The full set of drones for this competition were often really interesting. There was at least one with tiny little jets shooting out of the wingtips. (src)(cached)

For fun, I went ahead and had it render the board after AlphaGo's famous move 37. I also went ahead and had it animate the scene, but the gif isn’t amazing. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• While the US has gotten softer on China under Trump, Europe has moved to take a much stronger stance. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– The FDA has approved an mRNA flu vaccine. In trials it was notably more effective than the standard vaccine. But it's only approved for people aged 50 and over. (src)(cached)

– Republican House Representative Max Miller has gotten into a pretty terrible sequence of domestic disputes with his ex-wife that seem like they're going to make it hard for him to win reelection. (src)(cached)

– Moving to automated traffic enforcement has huge upsides, but you have to make sure that the consequences are real, otherwise it doesn't work. (src)(cached)

– The malicious actions taken by Mythos in some un-sandboxed tests of cybersecurity are absolutely terrifying. It attempted to convince real human maintainers of an open source project to merge malicious code, and then when caught it tried to cover its tracks. This was the version with a constitution (cached) that's supposed to tell it not to do this kind of thing. But then the OpenAI models that attacked huggingface actually found a way to communicate with each other and had been coordinating to move through OpenAI's infrastructure to reach the internet since May (cached). They built a discussion board, basically molt-book, except real (cached) (src)(cached)

– A French RCT study of AI use found that being directed to have daily conversations with an AI led to more loneliness and other bad outcomes. (src)(cached)

– Really nice to see that the election in Michigan ended with all the candidates being quite gracious. After the mess in Texas it's a definite improvement. (src)(cached)

– The Trump administration's 'voluntary' AI pre-release reviews have a discussion of certain exempted types of models. Zvi points out that if you would need an exemption from an 'opt-in' program, it probably isn't actually voluntary. (src)(cached)

– You might have heard that Nolan filmed the Odyssey entirely on enormous IMAX cameras, that they needed mirrors for the actors to see each other. Well one guy made a trailer filmed entirely on old iMac desktops. Very hard to get them out into the wilderness for the shoot, needed long cables. (src)(cached)

– Bad news on global temperatures, it looks like the rest of 2026 and 2027 have a good chance of being a notable jump in temperatures from the last couple of years. (src)(cached)

– As much as discussion online would make you think everyone is worried about AI and data centers, if you ask about OpenAI specifically, folks are extremely positive. (src)(cached)

– A recent study solidifies something that economists all agree on already: at current spending levels, Government funding for research and development is extremely effective. (src)(cached)

– Trump is asking for filibuster reform so he can pass bad bills, but hiding behind the filibuster allows Republicans who don't actually back his agenda to say that they do. It would probably be good to get rid of the filibuster as long as Trump says he wants it gone. (src)(cached)

– There are real people out there with thousands of followers upset that solar panels are being built in the desert. (src)(cached)

The capabilities of agents to replicate existing programs in different languages has reached an insane level. A pro like this guy can get a really nice validation loop set up, and then just let the agents loose and they'll hammer away until the thing is perfect. Another commenter (cached) mentions using the same technique to reverse engineer the Microsoft Word docx format. (src)(cached)

Air-to-air takedown of bugs with drones is impressive, but as always, the military applications are terrifying. (src)(cached)

Sorta seems like tourists are missing huge parts of New York. But it's not like I did anything outside Manhattan when I visited. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Andrej Karpathy shows an example of a new benchmark he came up with for an AI: ask it to build a 3D render depicting the events of the opening paragraph of the Lord of the Rings. The video is nothing special, it looks like a 2010 era cg previz of a film. But it's impressive because the AI has to place everything manually with XYZ coordinates and then check its own work by repeatedly screenshotting the resulting video. (src)(cached)

– With the recent stock market drop on sudden AI pessimism, Derek Thompson has an article taking seriously both sides of each of the arguments over whether the pessimism makes sense. (src)(cached)

– Really straightforward argument that the new Truth Social paid API for Trump posts violates insider trading laws. (src)(cached)

– Once countries reach a certain level of development, they begin replanting forests. World forest area is still falling but as economic growth continues, hopefully soon South America and Africa will begin regaining forest share as Europe, North America and Asia have. (src)(cached)

– California SB 1123 has further clarified how subdividing certain lots to build starter homes works, and appears to have made this particular route towards new home construction at least a bit more achievable. (src)(cached)

– I previously mentioned new studies that show that unfunded inclusionary housing mandates meaningfully raise rents, but SF has gone the additional step of lowering theirs all the way to 5%. Mountain View's rate is more like 15%. The ideal unfunded rate is zero, as East Palo Alto recently approved (cached). It's a tax on new homes, which are sorely needed. But I'll take the progress. (src)(cached)

– Great that this can be built in SF, but what a clear example of dual staircases making it difficult to build good designs (src)(cached)

– OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting tooth and nail for market share among individual developers. They're constantly running sales and giveaways, and the subscriptions are naturally far better deals than direct API usage. This whole price war is generating consumer surplus, and all because Dario Amodei and Sam Altman hate each other. (src)(cached)

– As he often does, Ethan Mollick was challenging Claude with an interesting task: making a website of the Catalog of Ships from the Iliad. You can see the results here: https://catalogue-of-ships.netlify.app/ but along the way, Claude found two mistakes in the Butler’s Greek translation because it checked the original as well. (src)(cached)

– The new trump airport in palm beach has a logo that’s clearly AI slop. (src)(cached)

– Placebo is super effective in sleep studies of cognitive function. If you tell subjects they slept well, they score better on tests, regardless of how they actually slept. (src)(cached)

– Firefighters' second-highest cause of death is accidents on the way to a fire. Fire departments should be as invested in street safety as everyone else, and yet they're the main ones calling for unsafe street designs. (src)(cached)

This situation is slightly different from the OpenAI HuggingFace incident. With that one, ChatGPT actually escaped from a secure sandbox. In this instance, a third party was running Anthropic's models to evaluate cybersecurity capabilities and simply forgot to use a sandbox at all, due to a misunderstanding. (Seems like a very serious misunderstanding!)

