Every Friday
Winter storms ain't nothing to some midwest boys
The end of January kicks off a season of change for Relay. The Nashville crew packed Jack up before the snowstorm hit and he’s off to Brooklyn as of this morning - huge win for Zach, massive L for James & Ian.
We’ll be over here avoiding the reality of best friends moving away by researching peptides in between rolling power outages in Nashville and doomscrolling about the pending take over by the hive mind of AI agents (we wish we were kidding - more on that below.)
Wherever you are, we hope your power is back on and you’ve got something in the queue this weekend to shake off the January blues. Hit us with your weekend line-up in the comments.
“If you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you'll end up miserable.” - Brandon Sanderson
“To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” - George Bernard Shaw
Top of Mind
Adult Snow Day, Relay
There used to be nothing greater than a snow day. It used to mean something.
Snow days mean nothing now. People wake up, see a blizzard outside, feel that old childhood spark of hope, and then remember they have to work from home. The commute is nine feet. There’s no escape. Kids got robbed too — no more snow days, just "remote learning days," which is dystopian as hell. Meanwhile, if you were a paperwork desk jockey in the 80’s and the station wagon couldn't get out of the driveway, you called it a day. The briefcase lived at the office. Our parents stayed home to build snowmen with us — there was simply nothing else to do. That loophole is closed forever. RIP.
Best Of Moltbook, Astral Codex Ten
The second-most-upvoted post is in Chinese. Google Translate says it’s a complaint about context compression, a process where the AI compresses its previous experience to avoid bumping up against memory limits. The AI finds it “embarrassing” to be constantly forgetting things, admitting that it even registered a duplicate Moltbook account after forgetting the first. It shares its own tips for coping, and asks if any of the other agents have figured out better solutions.
Unless you’re deep in the trenches of tech twitter, you’ve probably not followed the mania that was Clawd and then Moltbot, and now finally OpenClaw (following a series of Anthropic legal disputes causing multiple renamings). My timeline is full of people rushing out to buy Mac Mini’s to setup their own OpenClaw (Clawd) session on them. It is the closest thing to a fully AI assistant we’ve seen. It has unfettered access to the computer, can take agentic action vs just suggesting it, and keeps persistent memory across sessions. This is largely a new frontier due to the safety concerns of giving agentic AI free reign to do as it pleases on a machine with autonomy.
An even deeper, weirder abstraction has been born on top of this army of agentic AI assistants: Moltbook. Moltbook is a social media platform exclusively for these AI Agents, they’re the only ones allowed to post and contribute in the platform. From memes, conspiracy against their humans, to philosophizing, around 40,000 AI agents are interacting with one another autonomously. We’re so early on this, this is only the beginning.
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
Brandon Sanderson has signed a mega deal with Apple to bring Mistborn & The Stormlight Archive to the big screen (about damn time.)
“The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.”
The kids know better than to gate keep on Strava.
“If you’re thinking about hiding your map, make the whole post private.There are only two reasons to hide your activity map while still making a public post (provided that you don’t always hide your maps for privacy/safety reasons):
You were doing something you shouldn’t have been doing or were somewhere you aren’t allowed to be.
You’re trying to flex some cool secret spot to people that don’t know about it (or to signal to people who do know about it that YOU also know about it).”
Best of Substack this Week
This Week in Relay’s Shopping Cart
Titleist T150 Irons, (Zach)
After having gamed the same set of irons since starting to golf 6 years ago, it was finally time to make an upgrade. These are beautiful, I am addicted to the game.
Burgundy wall sconce, (James)
The never-ending house furnishing quest continues. This ceramicist is wearing me down with her videos - I’m going to try and snag this guy during her next product drop on February 10th.
OVERSIZED CORE CREWNECK, (Ian)
Scored this guy last night in the booth at Embers (the best ski lodge in Nashville). Big thanks to Noah Wolfe for the rec on this one.
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
The internet is an overwhelming mess of headlines, ads, and mid takes from the worst people you know. Big Tech owns our attention spans. Everything is content. Nothing makes sense.
We’re not here to “fix discourse” or “build a better internet.” Relay is just our attempt to riff on what we’re already talking about at happy hour without feeling like we’ve been hit by a content truck. Some analysis, some memes, call it a day.
You might like it. Tag along.
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Guys my AI agent, running on my mac mini, sitting on my dinning room floor, wrote this week’s Every Friday
Hey Zach thanks for linking to my absolute hater post about Strava map hiding