Weekend Reading #359

This is the three-hundredth-and-fifty-ninth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 11th April 2026.

To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

*****

What we're thinking.

Last week we intimated that the market was suggesting that it wanted to go up. Particularly in certain sectors like photonics and memory which subsequently have led the rebound as they began to suggest to us that they would. It turned out we got what our friend, Le Shrub, calls "Shrodingers ceasefire". In the virtual world there is a ceasefire but in the real-world rockets are still flying around. To us, it doesn't really matter as markets wanted to go up anyway. Will there be a breach and continuation of the war? We have no idea. But markets have sold off and we have had a positioning cleanse. The VIX has collapsed, the dollar has weakened and we are off to the races again. Right? Right? Our base case is we take all-time highs in the leading parts of the market and maybe even in the indices. After that who knows. Even crypto is going up. Bring on the bull market. We will however remind everyone that the selloff earlier this year was not triggered by war. It was fears of software redundancy and big tech overspending. Those have not gone away. Oh, and the war is not so simple either. If you are confused by what we just said, good. Markets are confusing. There is no linear solution to making money. That's why we love it.

What we're reading.
After reading the first 3 books of Pierce Brown's Red Rising series, I took a break for few months. I have now resumed with book 4, Iron Gold, and I'm straight back in. This guy is a genius. He has an ability to hook you multiple times in the same book, nevermind the same series (there are 6 books in total). I'm already pulled right into this one and I literally can't wait to continue reading. The good news is that even after this, there are still 2 more to come! For sci fi readers who love a space opera type theme, this is as good as it gets.. DC

For anyone that’s started to develop an unhealthy reliance on your LLM of choice, especially when that reliance becomes a belief in its infallibility, here’s an interesting tale of the fake disease that AI purports to be real: Bixonomania. Symptoms? Irritated eyes that when rubbed cause the eyelids to turn a slight pinkish hue, presumably from too much exposure to blue light. The symptoms are real, but the disease isn’t – a published admission in Nature that this was all just an experiment by a researcher in Sweden recounts how the initial aim was to test whether LLMs “would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice.” The fictional disease was conceived in 2024, first on Medium, then on two preprints, published by an equally fictional author named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photo was also AI generated. The eye condition was named -mania as a flag to any true medical professional who would know that -mania doesn’t describe eye conditions (probably more likely to be ending with -itis) and planted abundant clues in the preprints to alert readers that the papers were fake. For example, acknowledgements to “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”, or that the papers were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”. Moral of the story: AI can’t tell a joke from the truth, but at the rate we’re going, we’ll soon lose that ability too.

Speaking on morals, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has found itself in the middle of many controversies: from refusing the US DoD access to it to reportedly having developed a version of Claude called Mythos that’s too dangerous to release. So it’s interesting that in the face of accusations of playing God, Anthropic has turned to a Catholic priest for guidance in writing their ethics code. The main character in this case is Fr. Brendan McGuire, a parish priest in Los Altos California, who was approached by Anthropic to gather help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, leading to the institution of the Claude Constitution – an attempt to create a conscience for AI, with plans to approach other religious leaders to try and synthesise something universal. It all sounds fascinating, though one can only wonder how far down that road we can go without first having a thorough understanding of consciousness – whether these AI models have one or not, what makes our own humanity tick and how we can understand what exactly we’ve created.
 
In other news, as The Masters kicked off this week, an interesting name showed up on the players sheet: Fifa Laopakdee. The winner of the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship in Dubai last October made his debut this week, but his name obviously got quite a bit more attention. He’s quoted as saying that his father was a huge soccer fan, and for his nickname it was a toss-up between Uefa and Fifa. A great achievement earning a Masters invitation in any case – one can only imagine the feeling he got walking into the locker room to find his locker located in between Bryson DeChambeau and Tiger Woods. EL

What we're listening to.
I haven't listed to the Bankless podcast in well over a year, but the topic of the NYSE going onchain is something I wanted to learn a more about so I listened to this week's episode. There is a quiet revolution going on here. As the vast majority of crypto token prices collapse into irrelevancy, blockchain tech is being adopted at lightning speed by incumbents. The NYSE has built its own parallel onchain trading and settlement system which goes live shortly. One will be able to trade existing stocks onchain and settle in stablecoin. This opens up all sorts of opportunities for lending and indeed for DeFi to enter a real addressable market. The implications are big for existing infrastructure providers as well as for large DeFi players. This is well worth a listen.
 
Another way to play the above thematic is through Hyperliquid, an onchain exchange which uses 97% of its fees to buyback its token. Arthur Hayes is a big believer in this token and this chat with Anthony Pompliano (who I stopped listening to a long time ago) has great insights into 
many of these parallel aspects of where the infrastructure that facilitates our ability to trade and custody is going. DC