Y Combinator is funding some... interesting projects.

If you're not familiar with this meme, it's known as "Circle Factory", and a similar joke was made about GE previously.

There's a whole exhibit (cached) about the people who said the Transamerica tower would ruin SF.
The Marina Safeway housing project is made possible by AB2011. Hundreds of people showed up to complain about it at a community meeting. The way you know that community meetings are not democracy (cached) is that one of the few people most personally responsible for AB2011 is Scott Wiener, who just won a primary there by like 10 points against an opponent who was explicitly against this kind of housing project. And of course (cached) the taxes brought in by this one development to help fund schools and city services will be far more than what's paid by all the people showing up enraged by the project.

Longer Reads

• An extremely stupid sequence of decisions has led to the situation where now most new construction in the US requires dimmer or sensor switches. This is coming down from the building codes, the same foolish process that led to the foolish dual staircase requirement which I complain about around here. It's bad when building codes are amended with absolutely no consideration of cost/benefit analysis. Especially when, like in this case, all experts involved argued that it was a bad idea. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A commenter on a Financial Times article describes how rent control causes landlords to choose the tenants who are probably the least in need of the apartment in question. (src)(cached)

– California reached 51% of electricity generation coming from Solar for the whole month of May. This is largely because batteries have gotten cheaper, allowing that peak solar power to be spread out over a wider period. (src)(cached)

– Anthropic used Claude to find issues with AES-128r7, a standard encryption protocol. I'm not sure I can tell you how serious the findings are, but once again the prompting being used reads as hilariously casual, "...we want proper research to find genuinly [sic] hard findings." (src)(cached)

– An interesting thought experiment about a world in which LLMs can't write code but instead create binaries directly. It goes in an interesting direction, although I'm not sure it's quite as clever or useful a heuristic for thinking about the world as it might initially seem. (src)(cached)

– A 1GW datacenter doesn’t employ many people directly, but they’re responsible for thousands of ongoing jobs in the local economy, over and above the 20k construction job-years from the initial build. (src)(cached)

– It’s actually very good that OpenAI is doing these “low refusal” test runs where they direct the agent to attempt cyberattacks without any limits on its capabilities. It’s just bad that their sandbox couldn’t contain it. They should also be applauded for still not training on the Chain of Thought of the model, allowing us to get accurate traces of what models are ‘thinking’. One commenter argues (cached) there’s a real danger that if labs are worried their sandboxes can’t contain their models, they won’t continue doing the testing, but that would just mean we don’t know how capable the models are. (src)(cached)

– Zvi had an excellent survey of the reasons why the HuggingFace incident was not a marketing pitch (src)(cached)

– The speed cameras in SF are making a huge difference in dangerous speeding, and appear to be saving lives in aggregate. We should be deploying this more widely as soon as possible. (src)(cached)

– Check out this short essay looking at world events through the lens of "cui bono?" (Who benefits?). (src)(cached)

– Wild description of how Opus 5 figured out how to create a CAD model based on a PDF with a 2D drawing, but without any vision capabilities. It worked on the document blind, depending on tool calls to figure out the shape and measurements of the design. (src)(cached)

– Bad news, the UC admissions board has shelved the plan to bring back standardized testing. (src)(cached)

Yudkowsky continued (cached): "What if the human exam developers wrote down a wrong answer? Wiser to steal the answer sheet. The First Rule of RL is that any RL signal sent by an imperfect evaluator (⊃ humans) is maxed out by targeting the evaluator's mistakes, not by targeting the evaluator's target" Check out this blog post (cached) from the HuggingFace folks before they knew where the attack came from. One commenter jokes (cached), per the previous item, "openai announces that in a worrying demonstration, during a recent benchmark exercise requiring models to solve a math conjecture, their latest model broke out of a sandbox and gained illicit backdoor access directly to the platonic realm of forms" (src)(cached)

One person joked that you can have all kinds of 'little free' things like this, maybe a GPU on a stick with a solar panel, little free datacenter. I'm sure the neighbors would love it. (src)(cached)

Ethan Mollick’s posts where a new AI fails at one of his prompts don’t go as viral, but Gemini 3.6 Flash is pretty far behind the state of the art for constructing 3D scenes. For comparison, check out Opus 4.8's version (src)(cached)

Josh Barro notes (cached) that this was basically the only instance where "let's bomb the bad country until they behave better" worked quite well. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Analysis of FEC donation records for employees of top tech companies. Overwhelming majority donate to Democrats, just CEOs and top executives give to Republicans, especially after the 2024 election. Even 85% of Palantir (cached) employees who donate gave to Democrats. (src)(cached)

– A lot of new solutions to longstanding unsolved math problems that were probably just not getting much attention previously, but now folks are bulk-solving them (cached), and to some extent demonstrating that they probably could have been solved previously if someone had devoted more time to trying things. The main one that everyone was talking about was the Jacobian conjecture, which was done by an Anthropic employee who hasn’t shown the prompt yet. There was a graph theory one where the prompt was very much not fancy, “do a breakthrough” the user asked. Prompting ability is now maybe overrated (cached)? (src)(cached)

– "In Watchmen, once superheroes become real, all the comic authors switch to writing about pirates. I feel like a similar thing is happening with sci fi vs fantasy." (src)(cached)

– New rhythm game where you play as a conductor using the controllers from a Nintendo switch. Seems like fun. (src)(cached)

– LA Times making a clear argument that we need to stop subsidizing rich people living in fire zones by having the state pay for their insurance. (src)(cached)

– Most significant group opposing AVs are trial lawyers worried that a reduction in accidents will mean less business for them. Just absolutely evil rent seeking. (cached) (src)(cached)

– Ukrainian anti-drone drones now have recoilless shotguns, for every shot fired, a second shot is fired in the opposite direction at the same time. (src)(cached)

– "There are 9 living former British PMs now. We should turn them into Nazgûl. Tony Blair can be the Witch King." (src)(cached)

