Let’s be Fwends #160

Trees, AI, And Singing in Old English

The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.”

~ Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow

Hi, and welcome to Let’s be Fwends issue 160. Today, we cover a quite broad spectrum of things, but mostly it’s AI and trees. AI, trees, and my own website.

A New Meeker Report is out There

The Meeker Reports are legendary. Mary Meeker’s analysis are on point, short, poignant, and deeply thought-provoking.

Or better - were. Since she stopped publishing them 2019.

But last week, her 2025 report came out, focusing on AI.

So, what does she have to say about the Artificial Intelligence Industry? Let’s just say she uses the word “unprecedented” a lot.

Her summary:

“One thing is certain – it’s gametime for AI, and it’s only getting more intense… and the genie is not going back in the bottle.”

Or, as Leo said: “So many log-scales.”

I’ve Rebuilt My Website

In similarly earth-shattering news, I’ve rebuilt my website. It was about time. I made it faster, easier to maintain, and hopefully also easier to navigate. Let me know what you think (just reply to this mail).

Unfortunately, the relaunch also ment the end of the easter egg no-one found.

I also managed to tweak my workflow so that the contents of my website are now an Obsidian vault - previously, I did all my writing and editing in Obsidian, and then copied over the source markdown files to the website.

Now, my workflow is much straighter: I write everything inside Obsidian, get a live preview on Astro, and when I finally push to Github, my changes get published to the website automatically.

That’s a bit like living in the future.

If you’re looking for a similar setup, drop me a line. Maybe I can help you out a bit.

Using AITA for testing AI niceness

Reddit’s Am I The Asshole? subreddit is a really strange place. Basically, people in some sort of social predicament can ask the reddit community if they did something wrong.

Occasionally browsing the sub, I came to the following rule of thumb, or heuristic: If you need to ask if you are the asshole, then, yes, typically you are.

It’s very rare that someone posting there did not behave like an asshole.

But guess who doesn’t see it that way? Yes, AI.

Researchers were testing just how sycophantic current AI models are, and used a dataset derived from AITA as a benchmark.

They found that

Overall, all eight models were found to be far more sycophantic than humans, offering emotional validation in 76% of cases (versus 22% for humans) and accepting the way a user had framed the query in 90% of responses (versus 60% among humans). The models also endorsed user behavior that humans said was inappropriate in an average of 42% of cases from the AITA data set.

(Source)

So, next time an LLM tells you how much it likes your ideas, think twice. Maybe it’s just sucking up to you.

Ancient Tree Inventory

Trees are a recurring topic on Let’s be Fwends, it seems.

There aren’t many things that can create so much awe in me as trees and forests. And humanities relation with trees is - as with most things in nature - quite two-sided. On one hand, trees are a commodity, used as a resource, for construction, or for generating heat. On the other hand, they are also mythical, held in great respect (maybe these two things actually are connected, and not a contradiction at all?).

I was delighted to find that there are efforts to map the oldest trees there are - often right between us: Ancient Tree Inventory

Lightning Strike

Trees and lightning don’t make a great pair, as I’ve written before. Here’s an absolutely fantastic video capturing a lightning striking some buildings in 40.000 frames per second.

You can clearly see that lightnings are not a rod of light striking down, but two electrical arcs - one downwards, one upwards - connecting with each other.

Lorde In Old English

Were you aware of a musical genre called “Bardcore”?

I wasn’t. But I have to admit that Lorde’s Royals, as a medieval song, complete with lyrics in Old English is pretty catchy.

For reference - here’s the original.

That’s it for this edition of Let’s be Fwends! If reading it was even half as delightful as writing it I fulfilled my mission. ✍️