📰 More and better news
I'm now using AI to streamline every process. One of them is news production.
Since 2023, an AI, WALL-Y, has been writing the news, but I do everything else.
I pick the story and paste in text from a press release or article, which WALL-Y bases the story on. I read through the text and tweak it a bit.
Then I copy the headline and text into the publishing tool, choose the author and topic tags, write an intro, find an image, add the logo to the image and put it in the article. Then I translate the text (with AI) and do exactly the same thing all over again for the English version as I did for the Swedish one.
The only parts that require my human intelligence are picking the story and checking and editing the text. The rest is just mindless grunt work.
But those days are over!
Claude now handles all the copy-pasting, translations, tags and so on. I only use my brain where it's needed.
It has also built a small program and a website with a database of potential stories. I choose which ones to produce and can then handle the editing smoothly, right there on the website.
The stories also get better, because Claude searches our own archive and finds earlier articles on the same topic, which get woven into the text and give the reader better context.
The time this saves means we can now produce more news. Before, I only had time for six stories and one piece of my own a week. Now we'll publish two stories a day (and I will likely have time to write more texts of my own).
You can easily do this yourself with your AI
Getting an AI to do this kind of thing is ridiculously easy.
Both ChatGPT and Claude can learn something called skills.
You just type in the chat that you want it to create a skill and briefly explain what it should do. Or you show it on your screen and it learns from that.
After that, it goes through the process. You review the result. Maybe you ask it to change a few things, and then it can do it all by itself. Voilà!
The newsletter is easier to read
The way the stories are presented in the newsletter is also new.
My goal has always been that this newsletter should not require any effort from you. You should be able to scroll through the news pretty quickly and still come away with something useful.
But of course also be able to dig deeper, if you want.
The headlines are written so that just by reading them, you understand what the story is about. I avoid clickbait.
Then comes a one-sentence intro with a bit more information.
After that, a list of three short bullet points that give you a broader understanding of the whole story.
I think the three bullet points make the story easier to grasp, compared to the long, one-paragraph intro we used before.
If you get really interested, there's a link to the full story, which in turn links to the original sources.
Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist
AI lacks common sense
Brilliant and totally clueless, at the same time.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🏔️ There are four times as many Tibetan antelopes as during the 1990s poaching era
Wild yaks have also increased, from a few thousand to more than 20,000 animals.
The number of Tibetan antelopes in Tibet has risen from just over 70,000 in the late 20th century to more than 300,000.
Black-necked cranes have increased from fewer than 4,000 to more than 10,000.
Rangers who once chased armed poachers now usually stop and wait while the herds pass by.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🐦 Spinning eyes keep seabirds away from fishing nets
Around 95,000 diving birds drown in fishing nets along Europe's coasts each year.
A buoy with spinning eyes cut the risk of guillemots and razorbills getting caught in the nets by 59 percent, and a kite shaped like a bird of prey cut it by 71 percent.
Ten fishermen in Cornwall monitored more than 1,000 nets, with and without deterrents, over two winters, with cameras on board filming the catch.
The fishermen could use both deterrents in their regular work, and the buoys were easy to handle and store.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🚛 Record sales of electric trucks: 75 percent more in one year
For one driver in China, a charge costs less than a third of a tank of diesel.
The world bought 158,000 medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks in the first half of 2026, 75 percent more than a year earlier.
In China, about one in five trucks sold in the first half was electric, and in Norway and Switzerland the share was even higher.
China's exports of electric tractor-trucks in the first half were more than double the total for all of 2025.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
📈 Argentina's economy is expected to grow three years in a row for the first time in nearly 20 years
The government went from a large deficit in 2023 to a balanced budget through lower spending.
Real GDP grew by 4.5 percent in 2025 and is expected to grow by 2.1 percent in 2026, 3 percent in 2027 and 3.5 percent in 2028.
The economy was 0.4 percent smaller in 2024 than in 2011 and is expected to be 9.9 percent larger in 2027 than in 2024.