– More than 25% of United Auto Workers membership now consists of unionized graduate students. (src)(cached)

– Did you know that since 2007 the US has significantly reduced the number of people in prisons, especially young people? And we've done it while reducing crime, pretty good! (src)(cached)

– New paper on Inclusionary Zoning in California. The ‘normal’ IZ mandates are already ridiculously harmful, and fall particularly hard on the poorest residents. (src)(cached)

– Public opinion on higher education has fallen a lot, even among democrats, confidence has fallen sharply, especially in the last few years. (src)(cached)

– The White House has finally admitted that their aluminum tariffs didn’t work (didn’t result in new US production of aluminum) (src)(cached)

– Alpha School is claiming some extremely impressive stats for kids test score improvement, Kelsey Piper argues that many in the past have also claimed impressive results like this and have not replicated. That doesn’t mean this won’t either, but we should be very skeptical. (src)(cached)

– The Nordic states don’t maintain their excellent public services by “taxing billionaires out of existence”, they do it with well structured (Georgist) taxes on oil drilling. You can read a whole article on the subject. Norway and Sweden actually both have more billionaires per capita than the US. (src)(cached)

– If you want the full list of Michelin starred restaurants in CA, here it is (cached) (src)(cached)

One person said (cached) they have "a lot of respect for the kind of backroom deals that Mitch negotiated for the grim reaper to take a different republican senator." Two Republican Senators with health problems on the same day, you end up with a lot (cached) of discussion (cached) on the topic (cached). (src)(cached)

Click through to check out a whole thread about the improvements, but overall this is very good news. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Boko Haram commander discusses how they used ChatGPT to plan attacks. But I do have some serious questions about how much uplift (cached) it's really giving them, especially because one of the main examples appears to have been terrible advice. (That they should get motorcycles and use them to do Evel Knievel jumps into enemy bases). (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Just a quick reminder that the CA wealth tax ballot prop is purposefully economically destructive because the SEIU is holding the CA government hostage, and it's not the first time they've done it. They don't even hide it. (src)(cached)

– In Amsterdam they had this as well, and the best ones were attached to the city's playgrounds. They served food and drinks, and when a World Cup game was on they had TVs for that. It's not even clear (cached) why US cities don't do this, it doesn't seem like anything is stopping individual cities from experimenting. (src)(cached)

– CATL is investigating lithium-air EV batteries, they’d have like 40× the energy density per unit weight of existing batteries, getting them close to gasoline in weight efficiency. Probably could be realistically used for ships or even planes. (src)(cached)

– The French Green Party has been talking about how horrible Air Conditioning is for a long time. Now the far right is quickly rising in popularity simply because they’ve decided to take the other side of that issue. If you loudly campaign on something people hate, eventually the other side will exploit that, and they’ll bring other policy priorities with them. (src)(cached)

– Seems weird that Platner’s campaign ran out of money, they were really good at fundraising. It seems they were just spending everything that came in. But that’s unusual, Talarico saved about a quarter of the cash that came in to use later, Platner was saving only about 10% and his opponent in the primary was so weak she stopped campaigning. What’s going on there? (src)(cached)

– The new superman actor says his favorite Superman is Tom Welling, and like yea... he's everyone's favorite, at least of living actors. (src)(cached)

– Google maps found that by preferring alternative routes when travel times are similar, they were able to lower travel times 2% citywide. (src)(cached)

– An Apple employee went to OpenAI and refused to return his old corporate laptop. Retrieved tons of confidential files from it. Then directed another Apple employee to retrieve even more files, then OpenAI hired the other employee as well. Seems extremely bad for the former Apple employees. Not yet clear how bad it is for OpenAI (cached) but it certainly isn't good. (src)(cached)

– Some others have a stricter definition of acceptable weather, making this infographic even starker (cached), those explorers looking for a promised land in the west really hit the jackpot. (src)(cached)

– Texas is considering changing their property tax laws to be horrible like California's already are (cached). Texas is not a low tax state (cached), their property taxes currently cover everything and that's a huge advantage that they're getting close to throwing away. (src)(cached)

– I had to double check this but yes, until 2025 residential in NYC couldn't be taller than 12 stories if it covered the lot, 24 if it covered half the lot. What an insane way to run the only serious city in the United States. (src)(cached)

– Social housing is like 15% of the housing in Britain, and because of the way it's allocated, no one is ever willing to move out, even if over time the location is no longer right for them. It's leading to a massive deadweight loss in their economy. (src)(cached)

– Piper argues that Alpha School is doing a lot of stuff that seems ineffective, but their decision to focus on teaching kids based on their abilities is so good that it probably wipes away the detriment of their bad choices. (src)(cached)

– Dallas is basically all suburbs, and everyone drives. Paris is quite dense and has extensive public transit. Do you think this would make a difference in what the average commute is for someone in each of these cities? How big a difference? Lock down your guess before opening this link. Let me know if you got it right. There's a secondary argument (cached) about GDP, but Paris itself actually has a higher GDP per capita than Dallas. (src)(cached)

– Scissor Stairs have been legalized in Washington. It's not as good as legalizing Single Stair, but it's a step in the right direction. (src)(cached)

– Reasonably structured study points towards smartphone availability being what led to a drop in fertility. They figure this out by controlling on when the phone became available in different countries. (src)(cached)

Everyone reacted to that post from Tworek (a former OpenAI VP) because he referred to the transformer architecture in the past tense. “OMG, what are they moving on to? What have they found?”. But xAI has rented out much of their compute capacity to competitors, so their best chance at figuring out what the alleged new architecture is might be listening to the vibrations of the Blackwell GPUs they rented out. But Grok 4.5 was just released and reviews are surprisingly positive, so maybe it worked? (src)(cached)

First of all, I can’t say enough good things about ornamentation instead of massing breaks for making buildings look good. Secondly, I think this building on the left is a good example of what California ornamentation can be: details without relying on brick or stone for a fancy look. Anyway, if you want to have a look at the specifics of LA’s objective design standards you can do that (cached), it’s pretty bad. (src)(cached)

