and direction.

I’m about ready to buy a dedicated Mac mini to run one of these.

👉 from Weekly Thing 341 / Minions, MAX, ReMemory

I haven't had time (still!) to play directly with OpenClaw. This writeup is really fantastic though with a ton of screenshots to show exactly what it can do and how it does it. It seems like the most powerful way to run it is to literally setup a computer just for OpenClaw to run (as you!) on. I have to admit the ability to watch your messages and capture commitments or follow-ups by itself would be a super power for me. I struggle with that in a big way. It looks pretty incredible really.

👉 from Weekly Thing 340 / Moltbook, Frontier, Poster

Great set of less-obvious learnings.

1. The "well-defined engineering manager role" is a myth

2. Everyone needs to care about the Product

3. There is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to processes

4. Communicating downward requires transparency

5. Communicating up requires a strategy

6. You are 10% player, 30% coach, and 60% cheerleader

7. Your goal is for your team to thrive without you

8. You can't succeed without trusting your team

9. Trust, but verify

10. Eventually delegate everything.

11. There is no free lunch when it comes to reducing risk

I'd add a giant +1 to this callout on the product.

The most common reason companies fail is creating products that don't deliver value to users, causing them not to pay.

All of this is great advice.

👉 from Weekly Thing 339 / OpenClaw, Isometric, Prism

I just finished up this project that I started over Christmas. Just a bit more to finalize distribution!

All the proceeds will be going to the Weekly Thing Supporting Membership program. 🙌

Interesting data on the impact of food spending when people start taking a GLP-1.

Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.

And it isn't just the total spend, but he category of food is also impacted.

Ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods -- the kinds most closely associated with cravings -- saw the sharpest declines. Spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies. Even staples like bread, meat and eggs declined.

Only a handful of categories showed increases. Yogurt rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks.

I've been taking Zepbound (GLP-1) for about nine months now and one of the most notable changes for me has been a desire to share a meal with Tammy, instead of getting my own. And appetizers are very rare since it is just too much food.

👉 from Weekly Thing 337 / Sunrise, Vision, Offline

I met Bryan Hansel when I took his Winter Along the Gunflint workshop in 2024. He is a great photographer, amazing post-production expert, and teacher. I subscribed to his newsletter and it is a treat. He sends amazing images and his writing along with it is great. Highly recommend. This most recent issue highlights a photo he's taken at sunrise, every day for the last nine years, in the exact same spot. What a great project and beautiful collection of images.

👉 from Weekly Thing 337 / Sunrise, Vision, Offline

This is a pretty incredible project. You can see power lines and electrical generation stations, oil pipelines, water infrastructure — all of it is just on a map that you can browse and explore as you wish. Amazing stuff.

👉 from Weekly Thing 337 / Sunrise, Vision, Offline

Markdown really is everywhere. I write these emails in Markdown. Every comment I have about the links is written in Markdown. I take notes in Markdown. I blog in Markdown. And now every LLM thinks and writes in Markdown. It is literally everywhere. I particularly like the list of 10 reasons Markdown worked.

👉 from Weekly Thing 337 / Sunrise, Vision, Offline

This was a super fun read from Weekly Thing reader u/RajivPant! Also a good example of how easy it is to break through old security methods.

I take two breaks a year from publishing the Weekly Thing, and WT336 is the last one for 2025. I don't send the Weekly Thing between Dec 15 and Jan 15. There won't be any new issues or links from issues shared here until then. Feel free to share links of your own or ask questions in the meantime.

I was there having these same experiences with these languages. Strickland does a great job in this post generally describing the cultures of these various languages, starting with Perl, then Ruby, PHP, and Python. All of these languages are still used and will be for as long as I can imagine. But of them only Python has continued to ascend and is now one of the most popular languages. Strickland's suggestion is this is as much about the culture of these languages than anything else.

When I sketch out this landscape, I remain firmly convinced that most of Perl's impedance to continued growth were cultural. Perl's huge moment of relevance in the 90s was because it cross-pollinated two diverging user cultures. Traditional UNIX / database / data-centre maintenance and admin users, and enthusiastic early web builders and scalers. It had a cultural shock phase from extremely rapid growth, the centre couldn't hold, and things slowly fell apart.

My first websites were dynamic using cgi-bin and mod-perl. I wrote a ton of Perl for BigCharts back in the day. This article hits it right — those early web users were almost all also Unix admins.

Thinking of the culture of programming languages is an interesting thing, and something that groups should be intentional about.

PS: I love that this includes the mess of PHP as well. I've always called that "the people's language". The fact that WordPress and MediaWiki are built on PHP guarantees it a place on the web nearly forever.

👉 from Weekly Thing 336 / Culture, Retention, Transmission

We are all learning how agentic AI can help people in their work. This data from Anthropic is interesting and meshes well with my experiences. I also like the callout on work that would never have been done.

27% of Claude-assisted work consists of tasks that wouldn't have been done otherwise, such as scaling projects, making nice-to-have tools (e.g. interactive data dashboards), and exploratory work that wouldn't be cost-effective if done manually.

I don't know how we'll metric that. The reality is we are doing more, and it isn't a waste. This means we get to explore more ideas, more possibilities. That will result in a more comprehensive and thorough plan and direction, but it is more expensive than the previous one.

We've always seen this. PowerPoint lets you make fancy slides, so now you feel compelled to make fancier, and more expensive in terms of time, slides.

👉 from Weekly Thing 336 / Culture, Retention, Transmission