Linked List: November 10, 2026

Tuesday, 10 November 2026

Gary Marcus: ‘Just Say No to Anthropic’s IPO’ ★

Gary Marcus:

When a business needs exponentially increasing amounts of capital to make modest increases in quality in an intensely competitive market and still owes far more money than it has ever made, there is a serious problem.

I continue to believe that there is no moat in AI models. None. But the entire premise of Anthropic’s IPO is that they have an enormous gulf of a moat.

I would not be shocked to see Anthropic go out of business. Nor would I be shocked if the IPO fails. WeWork tried to IPO, 3 times, and didn’t make it.

I would be surprised if Anthropic does not go out of business. Most cults implode, and Anthropic doesn’t even hide that they’re a cult. And I just don’t see how the math works. Scientology is a long-running cult, but Scientology hasn’t committed $900 billion in spending over the next few years.

(Marcus’s post is on his Substack blog, which, annoyingly, requires you to be logged into a Substack account and to “subscribe”, even though it’s ostensibly a free post. What a rotten oppressive turd of a blogging platform Substack is. Just in case your Substack account isn’t working, here’s a PDF archive.)

Altar II Keyboard on Kickstarter ★

Electronic Materials Office is the brainchild of Andrew Emerson. Back in 2023 he launched the Altar I, a rather distinctive mechanical keyboard. Much thinner than most, very opinionated in its industrial design and keycap typography. I got one and I don’t regret it, but there was too much I didn’t like about it, so it’s mostly sat in a drawer.

Today on Kickstarter Emerson/EMO has launched a campaign for the Altar II. Same cool aesthetic, but with improvements that address everything I didn’t like about the Altar I. The Altar II has all new switches. It’s so thin it resembles the profile of Apple’s Magic Keyboard from the side. The dial — now called the M-Dial — now attaches magnetically, which means it’s easy to detach for putting the keyboard into a bag. And it has new features that never even occurred to me, like NiteLite — backlighting from “a long-wavelength amber-red light that won’t affect your body’s circadian rhythm, meaning you can sleep better at night.” The sleep benefits might be voodoo but red lights are undeniably easier on your eyes at night, and it looks cool as shit. (My favorite feature of Apple Watch Ultra is “Night Mode” — a handful of watch faces that switch to all-red in the dark.)

I love that mechanical keyboards have come back into vogue, and that the market for them is thriving. But most of them annoy me. Often because they aren’t really keyboards — they’re design-your-own-keyboard kits. Kits are fun, but I want someone else to do the hard work of making all the design decisions. Don’t make me choose between half a dozen (or more!) types of switches. You’re the goddamn keyboard designer, you pick the switches. That’s my thinking. Altar II is that type of keyboard — one that has been properly and thoroughly designed for you. You just choose the key layout — US or UK. That’s it.

Another thing I don’t like about most mechanical keyboards — that also makes them feel like a hobby, not a finished product — is that they’re designed for cross-platform use. If they’re customizable via software, the software tends to be confusing and poorly made. Altar II is designed for the Mac and is going to come with a native Mac app for configuration. Fuckin’-A right.

I haven’t tried the Altar II yet because it’s only at the preproduction stage. That’s why it’s on Kickstarter. You can wait and see what I think of it next year. But if you jump on the Kickstarter now, there’s a first-48-hours early bird price that will save you $70. Retail price is going to be $350; for the remaining 40 hours or so, you can book one for just $280. After tomorrow, Kickstarter pricing goes up to $300.

Bloomberg: ‘Nvidia Intervened in U.S. Probe of Megaspeed Chip Smuggling’ ★

Mackenzie Hawkins, reporting yesterday for Bloomberg:

Despite that stance, in the months after Teter’s initial call with Kessler, Nvidia gave BIS an incomplete account of its business with Megaspeed. After several visits to Megaspeed’s data centers — 12 facilities owned by eight companies across three countries in Southeast Asia — Nvidia had sent inventory checks to the agency and declared to Bloomberg News in mid-November 2025 that everything was where it should be.

The company also said at the time that it had asked the US government whether it needed to cut off business with Megaspeed, and was told no.

But Nvidia’s tabulations, as relayed to the US government, undercounted the number of chips it had sold to Megaspeed via hardware partners by 50,000 units, according to trade records analyzed by Bloomberg. That’s worth billions of dollars. After being pressed about the gap, Nvidia told Bloomberg in December 2025 that it had checked additional Megaspeed warehouses that contained the missing hardware, while declining to state exactly how many chips it found in those facilities or provide any further details.