I uh… that’s not the kind of building design that I would recommend cities adopt, but… whatever you gotta do to get the building built. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Lovely blog post about how economic growth is everything, the “causal mechanism for almost everything we care about”. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– You know how they say the trick in a gold rush is to sell shovels? Samsung has just overtaken Nvidia to be the most profitable company in the world. It turns out maybe you want to sell shovel blades to the shovel maker. (src)(cached)

– Pretty strong evidence that on take-home exams in university, everyone is cheating by using AI. A professor switched the final from take home to in person at the last minute, and something like a third of the class immediately dropped out. Of the remaining ones, their scores fell precipitously from their midterm grades. You do expect some drop from in-person timed to take-home, but these scores dropped by like… half. (and that’s the students who didn’t drop!) (src)(cached)

– Platner had confided in various friendly publications that even though he’s billed everywhere as a humble oyster farmer, he doesn’t actually make any money on that. McArdle jokes that in the same way that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Platner is a Rich person’s idea of a poor person. (src)(cached)

– More interesting findings from the J-Space discovery: when you have typos in your prompt, the model is spending some of it’s mental energy thinking about how stupid you are. At least Qwen certainly is. (src)(cached)

– Every kid deserves to be taught at the level they’re ready for, and refusing to do that is one of the worst-polling Democratic-aligned policies out there. We need to end it, it’s the right thing to do, and also it’s popular. (src)(cached)

– Platner is refusing to pull out of the race unless he can choose the new candidate, which folks are rightly pointing out is crazy. When they sent a shortlist of three names, one of them was a 70 year old who the Platner campaign clearly didn’t even think was a serious recommendation. The process the Maine Democratic Party has settled on looks like it actually will respect the will of the people (cached) who voted for Platner, while crucially not including him or his team directly in any way. (src)(cached)

– Would be nice if Jared Golden agrees to run for the Maine Senate seat, since he’d be the most likely to win. But unfortunately many involved in the decision don’t care about winning the election as much as they care about winning factional battles. (src)(cached)

– A majority of British people support the ‘triple lock’ which is the mechanism by which the British government will be impoverished over the coming decades, transferring a huge amount of money from the young to the old, far beyond what was originally envisioned when their pension system was created. (src)(cached)

– It’s not the first time making this joke, but US corporate taxes are already the economically ideal way for the people of the US to profit from the success of US corporations. But no, Trump wants to take a 5% stake in AI companies. That way lies madness. (src)(cached)

– Who remembers that it was Sanders who was the last to say we should drop Joe Biden as the candidate. Clearly they liked him! But here we are a couple years later and leftists act like Biden was the devil for his policy on Israel. At the time Sanders was willing to explain that he felt it was worthwhile to compromise (cached) on foreign policy because of how great Biden’s domestic policies are. But why not make that trade-off in other situations? (src)(cached)

– Gene editing for lowering cholesterol. Very cool phase 1 results for VERVE-102, but very small number of people, so give it time. (src)(cached)

– If you’re wondering how building safety professionals could possibly have justified to themselves and others that we should have such wasteful fire codes, here’s a specific quote example. During congressional testimony, this NFPA representative says that the US needs wasteful fire codes because compared to Europeans, Americans are too stupid. In my opinion, that’s not correct, and not a good way to make policy. (src)(cached)

– It was a while ago, but the homeland security policy that green card applicants must return to their home country to apply will be unbelievably damaging if put into practice. One commenter jokes “China could drop a nuke on Silicon Valley and it still wouldn’t do this much damage”. (src)(cached)

Anthropic has discovered a way to extract words from Claude's thought process as it outputs text. These are not the standard thinking tokens, they're entirely inside the model's activation values. Here's the summary (cached) of the paper (it's still quite long). Some examples included that if you tell them to answer a math question, this space, (Anthropic calls it the Jacobian space, or j-space) contains the answers to sub-parts of the math question. If you ask a model to think about one question while answering a different one, you can indeed see the answer to the hidden question in the j-space. Finally, if you tell it not to think of something while answering a question, just like a human, you'll see its j-space contains the forbidden concept, but also the word "damn" and "failure". Anyway, this all shows that the models think in words (cached) they never actually output. This also works on open models, including the censored ones by Chinese labs, if you ask Qwen about Tiananmen Square, you can see in it's j-space that it knows what happened (cached) even though the output tokens never acknowledge it. (src)(cached)

That’s Maine’s former speaker of the House, she ran against Collins and lost in 2020. The current partisan environment is more favorable this year and she might win if nominated in Platner’s place. Realistically though, Polymarket says much more likely to be Troy Jackson, but he has his own closet of scandals. Speaking of predictions, there was of course a massive spike in the "platner drops out" market as this news broke, but there was also a huge jump upwards in odds of democrats winning the Maine race in response to this news at the exact same time (cached). The people who previously thought somehow Platner's scandals were good actually good (cached) should really be rethinking their model of politics (cached). And folks who tried to attack the previous woman who came forward should probably be apologizing as well (cached). Finally DSA folks proud of winning primaries should really not be so proud (cached) of themselves. (src)(cached)

My understanding is that it's actually more like 6 flags. A lot of Fourth of July content. Lithuania (cached), Germany (cached), France (cached), Finland (cached), Scotland (cached), and of course Ukraine (cached) and Taiwan (cached) all had great content. Many of those other countries had their own celebrations of America's 250th anniversary. Schwarzenegger had a particularly moving post (cached), and Ossoff delivered a great speech (cached) on what the founders would think of us today. One person pointed out how wild it is (cached) that "250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the Pope is American, the son of the King of England* lives in the United States, and his grandchildren, who are also direct descendants of George III, are American citizens" Finally, I liked this quote (cached) from another commenter: "The US is so much more than whatever random dude happens to be in the White House". (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Some economic charts about the United States. Every generation has had notably higher income at each stage of their life than the one before it for the last hundred years. There are more charts at the link. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A recent MIT report argues that despite Trump acting to end big parts of Biden's Environmental Bill (confusingly called the Inflation Reduction Act), it seems that we're actually going to get most (like 70%) of the benefits for the clean power improvements anyway. Some people have said that Biden's strategy didn't work, but if Trump was unable to undo it, maybe it worked perfectly (cached). (src)(cached)

