Weekend Reading List — 02/05/2026
Have a great weekend.
Links
“The Human Creativity Benchmark” - Contra Labs. Genuinely interesting attempt to build an eval framework for AI in creative work. Their key insight: most benchmarks treat evaluator disagreement as noise to be resolved, but in creative work, disagreement is the signal, that’s “taste”.
“AI Water Use Distractions and Lessons for California” - Jay Lund. Everyone has heard the “AI uses lots of water” debate. Turns out, it’s not that simple. This guy actually did the math and found that California data centres use roughly 0.055% of the state’s annual human water use, less than beer production in Central Arizona. TLDR: The discourse is bad.
“Atlassian and Twilio Crush the Quarter, Accelerate. Is the SaaSpocalypse Over?” - Jason Lemkin. Two “legacy” SaaS co’s just crushed the quarter which feels very counter to the prevailing narrative (not to mention the stock price). The big question is whether this is a sustainable return to growth or just temporary gain.