600: Nadella's AI Strategy for Microsoft, Constellation Software, Azure Explosion?, Anti-Gentrification is BS, ChatGPT-5.1, Vibe Hacking, Meta Omnilingual, and PLUR1BUS

"effectively generating more subjective life"

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

—Jonas Salk, the virologist who developed the first successful polio vaccine

🗓️ 6️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 📬🚢⚓ 600 Editions!

I know it’s a recurring theme for me lately, but time flies.

It’s one of those truisms that you don’t fully get until you hit your early 40s, in my experience.

My working theory to explain why subjective time perception is like this has two main elements:

• Time perception is largely logarithmic. When you’re 5 years old, a year is a huge fraction of your life (especially since you don’t remember the first few years). That’s why a summer can seem to last forever, and thinking about “when you’ll be a grown-up” seems impossibly far off in the distance. But when you’re 40, a year is a much smaller fraction of your lived experience.

• Our memory is kind of U-shaped. I vividly recall my formative years, from, say, 6 to 22. After that, the resolution drops. Some things stand out, some periods are spiky, but I likely have fewer vivid memories from 22 to 42 than from 12 to 22, even if it's a much longer period, and I did way more interesting things.

So here we are at 600 Editions, each of which took multiple hours to write, and multiples of that in research (reading, thinking, listening to interviews, podcasts, audiobooks, watching films, TV, etc).

In the same way that walking around with a nice Nikon around your neck 📷 makes you pay more attention to everything, looking for good shots. Writing this newsletter makes me pay more attention to everything I see and learn.

That’s a big chunk of my life, and it’s done something unexpected: by sharpening my attention and creating more standout memories, it’s effectively generating more subjective life. 🌱

How much extra life can we wring out of the next 600 Editions?

If you’ve been reading for a while (and listening to the podcast), you have so much shared context with me that it’s the closest to one-way telepathy I can think of.

Thank you for being part of it. This wouldn’t exist without you, especially those who keep the lights on as paid supporters ☕🫶 💚 🥃

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🌐🔮🤖 Inside Satya Nadella’s New AI Strategy for Microsoft

What if the Industrial Revolution had happened in 20 years instead of 200? 🤔

The best interview you can listen to right now is Satya Nadella’s convo with Dwarkesh and Dylan Patel (how convenient that they have the same last name).

They start by touring Microsoft’s gigantic Fairwater 2 datacenter in Atlanta, one of multiple Fairwaters that will be home to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200s & GB300s and consume on the order of 2 gigawatts of power.

You can listen to the audio version for most of it, but I recommend the video for at least the first part when Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Cloud + AI, is showing the Patels around. I don’t know about you, but I also love seeing inside the most cutting-edge DCs to see what the state of the art looks like (though I’m sure Microsoft isn’t showing everything for competitive reasons).

Then they sit down with Nadella, and I thought that both interviewers and interviewee did a good job of cutting the BS and talking about important things, strategic decisions, rather than dancing around PR platitudes.

Here are my highlights and thoughts on all this 👇