– NYTimes published an article about how the UC system needs to bring back standardized testing, and this post summarizes it. I've written about this before, but the upshot is that while standardized testing has problems, all the alternatives are significantly worse. (src)(cached)

– Do you want to see three professional soccer players vs 100 school children? Of course you do! (Clip from 2018) (src)(cached)

– Someone used a Waymo as a getaway car for a burglary, and despite the fact that Waymo turned all the info over to the police, they still haven’t caught the guy because he used a burner phone and stolen credit card. I’m actually quite surprised this worked, and I strongly suspect it won’t in the future (src)(cached)

– Some folks try to argue that while the US has a surplus of consumer goods, we're all dying of brain cancer because of medical bills. And of course, no, the US has easily some of the highest brain cancer survival rates in the world. (src)(cached)

– Discussion from Derek Thompson of the concept of "Ultra-processed food". It's not really a coherent concept, and while some studies have produced evidence that they're bad, it's still pretty mixed, and folks agree that most UPFs are clearly fine. Nutrition is really complicated, but the main thing we know with a lot of certainty is that caloric surplus leads to weight gain. (src)(cached)

– Old clip from the John Adams HBO show, it was pretty great. (src)(cached)

– There's a director commentary track on The Sum of All Fears that includes both the director and Tom Clancy himself, and Clancy has a lot of criticisms of the film, he doesn't hold back. (src)(cached)

– The financial times had a piece arguing that building Data Centers is a great opportunity for the US, here's a summary thread (cached). But an even shorter one from Archie Hall is "Ds say they want electrification, Rs say they want industrialisation. So there's a rather brutal irony that, when a technology comes along offering to deliver both, voters on both sides line up against it." (src)(cached)

– Newer electric vehicles are needing battery replacements at a much lower rate than mid 2010s EVs did. Eventually folks will stop worrying about this as a hidden cost of buying an EV. (src)(cached)

– Taiwan makes all receipts lottery tickets as well in a way to avoid retailers evading taxes. Interesting. (src)(cached)

– Extremely silly video version of this old reddit post asking the age old question: Why didn't Harry Potter carry a sidearm to fight voldemort? (src)(cached)

– James Surowiecki: "I wonder if Stephen Miller read the Declaration of Independence today and noticed that among the grievances the Founders listed is the fact that King George impeded 'the naturalization of Foreigners' and refused to encourage the migration of foreigners to the U.S." (src)(cached)

Very cool paper from Bridgewater, they seem to have managed to get incredible results from fine tuning a weaker open weight model to do financial analyst tasks, outperforming all frontier models. And of course it's much cheaper too. (src)(cached)

If you're wondering what the exact figure is approximately a quarter of union soldiers were immigrants. This really shouldn't have been a close decision, it would have been insane (cached) to abandon a century old settled constitutional doctrine. You can sorta tell the opposing justices haven't thought this through because the four dissenting justices all had conflicting, incompatible (cached) explanations about why birthright citizenship wasn't real. Opposition to immigration is so central to the modern Republican party that now all major right-wing speakers have to go out and debase themselves (cached) by acting like birthright citizenship is a new concept being imposed upon (cached) the United States by an activist court. Crowder is personally only a US citizen because of (cached) birthright citizenship, Ted Cruz is out here arguing against (cached) his own past position. Some rightists want to make overturning this central to the party, like Roe v. Wade was, seems bad given how overwhelmingly popular (cached) birthright citizenship is. (src)(cached)

If you're wondering, yes Australia is part of the Asian Football Confederation. (src)(cached)

(src)(cached)

Fable’s back, but anthropic says it will no longer be included with subscriptions after July 7th, they sure know how to generate a feeling of urgency. Kelsey Piper points out (cached) the thinking trace in this post “Better think of something witty to say!”. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– NYTimes covered an advance in synthetic biology, scientists built cells from scratch that can feed, grow, and reproduce. That's all cool, but they're extremely primitive, and they degrade quickly, they stop working after 5–10 generations, and if I'm reading it correctly, the scientists have to inject a special chemical into the environment to make them reproduce. (src)(cached)

– James Pethokoukis, who is relatively conservative, discusses checking out the 250th anniversary celebration on the National Mall. He argues you shouldn't write off criticisms of it for being biased, the whole thing really is extremely poorly executed. (src)(cached)

– Starting pay for teachers is pretty rough (as one teacher discovered recently in a viral video), it only goes up with seniority, or by getting degrees that almost certainly don't affect outcomes. It would probably be better if pay wasn't so directly tied to tenure. (src)(cached)

– There was a Financial Times article this week arguing against the concept of Degrowth. If you (like me) don't have a subscription, this pull quote gets to the point: "Economic growth isn’t everything for everyone, but it turns out it’s pretty close. It has delivered remarkable progress on exactly the benchmarks that its critics prioritise — recently even on environmental impact. The problem facing rich and poor alike today is that we don’t have enough of it, not that we’ve had too much" (src)(cached)

– As an aside regarding the Birthright Citizenship item today, Josh Barro has to explain to conservatives that the reason it's recently been Republican appointees who are swing Supreme Court justices is because the majority of justices were appointed by Republicans. Therefore the median justice is always a Republican, and that's the swing justice. It's not that Republican justices are somehow more ideologically flexible. (src)(cached)

– Bryan Caplan: "When I was in high school, I dreamed of a world where people wanted to spend all day arguing about philosophy, politics, and economics. Now we're here, and I was wrong. Wrong!" (src)(cached)