Regarding Graveyards and Indispensable Men ★

Steve Jobs to 60 Minutes in 2003: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”

(I linked to this just a few months ago, but thought it worth a re-link today.)

Steven Levy on John Ternus ★

Steven Levy at Wired, in a terrific post-event follow-up to his exclusive early look at the new MacBook Pros (News+ link):

I first met Ternus in 2015, when I spent a day with him at Apple’s Input Design Lab, a testing facility in Cupertino. He’d risen to VP for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem, and Audio Engineering, and he struck me as affable and knowledgeable. (He spent four years right out of college at a virtual reality company, but he’s been at Apple ever since.) The peg to my story at the time was how this unknown manager conducted a Javert-like investigation to fix the weird sound a redesigned mouse made when sliding on a table.

That attention to detail was a legacy of Jobs’ perfectionism, which Tim Cook sustained as the next CEO. In the decade when Ternus overlapped with Jobs, he says he had only “a handful of interactions” with the founder. “But I’ve always felt like sort of a student of Steve’s teachings,” Ternus said. “And then being able to work very closely with Tim, I’ve been very lucky.” [...]

The extent to which Ternus is a deep Apple insider became clear when I probed him on his views on being a corporate leader. I asked him which non-Apple CEOs he admires, and he was stumped. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he said. I asked whether any business books had an impact on him. “Not really,” he said. “Of course I’ve read books, but there’s so much to be learned from the people I get to work with.” Indeed, every time I tried to pin down Ternus on what mark he wants to make at Apple, he deflected the question and told me how he will continue Apple’s commitment to internal collaboration.

OurCal ★

My thanks to OurCal for sponsoring last week at DF. You ever have a discussion that starts with “I didn’t see you put that on the calendar”? Could be with your colleagues, could be with your family. But the problem is familiar: Shared calendars solved scheduling, not communication.

OurCal connects any calendar, new or existing, to a group chat. Changes post there automatically, so nobody misses them. Because it’s a messenger, they made everything end-to-end encrypted, certified by France’s cybersecurity agency.

OurCal is native SwiftUI across Apple’s platforms, and the App Store just featured it in “Great apps on iPhone Duo”. They’ve got an Android app too, but they’re an Apple-first company. It’s really well done. Even the app icon is chef’s kiss.

OurCal is free to try, then a low monthly group subscription. No ads, no tracking.

Safari 27.3 Adds Support for Global Privacy Control ★

Nick Heer, Pixel Envy:

There are a whole bunch of features and fixes coming to Safari with Apple’s OS 27.3 update. One that is not in the beta release notes but appears nevertheless is support for Global Privacy Control. This new standard is effectively a replacement for Do Not Track with legal muscle that should permit you to indicate your tracking preference one time and then, theoretically, never again see a cookie consent banner.

‘A Scandal at the Center of the Economy’ ★

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):

It is curious, then, that, as news came out that the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, had had a romantic relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who was also an asset of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, notable factions of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., seemed nonplussed. “Even incredible humans make mistakes,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, posted on X yesterday. “We should all support him and his family. Onward.” The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire offered a five-point analysis of Huang’s situation, noting that the CEO did something “incredibly dumb” and “bad for America,” but that “my guess is there was no bad intention.” He then argued, “I believe Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.” Elon Musk agreed. From there, the posts, written before we know all the facts of the scandal, got only more absurd, including defending Huang’s affair on the grounds that his kids are adults now. [...]

Huang’s thinking on issues such as AI doomerism (he’s anti-doom) and chip allocation in China (he’s for it — a position that warrants examining, given this weekend’s revelations) influences U.S. policy. This centrality is why one tech analyst on CNBC this morning implied that replacing Huang was a comical suggestion. Huang is a singular figure: the linchpin of the company that is arguably the linchpin of the American economy. Framed another way, Nvidia has much of the financial system in a hostage situation. Huang is too big to fail. Which may be why so many people seem motivated to downplay or protect him right now.

Elbert Hubbard: “The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”

U.S. Commerce Dept. Inquiry Into Megaspeed Was Halted After Nvidia Name-Dropped Trump Appointee ★

Ana Swanson and Devlin Barrett, reporting yesterday for The New York Times (gift link):

Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.

But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.

It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.

The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident.

“Nice job you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

If this is as abjectly corrupt as it sounds, it seems indefensible — and Congressional oversight investigations are now inevitable with both the House and Senate in Democratic hands. This isn’t just pocket-stuffing corruption — it’s a national security issue.