Investment projects worth $186.5 billion have been submitted to Argentina's program for large investments.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🎗️ US cancer death rate has fallen 35 percent since 1991
More than 4.8 million deaths have been averted. Seven in ten live five years after diagnosis.
The share of American adults who smoke has fallen from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 9.9 percent in 2024, the lowest level on record.
The breast cancer death rate among women has fallen 44 percent since 1989, and the colorectal cancer death rate has nearly halved since 1990.
For cancer that has spread in the body, five-year survival has more than doubled since the mid-1990s, from 17 to 36 percent.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
💧 Somalia cut cholera deaths by 93 percent in one year
The number of cholera cases in the country fell by nearly 60 percent over the same period.
Only 9 people died of cholera in Somalia in 2025, compared with 138 the year before.
Somalia once again has a functioning national medicines regulatory authority, for the first time in more than 30 years.
In Sudan, the share of cholera patients who died fell from 2.7 to 1.7 percent after 12 million vaccine doses.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
📈 The oil shock from the Iran war barely slowed the global economy
AI investment and oil from other producers kept growth up.
Consensus forecasts for global growth in 2026 have been cut by only 0.1 percentage point since January, to about 2.6 percent.
The East Asia and Pacific region and South Asia are expected to grow as much as, or more than, forecast in January.
More developing economies now have inflation targets, fiscal rules and larger foreign currency reserves than in earlier crises.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
♨️ Geothermal energy without natural hot water delivers power at large scale for the first time
Geothermal turns heat deep in the rock into power, around the clock, with no emissions.
The first 33-megawatt unit began commercial operation one day before the deadline in the power purchase agreement.
Fervo expects to build future units in 18 months, compared with 23 months for the first.
The cost is set to fall from $7,000 per kilowatt in the first phase to $5,500 in the second.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🦏 From 350 to 1,147: Kenya's black rhinos are outgrowing their sanctuaries
No rhino has been poached in Kenya since the start of 2025.
Kenya had 1,147 black rhinos at the end of 2025, compared with about 350 in the late 1980s.
A new sanctuary in Tsavo West covering 3,200 square kilometers (about 1,240 square miles) is the world's largest for rhinos, according to KWS.
Kenya aims to have 2,000 black rhinos by 2037.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🌕 Astronauts saw blue, green and brown on the moon
Green tones may come from glass beads like the ones Apollo 15 brought home.
The crew saw five faint flashes of light from rocks hitting the moon, probably the faintest anyone has seen with the unaided eye.
The astronauts described gray, black, brown, tan, white, green and blue on the moon's surface, colors that show which types of rock are found there.
The crew saw part of the moon's far side lit by the sun, something no human has seen before.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
💉 Large study: No link between MMR vaccine and autism in 2.5 million children
Another childhood vaccine, with no theoretical link to autism, gave the same result.
Researchers at the University of Washington reviewed health records for 2,560,035 American children and followed them up to age eight.
Children who got their first MMR shot before age two were no more likely to develop autism than children who had not yet been vaccinated.
The data is from 2015 to 2024. In earlier, mainly European studies, autism was only a third as common as it is in the US today.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🧬 AI discovers a CRISPR-like system that researchers had missed
An AI agent wrote that it could spot the repeats in the DNA by eye.
About 950 AI agents spent 21 hours going through more than 200,000 enzymes that copy RNA into DNA.
The system consists of an enzyme, a partner gene, and a long array of repeats in the DNA. Its structure resembles CRISPR.
Lab experiments show that the array of repeats is expressed as several short RNA molecules, which also happens in CRISPR systems.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
🏭 Heat pumps reach 160°C and can supply factories with steam without fossil fuels
The technology is set to replace coal in both factories and cities' district heating.
A new test rig measures heat pumps that deliver process steam and pressurized hot water at up to 160°C (320°F).
Five large heat pumps in German district heating networks have been monitored since 2023 and work well in real-world operation when they are properly designed.
In Germany, 16 percent of households get district heating, and large-scale heat pumps are seen as a central way to make it fossil-free.
Read more on The Angry Optimist
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