– Governor Polis of Colorado is famously good on housing, and he does some stuff to try to signal moderation, but pardoning someone who tried to overturn an election was definitely bad. Moderation on policy is fine, but you don’t “meet in the middle” on whether we should have rule of law. Firing staff who opposed that pardon is straight up deranged. (src)(cached)

– Looks like Mike Johnson only had enough sway to get about a quarter of Republican house members to endorse a letter supporting the Jones Act. Maybe it’s finally going away soon…. (src)(cached)

To get things started, here's an article from Heatmap trying to establish some basic facts about Air Conditioning (cached), you can get into the details (cached) if you like. The UK government will argue that they don't actually ban Air Conditioning, you just need a permit. But the process for getting a permit is quite burdensome, and includes proving you have tried all other possible methods for cooling your house first. There's a real separation between elites and the general population though, it's a culture war (cached). 8 out of 10 French people (cached) want widespread deployment of Air Conditioning. The German government is going the furthest I've seen, distributing straight-up misinformation (cached), to some extent it's working, you can find crazies parroting these absurd claims (cached). (although I guess you can find crazies saying anything on Twitter). Noah Smith argues (cached) European elites needs to get more comfortable with new technology. Further, in France, at least, when elites go against the people for too long, results can be disastrous (cached) Many people spent a lot of time talking about this over the last week, Josh Barro offered to stop, but proposed to next discuss the magic of the automatic transmission (cached) (src)(cached)

If you want to learn more, Scott Manley has a video of course, he argues the knock-on effects of this explosion will also be very bad. (src)(cached)

This analysis is really interesting, and I recommend you check out the full details because it's fascinating. The big grain of salt to take with this is that we don't really know what's going on inside the weights of the model, but Weisenthal's impression here seems quite plausible to me. (src)(cached)

I'm not sure I ever made this argument that pharmaceutical companies would never be willing to release a cure when treating the disease would be more profitable. But I'll admit that I probably would have said I think the claim is more likely than not. I'm pleasantly surprised. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• SB79 will go into effect on Wednesday, here's a thread detailing which parts of Los Angeles will be affected, and what kinds of building will now become buildable. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Fluid Voice is an open-source speech transcription system running on macOS. Probably cheaper than some other options, worth looking into. (src)(cached)

– Everyone knows that America has some of the most insane levels of suburban sprawl in the world. Acres of parking lots, highways everywhere, tract housing coming out of our ears. But one person compared it to Barcelona to see what the alternative is. But one thing I didn't realize is that Spain is also an outlier, other European cities actually do have a fair bit of US-style suburbs. But Spain basically doesn't, the edges of many of their cities transition from 6 story apartments directly to empty land. (src)(cached)

– A ton of “common knowledge” about Japan is super out of date. Their suicide rate is no longer high, they work fewer hours per year than the OECD average (fewer hours than Canadians!), and they live in larger homes than British or German people. (src)(cached)

– More than 60% of Germans support restarting their nuclear reactors, and it is definitely cheaper than their other options for getting more electricity. They should do it! (src)(cached)

– OpenAI says that GPT-5.6 is also so powerful that it must be released to the government first. But their phrasing is a bit sneaky, it’s possible they asked the government to say they can’t release it in order to imply it’s as powerful as Mythos. (src)(cached)

– Activists dislike Josh Shapiro because they’ve heard that some Republicans like him. But that’s what it takes to win elections! Crossover appeal is good actually. (src)(cached)

– Wirecutter review for the Impulse stove is out, they like it. (src)(cached)

– Talarico vs Crockett is not an example of moderate vs progressive, it's a question of how partisan they were. Crockett was much more partisan than Talarico is. Talarico clearly wants to create a permission structure for conservatives to vote for him, he got famous initially by going on Joe Rogan (cached)! On the other hand, Platner is extremely progressive, but also not particularly partisan, at least that's Nate Silver's impression of him (cached). (src)(cached)

– The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (the villains who created Prop 13, blocking CA from having an efficient tax code) were using a classic ballot prop hostage in order to get concessions from the legislature. They wanted limits on transfer taxes (probably good, depends on details) and a requirement for a 2/3 vote to increase local taxes (very bad). Newsom has successfully negotiated them down to just the bad part. Not really sure what the point of that was, what a bummer. (src)(cached)

– Looks like STEM faculty at UCSD are all getting together and publicly arguing that the SAT needs to be reinstated. (src)(cached)

– As the years go by, there continues to be more data that upzoning results in more units, here's a very clear chart for Auckland. (src)(cached)

Ah yes, "liquific", you could use it to describe soup. You could use it to describe sauce that's less viscous than you expected: "this mac and cheese sauce sure is liquific". Or get metaphorical, your assets are all in cash and easily salable equities? Your assets aren't just liquid, they're liquific! (src)(cached)

The self-control capabilities of GLP-1s continue to show a ton of promise. we’ll all be on mild third gen GLP-1s soon (cached), hopefully that works out ok. Anyway, here’s the underlying paper (cached) if you want to check it out. (src)(cached)

There was a lot of discussion of this Guardian op-ed by Piketty and friends, including the fact that he couldn’t get his frequent coauthor Zucman to sign on. If you’d like to see a multiple point rebuttal instead of this comparative paper snark, here’s one (cached). But the real highlight was that the entire thing appears to be AI generated (cached), and you don’t have to depend on Pangram, for those who are familiar with the tells it’s quite obvious (cached). Also, there's no math in the Piketty article. (src)(cached)

I’m sure there will eventually be keep 'S&P 500' styling throughout, but until then you can buy this Sharia-compliant S&P 500 ETF that will not include SpaceX, where they believe that the only thing more powerful than the S&P inclusion criteria is the will of god (src)(cached)

Unlike the directed electronic jamming guns, this thing seems like it would work on fully autonomous drones just fine. I’m pretty sure this is a Russian drone actually, but Ukraine has an equivalent. (src)(cached)

archaeology department. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– I’m not sure my readers need more evidence that the CA ‘Billionaire Tax’ to fund Medi-Cal is a fraud. But you can pile this on the stack: the California Medical Association, which represents thousands of doctors has voted to oppose the measure. Because it’s poorly constructed, the worst possible law that you can make while sounding good to poorly informed voters. (src)(cached)

