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Rough Notes, Feb 16, 2026: China, Amodei, Unrest, etc.

A digest of recent Rough Notes

Rough Notes, Feb 16, 2026: China, Amodei, Unrest, etc.
Photo by Minh Đức / Unsplash

Here are recent rough notes from the site.

1.
China conducts abortions matching US population

"Over the [one child] policy's three-and-a-half-decade duration, China conducted nearly as mamy abortions ... as the present population of the United States."
—Dan Wang, Breakneck

Feb 16 · Permalink →
2.
Anthropic cuts competitors from Claude Code

Speaking of the recent Amodei interview, I did not realize until now that Anthropic had cut off its competitors from using Claude Code. That is an interesting signal.

Feb 16 · Permalink →
3.
Zvi Dissects Amodei-Dwarkesh Bizarre Interview

Good Zvi dissection of recent (bizarre) interview with Anthropic CEO Amodei, rightly calling him out for retroactively changing predictions, while pretending he didn't, and for he and host Dwarkesh ignoring minor things like catastrophic risk. As I said previously, a deeply strange interview, but Zvi analyses it in detail, so worth reading.

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-dwarkesh-patels-2026-podcast-with

Feb 16 · Permalink →
4.
Humans Pay Human Touch Premium

This is naive—humans will always pay for the human touch, at scale—and there are many rejoinders, so I'll just give one: Live music, chess, and fine dining are consumed as performances of humans’ humanness. It is not the same for spreadsheets, car assembly, or legal work. People DGAF who or what did i, and it will be "performed" accordingly with AI.

AI and the ecnoomics of the human touch
https://agglomerations.substack.com/p/economics-of-the-human

Feb 16 · Permalink →