😈 First week as The Angry Optimist
First, an apology to you all for springing the name change on you unannounced. I get that it may have been confusing.
When I sent the last newsletter before the switch, I wasn't completely sure I'd go through with the name change the following week. It was going to happen along with the platform move to Substack, and at the time of writing I wasn't a hundred percent sure it would happen right then, rather than maybe a bit later.
But I still should have given you a heads-up and said that a change of both name and platform was coming soon. Thanks to those of you who asked about it.
Even so, the switch seems to have gone well. Lots of cheering and several new free and paid subscribers. So much so that we're now on Substack's global leaderboard.
Wonderful and absurd
Just a few weeks ago I wrote about the biggest AI leap since ChatGPT launched in 2022. That ChatGPT (or Claude) can use your computer. That's why the entire move and name change were done by ChatGPT.
A big, complicated job that absolutely could not go wrong.
Since I'm bad at that kind of technical work, there was no way I could have pulled it off myself.
But together, ChatGPT and I carefully mapped out what needed to be done, and then ChatGPT did the work while I supervised and made decisions.
That led to the weirdest work week of my life, where for a couple of days I mostly scrolled social media while the AI worked.
Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist
🤪 The weirdest work week of my life
How I became a lazy but micromanaging boss — of a machine.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
📉 Black men's risk of imprisonment in the US has fallen by nearly two-thirds
Prison admissions are expected to halve within 20 years, nearing 1970s levels.
At the end of 2023, 1,254,200 people were in US prisons, 22 percent fewer than in the peak year of 2009.
Among young adults ages 18 to 30, the rate at which people are sent to prison has fallen 53 percent since 2000.
In 2000, Black men were sent to prison 7.9 times as often as white men, and by 2036 the gap is expected to be about twofold.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🛡️ Nvidia launches a platform to keep AI agents within their boundaries
A watchdog in the hardware stops an agent within milliseconds if it goes too far.
The OpenShell software is open source and lets companies decide exactly which files, networks and tools each agent can use.
In Nvidia's tests, AI agents spent up to two hours trying to get write access to a protected code repository, without success.
More than 100 organizations are working with the technology, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
💉 Sudan raised the share of vaccinated children from 39 to 71 percent in the middle of a war
Almost one in three vaccine doses came in through Chad when the roads were cut off.
The share of children in Sudan fully protected against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B and Hib rose from 39 percent in 2024 to 71 percent in 2025.
At the same time, the share of children who received their first measles dose rose from 46 to 68 percent.
More than 40 million Gavi-funded vaccine doses were delivered to Sudan in 2025.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🔌 An electric car goes nearly three times as far as a gasoline car for the same money
Electricity costs more per kilowatt-hour, but an electric car puts 85 to 90 percent of it to use.
For $100, an electric car could travel about 2,310 miles in 2025, compared with about 860 miles for a gasoline car.
A heat pump provided 42 days of heating for $100, a gas boiler 30 days.
Electricity accounted for 23 percent of the world's energy use but for nearly 40 percent of the useful energy.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🚀 The world's most powerful rocket, Starship, reached orbit for the first time
The payload will add ten times the internet capacity of a Falcon 9 launch.
Starship reached orbit on its 14th test flight, after 13 flights that did not go all the way around the Earth.
The ship deployed 26 Starlink satellites of the new V3 model, and all of them worked normally.
One of the ship's six engines shut down early, but the other five compensated and the ship still made it to orbit.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
📉 Suicidal thoughts among American teenagers at lowest level in ten years
The share who feel sad or hopeless has also fallen, from 42 to 33 percent since 2021.
The share who seriously considered attempting suicide fell from 22 to 14 percent and the share who attempted suicide fell from 10 to 6 percent, the lowest levels in ten years.
Five of six indicators of mental health and suicide risk improved between 2023 and 2025.
The share who ate fruit daily rose from 33 to 39 percent and the share who ate vegetables daily rose from 58 to 63 percent between 2023 and 2025.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🔢 New ChatGPT model cracks hundreds of math problems that have been unsolved for decades
On average, each result required computing power equal to three hours in ChatGPT Pro.
OpenAI's new model has solved or made major progress on 372 mathematical problems, many of which the world's leading mathematicians have worked on for decades without solving.
The results include progress on two of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, the hardest questions in mathematics, each carrying a one million dollar prize.
The mathematical world is in shock, and it will take researchers months or years to work through the more than 700 papers.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
👮 Fewer shootings and murders in New York than ever before this summer
There were no murders, shootings or rapes in the subway during all of August.
New York had fewer shootings, shooting victims and murders in summer 2026 than in any summer since records began.
In the first eight months of the year, the number of murders has fallen by 24.1 percent compared to the same period last year.
In the city’s public housing developments, the number of murders has fallen by 52 percent so far this year.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
⛽ Gasoline cars fall below 50 percent of global car sales for the first time
Electric car sales hit a record level in 50 countries in the second quarter.
The share of gasoline cars in global car sales fell below 50 percent for the first time ever.
Sales of electric cars in Europe rose by 52.2 percent in August compared with a year earlier.
Electric car sales reached record levels in 50 countries in the second quarter, and 90 countries saw growth in the first half of the year.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
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