Welcome back to The Catalog. Here’s what’s worth learning, exploring, or watching this week, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

CONTENTS

• New Arrivals (3D-Printed Home After California Wildfire, Robots Do a Third of the Work, CRMs Rearrange Around AI, Sony Skipping CES)

• The Feature (Thinking in Generations)

• Observations (News Without Writers, The Unicorn in the Window)

NEW ARRIVALS

01 · 3D-Printed Home After California Wildfire

A robotic printer finished the concrete walls of Los Angeles County’s first approved 3D-printed home, a Spanish-style home being rebuilt in Altadena for Cindy Lopez, who lost her home in the blaze of the Eaton Fire.

It took about 12 hours to pour and print the concrete walls of the roughly 1,500-square-foot house. PCI Builders designed specialized features that were ultimately 3D printed as arched windows, sills, and headers when they came off the RIC Robotics printer. The finished house will carry a waterless fire-suppression system from Sonic Fire Tech, which emits powerful low-frequency soundwaves that disrupt combustion, interrupting the chemical chain reaction fire needs to sustain itself.

02 · Robots Do a Third of the Work

Economists at Anthropic measured what work robots can do today, using Claude to cycle through and measure over 7,000 physical tasks across roughly 900 occupations against robots already deployed or demonstrated. Robots could handle 74% of physical tasks, which represents about 34% of all US working hours.

Then they added up all the costs, all the expenses related to deploying the robots. After accounting for the hardware, integration, maintenance, supervision, and insurance, robots were only cheaper than people on less than 1% of physical tasks.

Welding robots, for example, cost about 5x as much as a human welder. One outlier that is ripe for automation today is warehouse packing, where the math works. A packing robot costs about $45,000 a year against roughly $49,000 in labor. You might have seen the human vs robot packing bake-off video (above).

03 · CRMs Rearrange Around AI

Salesforce agreed to buy Listen Labs, a startup whose AI agents interview real customers over audio and video and turn the conversations into research reports in days. TechCrunch reported a price near $2 billion, about 65 times Listen Labs’ annual revenue.

A week later, HubSpot said it would cut about 660 jobs, roughly 7% of its staff, to reorganize around “AI-powered customer outcomes.” CEO Yamini Rangan said AI isn’t replacing those workers.

Customer research used to sit outside the marketing stack, run by consulting firms and agencies and delivered as a ppt deck. Both companies are now betting the customer relationship runs with fewer people in the middle.

04 · Sony Skipping CES

Sony won’t exhibit at CES in January 2027, ending decades of electronics innovations showcased in Las Vegas. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the world’s largest annual trade show for consumer technology and innovation and Sony’s participated in it for six decades.

Leadership at Sony say they’re doubling down to focus on entertainment business units like gaming, anime, film, and music.

Most of the hardware Sony would bring to CES has already been sold off. Sony electronics handed control of its Bravia TV brand to TCL this year, and its Afeela prototype car with Honda was shut down months after appearing at CES 2026.

THE FEATURE

Thinking in Generations

I’ve been rewinding and reviewing old travel footage lately, cutting it into ambient videos for a series called Ambient Travel that I post on YouTube.

It’s a strange kind of time travel, sitting with video you shot on walks from a year or two ago, deciding which parts of a trip deserve uploading. That’s how I came across the photo below. On a recent trip to San Francisco, coffee in hand, I visited a room that’s equal parts coffee shop, cocktail bar, and museum called The Interval.

I was intentional about visiting while in San Francisco, as a kind of ambient pilgrimage. Brian Eno, one of my favorite experimental musicians and producers, co-founded the Long Now Foundation and its hq beautifully reflects his signature touch, transforming a physical space into a living, breathing soundscape of long-term thought.

Eno helped develop the chimes for the expansive Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 Year Clock project. It’s an entirely mechanical clock built to keep time for ten thousand years, wound automatically by the daily heat of the sun. In the corner of The Interval, I saw plans for the Clock on display. The real Clock, paid for largely by Jeff Bezos’ $42M, is still being assembled inside a mountain in West Texas. The Clock has ten bells, but they don’t ring on a schedule like a church bell. They only ring when someone is there in person. A visitor who makes the trip into the mountain has to wind the Clock to hear them. Bells rang for the first time in 2022, a year that keeps coming up in this story.