Great time at the Brown County Fair today. It was wet, it was rainy, and the community still came out strong. Rural & small-town Ohio is the backbone of our state, and I won’t forget it next year.

Great to see @DeryaTR_ at #ARDD2026#, where he's speaking today on "How AI can help defeat aging: Roadmaps, breakthroughs and what's next." Looking forward to it! @ARDD_meeting

Great stop in Tiffin today. Heard from local residents about their appreciation for the gas tax suspension that goes into effect on Sunday. It’s a preview of how we’ll lead this state in January - fast, decisive, and focused on putting $$ back in the pockets of Ohioans. 💪🏼

Great talk from Yogish Baliga "From Vim (:wq) to 'You're absolutely right!'" tracing 20+ years of software engineering evolution. Highlights: 1/ open-weight models have closed the gap with closed models for most use cases 2/ open models often pass closed model quality with multiple passes 3/ agentic workloads are already running mostly on open models (30%→78% in 13 weeks on Vercel's AI Gateway) Software engineering has come a long way over the last 20+ years and the future looks like it’ll be built on open models.

great post from @exedev team - the same thing that has always been true of software engineering is still true: Do fewer things in parallel, do them very well, optimize for getting incremental value out to users, FOCUS It's been 30 years since the XP and Lean folks said "limit work in progress (50+ if you count the eli goldratt thing) - its still true

Great to meet today with @POTUS, @JDVance, @SpeakerJohnson and Administration + tech leaders. Important conversation and we signed today the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. As I shared today, Google has invested hundreds of billions in the last two years alone, with more to come, across the entire stack, to deliver benefits for America and the world. We’re working to build products that deliver real value for people and businesses, invest in local communities, and build trust in the technology. Industry also has to innovate responsibly. Google’s focused on building the right way, with appropriate testing, evaluations, red-teaming, and other safeguards against misuse and misalignment – and releasing models or products only after they’ve been thoroughly reviewed. We are committed to working with other industry leaders to establish norms and build public confidence. The White House Accord and the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities signed today is a solid basis for moving forward - it contains real tangible steps to promote safe development, while delivering the economic and scientific benefits of this technology.

Great article on increasing solitude of our societies, in this case US but same probably in EU to a lesser extent: "Derek Thompson's essay "You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner" argues that Americans have largely stopped having people over. The headline stat comes from combining the old DDB Needham Life Style surveys Robert Putnam used in *Bowling Alone* with a new replication by Data For Progress. The share of Americans who host friends or family at home at least monthly fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026, roughly a 70% drop. Most other forms of socializing also fell by double digits over the last 30 years, including cards, bars, sporting events, and volunteering. The decline in hosting was steeper than the much-discussed drop in church attendance. He rules out two comforting explanations. People haven't just moved dinners to restaurants, since solo dining is rising and face-to-face socializing is down overall. They also haven't replaced parties with other social activities. Exercise and travel are up, but exercise is mostly solitary, and time spent at home has jumped sharply since the 2010s. His explanations: 1. Harried dual-earner households. As societies get richer, leisure starts to feel like work, and planning a dinner party is basically unpaid project management. Women historically ran the family social calendar. When they moved into paid work, men didn't take over that job. He admits this can't be the whole story, because total leisure time has actually increased. 2. Intensive parenting. Parents, especially fathers, now spend far more time with their kids, and that time comes out of evenings that used to go to hosting adults. 3. Shrinking friend networks. Close friendships are declining, most sharply among people without college degrees, so hosting is becoming a luxury good. People who never host skew toward independents and non-graduates. He speculates that weaker social ties may lead to weaker party attachment, rather than the other way around. 4. Home is too comfortable. Americans spent almost two extra hours a day at home between 2003 and 2022, much of it on screens and short-form video. His closing idea is a "Lump of Leisure" theory, a twist on the Lump of Labor fallacy. Technology hasn't made human work unnecessary, but it has made other people less necessary for fun. Social leisure turns out to be finite and easy to displace. He frames this as a coordination failure rather than a personal one: a dinner party requires schedules, cleaning, food, allergies, and the risk of a dull evening, while TikTok asks nothing of you. A footnote adds that if everyone gets a bit busier, the difficulty of coordinating a get-together rises multiplicatively, so small increases in individual busyness could produce large drops in socializing overall."

Great to meet with @SenatorRounds’ Angels in Adoption nominee, Coleen Globke Brasch, from Marion. Thank you for all of your work with All About U Adoptions to help place over 300 kids with permanent families.