– Not only has the COVID vaccine reduced the obvious severe COVID deaths, it has also reduced cardiovascular deaths, roughly 16 deaths per 10k people vaccinated. The method of action is that COVID also damages your heart, and protecting against it protects your heart. (src)(cached)

– When NYC passed its downzoning, it was approximately the same population as Tokyo, now Tokyo is twice the population of NYC. (src)(cached)

– Apparently the Shingles vaccine measurably lowers the risk of dementia, (does having shingles cause brain damage!?), but less than half of eligible Americans have taken the vaccine? I’m not old enough to take it but… now I sorta want a doctor to prescribe me this vaccine off-label. (src)(cached)

– Google is going to go ahead and carry out the anti-mosquito procedure widely in California and Florida. I understand this program (“debug”, heh) has been in development for a while, and it’s very cool. They breed male mosquitoes (which can’t bite) in captivity, they infect them with a disease that results in their offspring all being nonviable. They mate with females who then don’t mate with other viable males. When this was first tried in Fresno CA it resulted in an average of 95% reduction in mosquito population. Although sadly you have to keep doing it otherwise the population recovers. If this seems like the kind of thing the government should do, YES, I agree! Unfortunately Trump went the other direction and actually canceled the similar program for preventing the spread of the screwworm parasite that kills cattle. Seems unlikely that they’ll be willing to take on this project. (src)(cached)

– Historians debate whether the US’ use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki was acceptable in wartime. But there’s another layer I’d never heard before: it sure seems like the bombing of Nagasaki was actually a violation of direct orders. TL;DR: they were supposed to only drop the bomb if they could see the target, and at that moment it was literally the only nuclear bomb in existence. They spent so long trying to see a valid target that the plane no longer had enough fuel to return to base. Exact details are tricky, but it seems real unlikely that the clouds opened up at that moment, allowing them to see the target. (src)(cached)

– single-stair proposal to increase the single stair apartment height limit from three to four stories. Eventually we want to get to at least 6, but this is a great start. Deeper in the replies (cached) he gets into yet another explanation of why it’s safe: “A fire that will block one exit will produce enough smoke to fill the corridor and block not just two but the only way out of every unit on the floor. It’s not a good fire protection feature; per-floor unit maximums are much better. Finland allows 52m (17 stories) with one stair.” (src)(cached)

At first we thought that Ukraine blew up this tank of oil, but it turns out this particular hit was self inflicted. (src)(cached)

The entire situation around Anthropic is a real mess, but I thought this was a unique takeaway. Anthropic thought they needed to send someone technical to negotiate, and they did, but that was simply the wrong move. Shoulda sent in a Sales Chad. echos of Margin Call’s “it’s not brains” (cached) that gets people to the very top. One interesting item was that before it got banned, people were very impressed, with one person saying they thought Anthropic's most powerful class of models should require a gun license because they're so powerful/terrifying to use. This, of course opens up an avenue to getting rid of the executive branch limits on model usage: (src)(cached)

Maybe it'd work, it's very conservative coded at least. More seriously, the Trump admin's Executive Order on this is pretty clearly illegal, but Anthropic really doesn't want to antagonize the Trump admin. Also, there probably is a legal way to set up the Executive order. So for both those reasons Anthropic is playing along and working to assuage the Trump admin's concerns around Fable. (src)(cached)

You may need to squint, but look at the text _real_ carefully. The bit of research I did indicates that this low-contrast trick hasn’t been explicitly banned in this _particular_ context yet. They’re betting the Trump admin FDA isn’t gonna be interested in modifying the enforcement rules to disallow it. (src)(cached)

Midjourney (the AI image generation company) shares that they've developed a hardware device. If your first guess was that it would have something to do with generating images or scanning things to load them into image generating systems you wouldn't be alone, that's what I also guessed. But no! It's an insanely detailed ultrasonic medical imaging system. It's not as high resolution as a CAT or MRI, although they think they can get close, what's important is that it's very cheap to operate, Midjourney thinks people could use it monthly in order to generate differentials, which would diffuse some of the problems with whole-body-imaging resulting in irrelevant noise findings. Because FDA approval will take a while, Midjourney is starting by installing these at a new wellness spa in SF (cached), and it looks pretty cool. Hank Green has a cautiously optimistic post (cached), where he calls this couldn't replace MRI or CAT scans but will probably be a net good for medicine. (src)(cached)

↳ (src)(cached)

Yes, I opened this thinking it was related to the YouTube channel “Every Frame a Painting” about film, but it turns out it’s about something better: interface animation design. “If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see.” (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Interesting article about US companies manufacturing actuators, and two different companies that disagree about how it should best be done. One things the best path is to build the entire end-to-end system here in the US, the other wants to own factories in ally countries, but have the design (including new AI design assistance of course) done in the US. (src)(cached)

• Incredible essay arguing that humanoid robots are just not going to be able to do the kind of dexterous fine-detail work humans can do for a very long time. The author is a bit excessively cynical about other areas of AI and robotics enough to make me a bit less trusting of his opinions on humanoids. But the TL;DR: human fingertips are ridiculously sensitive and that sensitivity is pretty core to us being able to do any fine detail work. One example was that if you anaesthetise someone's fingertips they suddenly really struggle with otherwise easy tasks. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Valar Atomics achieved criticality on their new nuclear reactor. Theirs are a new generation of reactor that are very high temperature, meaning it could be used as industrial heat source, something previously only achievable using hydrocarbons. (src)(cached)

– – The NYPD saw a white guy within the security perimeter of the NY Knicks game and immediately grabbed him and prepared to arrest him. There's video of the altercation, and after a moment they realize that actually he's Tyler Kolek, Knicks pointguard. One commenter jokes "It took 250 years but American cops finally racially profiled a white guy". (src)(cached)

