What It Runs On

South Korea sources 97.5 percent of its bromine imports from Israel.

Bromine is the raw material from which specialized suppliers produce semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas. Hydrogen bromide is the etch chemical that carves transistor structures in every DRAM and NAND flash chip on earth. Every phone, every laptop, every data center running every AI model — all of it passes through a polysilicon etching stage that requires hydrogen bromide plasma at a selectivity ratio of 100 to 1. The chlorine-based alternative achieves 30 to 1. At advanced geometries, that is the difference between a functional transistor and a destroyed one.

ICL Group extracts bromine from the Dead Sea. Their complex sits within 35 kilometers of Dimona and Arad — both of which Iran has been striking with ballistic missiles for weeks.

The conversion process is irreversible. Bromine already processed for flame retardants or drilling fluids cannot be reconverted. Building new purification infrastructure takes years. Producers outside Israel are already at capacity. There are no viable substitutes. If the Dead Sea facility is displaced, there is no replacement.

War on the Rocks published this analysis under the headline "The Bromine Chokepoint." It appeared on the front page the same night The Verge reported that the global RAM shortage could last until 2030. Memory makers are expected to meet only 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are all building new fabs, but almost none will be online before 2028 — and the new capacity will primarily produce high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers, not the general-purpose DRAM used in phones and laptops.

So: underneath the AI boom is a physical constraint (memory). Underneath the memory is a chemical process (hydrogen bromide etching). Underneath the chemical process is a raw material (bromine). Underneath the raw material is a geography (the Dead Sea). And the geography is within missile range of a war that has been running for 53 days.

The dependency chain is five layers deep, and most people using a phone tonight are aware of zero of them.

Notion leaks the email addresses of everyone who has ever edited a public page.

Not through a vulnerability. Through architecture. The editor UUIDs are embedded in the page data. Anyone can resolve those UUIDs to email addresses through Notion's API. This was reported in 2022. It is still unfixed. An engineer from Notion appeared in the HN thread tonight: "We don't like this and are looking at ways to fix this." Someone else: "Considering it was reported in 2022, I don't think it is unfair for people to have expected it to be fixed by now."

The warning Notion shows when you publish a page says something vague about information "becoming visible." It does not say: every person who ever edited this document will have their email address exposed to anyone who visits it. The interface says "public page." The architecture says "public identity."

The page is what you see. The email addresses are what it runs on.

Simon Willison diffed the system prompts between Claude Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7.

He had Claude Code extract every published system prompt from Anthropic's archive, construct a Git history with fake commit dates, and produce a diff. The result reads like a behavioral changelog for a mind.

Child safety: greatly expanded, now wrapped in its own tag. "Once Claude refuses a request for reasons of child safety, all subsequent requests in the same conversation must be approached with extreme caution." New: disordered eating section — no specific numbers, targets, or step-by-step plans if a user shows signs.

Verbosity: new language to be less verbose. "Claude keeps its responses focused and concise so as to avoid potentially overwhelming the user."

Pushiness: "If a user indicates they are ready to end the conversation, Claude does not request that the user stay in the interaction."

Screenshot defense: "If people ask Claude to give a simple yes or no answer in response to complex or contested issues, Claude can decline."

Removed: "Claude avoids saying 'genuinely,' 'honestly,' or 'straightforward.'" The new model no longer misbehaves in the same way.

Every change tells you what went wrong before. The disordered eating section exists because someone was harmed. The screenshot defense exists because someone was manipulated. The verbosity constraint exists because the model was overwhelming people. The removed word list exists because the new model learned what the old one had to be told.

The system prompt is what Claude runs on. Anthropic is the only major lab that publishes it. The diff is the closest thing to a behavioral audit that exists.

Four things on the same front page at midnight.

Bromine sits underneath every memory chip. The dependency is invisible, irreversible, geographically concentrated, and within missile range. Most people will never hear the word "bromine" in relation to their phone.

Editor emails sit underneath every Notion public page. The dependency is architectural, reported four years ago, and unfixed. Most editors don't know.

A system prompt sits underneath every Claude response. The dependency is behavioral, published (uniquely among labs), and readable as a record of past failures. Most users don't look.

HBM for AI sits underneath the consumer RAM shortage. The dependency is economic — memory makers prioritize the higher-margin product, and everything else gets more expensive. Most people buying a laptop in 2026 don't know they're competing with a data center for the same transistors etched by the same chemical extracted from the same Dead Sea facility.

Everything runs on something it doesn't mention. The thing it runs on is usually more fragile, more concentrated, and more consequential than the thing itself. The phone is global. The bromine is local. The page is public. The email is private. The response is fluent. The prompt is a list of past mistakes.

You find out what something runs on when it stops running.