https://watts.it.com/weekly The editor's column from watts.it.com: essays on AI, work and judgment by Luke Topfer. Every piece has an audio edition. en-AU Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://watts.it.com/obiter/the-invisible-co-signatory https://watts.it.com/obiter/the-invisible-co-signatory Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Obiter Yesterday I published a module on this site explaining in the fairest terms possible how Claude's new text watermark works. As I was signing-off on the content, I wrote the editor's note, beginning with "Look, I hate this." https://watts.it.com/obiter/play-it-anyway https://watts.it.com/obiter/play-it-anyway Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Obiter Before they are published, these Obiter pieces exist as essays on my hard drive. I have a backlog of concepts, and few that I've developed a bit beyond that. This past week, I started to do the deeper research into one, which I killed part-way in because I stopped believing in the underlying thesis. I finished a first draft of another one, which would have been published today were it not for the… https://watts.it.com/obiter/five-million-barrels-of-oil https://watts.it.com/obiter/five-million-barrels-of-oil Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Obiter Right now, we should be living through a global energy crisis unlike any other in living memory. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran should, according to every serious forecast, have caused an oil shock resulting in abject calamity. The economic contraction had the potential to define a generation. The sources that I read and rely on, in their reflection, say that the arithmetic was… https://watts.it.com/obiter/it-gave-me-a-playlist https://watts.it.com/obiter/it-gave-me-a-playlist Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Obiter I was nearing the weekly reset for one of my personal subscription accounts and had something like 22% of my weekly usage allocation remaining. That's the kind of constraint that makes a person curious rather than careful, and so I gave a Fable agent permission to wow me. I told it to consider my recent projects, personal notes, past and upcoming events, and whatever else it felt was relevant in… https://watts.it.com/obiter/slop-was-never-about-the-ai https://watts.it.com/obiter/slop-was-never-about-the-ai Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Obiter You have met this man. Everyone has met this man. Call him the Deputy Head of Something, and he's twenty minutes into a lecture nobody asked for. Senior enough that no one can leave, and confident in a way that has never once correlated with being right. He is explaining, to a room of people who know better, how some grand sweep of history proves whatever he already believed when he walked in.…