The Latticework Daily Read · 2026-05-11

Today's Four.

Each a mental-models reading. Each anchored to fs.blog/mental-models. Each with evidence from the source.

Y Combinator · May 4, 2026

Inference Chips for Agent Workflows

GPUs hit 30–40% utilization on agent workloads. YC's call for purpose-built silicon is a case study in first principles, bottleneck theory, and the compiler as the real moat.

Veritasium · Apr 27, 2026

Wombats Poop Cubes

The cube wasn't designed — it fell out of a gut optimized for water extraction under extreme scarcity. Sixty seconds on falsification, emergence, and form following constraint.

Ashley Hodgson · Sep 4, 2024

Competition and Cooperation: They Cohere

The Battle of the Sexes and Prisoner's Dilemma show that competition and cooperation are not a spectrum — they are simultaneously active forces, fractal and nested at every scale.

Anthropic Engineering · Mar 24, 2026

Harness Design for Long-Running Apps

A GAN-inspired generator-evaluator loop for multi-hour autonomous coding. Every harness component is a falsifiable assumption about model capability — and must evolve with the model.