(AI) Links (Dec. 8)

Worksinprogress Co: The Great Downzoning – Works in Progress Magazine (Nov 24, 2025)
The anti-abundance reality: The Downzoning was driven more by the interests of property owners seeking to protect their property values by restricting development than by a widespread anti-density ideology.
WSJ: How Blue Origin Plans to Beat SpaceX to the Moon (Dec 2, 2025)
The company is streamlining operations under new leadership to accelerate its pace and challenge SpaceX, particularly focusing on lunar opportunities and a simplified human landing proposal for NASA. They are leveraging existing hardware and proven technology to achieve a crewed lunar visit by the end of 2028.
Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (Dec 5, 2025)
“The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.” HT Simon Willison
NYTimes: A Data Center Wrapped in a Mystery Comes to the New Mexican Desert (Dec 7, 2025)
BorderPlex, a little-known Austin company led by Lanham Napier, pitched “Project Jupiter” — a $165 billion AI datacenter complex on 1,400 acres in Doña Ana County, N.M.
WSJ: Nvidia Takes Top Spot in the List of Best-Managed Companies of 2025 (Dec 8, 2025)
Nvidia is No. 1 in the Drucker Institute’s Management Top 250 as tech’s overall share slips, with five Magnificent Seven firms leading but Intel and Adobe plunging.
Simon Willison: Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult (Nov 24, 2025)
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, aiming to reclaim the top spot for coding models, boasting improved capabilities, a new “effort” parameter, enhanced computer use tools, and preserved “thinking blocks.”
Simon Willison: LLM SVG Generation Benchmark (Nov 25, 2025)
Tom Gally created a project inspired by a previous SVG benchmark, using LLMs to generate SVGs from creative prompts like “an octopus operating a pipe organ.”
NY Times: Prosecutor Used Flawed A.I. to Keep a Man in Jail, His Lawyers Say (Nov 25, 2025)
A California prosecutor is under scrutiny for allegedly filing court papers containing AI-generated errors, including misinterpretations of law and nonexistent case citations.
Anthropic: Snowflake and Anthropic announce $200 million partnership to bring agentic AI to global enterprises (Dec. 3, 2025)
Anthropic and Snowflake are expanding their partnership through a $200 million agreement to integrate Anthropic’s Claude models into the Snowflake platform, enabling enterprises to leverage AI agents for complex data analysis within a secure and governed environment.
Johann Rehberger: The Normalization of Deviance in AI · Embrace The Red (Dec 4, 2025)
“The AI industry risks repeating the same cultural failures that contributed to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster: quietly normalizing warning signs while progress marches forward.”

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