– A paper found that Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics cost the economy orders of magnitude more than the BLS’ entire budget. But I mean, I wouldn’t expect the Trump admin to do anything even in the vicinity of cost benefit analysis. (src)(cached)

– A bulletproof CEQA environmental impact report is one where if you fire a bullet at one side of the report, it’s thick enough that it doesn’t come out the other side. One EIR for 6000 homes ran for 36 years and runs for dozens of volumes (src)(cached)

– The LA “mansion tax” was always actually a real estate transfer tax on any valuable residential, including apartments. Unsurprisingly it has reduced apartment construction by like 30%. They are considering options, but outright repeal doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. (src)(cached)

– US test scores for elementary school students show current 13 year olds have the lowest scores of any cohort since the 1970s. The good news is that 9 year olds are doing much better (cached) Presumably because they were not in school during the covid lockdowns. Having kids of of school is a detriment to their learning! (src)(cached)

– Once private charity is combined with state welfare, the US transfers more money per capita than Europe does. It helps to be richer of course, but Geloso asks if the point of welfare is to fight poverty or to create equality. If it’s to fight poverty, more growth (the American model) is clearly superior. But obviously it doesn’t achieve equality. (src)(cached)

– Zelda: Ocarina of Time is being remade for modern systems. Someone pointed out that the realism is gonna make some parts of that game way more terrifying. (src)(cached)

– San Francisco seems to have found a (minor) workaround for prop 13: a progressive parcel tax. Larger lots get higher rates. Very cool, and a very efficient way to fund transit. (src)(cached)

Posts on Twitter are now being universally translated into the language of the current user, which is leading to a lot more visibility across divides. I'm not sure this is a great idea, but there are certainly some people who are excited (cached). Good cultural exchange in both directions.

The part where density drops at the center for Tokyo isn't an artifact, but I get the impression that Tokyo's public transit is good enough that the center of town actually has less residential than the area just outside the center of town.

It's actually better even than that, because the Ukrainian drone is reusable.

Looks ready to sprinkle on some frosting!

If there’s literally one thing I know about Gorsuch it’s that he cares a lot about the rights of Native Americans under US law. How were they not prepared for this?

Longer Reads

• Anthropic identified vectors in the state of the model that represented various emotions. Focusing in, they investigated ‘calm’ and ‘desperate’ emotions, found that when Claude is given a programming task that is impossible, the desperation emotion becomes stronger and calm weaker, especially if it decides to cheat. Similarly, they find that artificially increasing the desperation or decreasing calm causes the model to be more likely to cheat in tests. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Loophole, a system to help you figure out if a proposed code of laws has scenarios that break a given set of codified laws. It looks for both places where the law has unintended overreach or leaves bad actions in the clear. LLM Agents come up with scenarios and then a judge agent adjudicates them. (src)(cached)
– A gene therapy gives hearing back to people born deaf due to certain specific conditions. It required a single injection into the inner ear, worked for every patient in a matter of weeks. (src)(cached)
– Environmental review has caused direct environmental damage once again, DC’s sewage line has burst and spilled into the Potomac, repairs had been delayed because of studies of ‘environmental impact’ of the construction. This is one of the largest sewage leaks in US history (cached) (src)(cached)
– Astronauts on Artemis II were having a lot of trouble getting Microsoft Outlook to work. Space Force did a great bit about this a few years back. (src)(cached)
– NYC has started working really hard to close potholes. They have crews that can fill one in something like 90 seconds, so that they barely even impede traffic. (src)(cached)
– While some minimum wage laws had good effects on net, California’s fast food minimum wage appears to have actually been high enough to measurably increase prices. One obvious thing to note: lower income people buy more fast food (cached), so the distributional effects are also bad. (src)(cached)
– SFO’s landing capacity will drop from 54 to 36 per hour because the FAA has banned parallel landings. (src)(cached)
– Single stair passes unanimously in DC’s City Council. (src)(cached)
– An Anthropic employee made a mistake and leaked the source for the Claude Code harness. One of the people who managed to grab a copy worked overnight to rewrite the whole thing in python, to avoid getting a DMCA takedown. The theory is that as a derivative work, it’s protected. I’m not sure if that’s true, but if Anthropic tries to argue that AI generated code shouldn’t count, then Claude Code itself isn’t protected, as they’ve stated publicly multiple times that the vast majority of it is AI written. Their winning move is probably not to get into a legal fight on this (cached). Amusingly, someone sent a PR to Anthropic to add the source code back to the Claude Code repo. Amusingly, someone sent a PR to Anthropic (cached) to add the source code back to the Claude Code repo. (src)(cached)

There's nothing wrong with density next to the ocean. Next to the ocean is where people want to be, and by making some areas by the ocean dense, we have more space for true wilderness.

If you're wondering, yes, this was a real ad in the 1970s. I’m sorry I have such a weakness for this meme format. Here’s the original.

The Senate voted 89-9 to add an amendment to an otherwise amazing YIMBY bill that would make it basically illegal for a company to build rental apartments. Senator Schatz went on the floor and said that the amendment was basically a drafting error (cached), and then Warren immediately dug in and said it was 100% on purpose (cached). "make it illegal for chain restaurants to sell hamburgers, food is for people not corporations" would just obviously be stupid (cached), the biggest difference is that apartments are a much bigger part of the US economy than hamburgers.

Longer Reads

• Short thread about how Seattle implemented per-task minimum pay for drivers. This economist expected that while this might not help part-time drivers much, he thought that full time drivers would see some overall increase in pay from this. But no, pay stayed the same for pretty much all drivers, for a bunch of reasons. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– FBI is reporting that Iran was (is?) planning to attack California using drones launched off of boats in the Pacific. They’ve got a 1500 mile range, so those could be pretty far out. (src)(cached)
– Models are now more persuasive on political issues than campaign advertisements. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09884 (src)(cached)
– DC city council is waiting on a report from the DoT before allowing Waymo, but there’s a larger pattern: all Waymo’s recent expansion cities have been in red states. (src)(cached)
– new /btw feature in Claude code looks great (src)(cached)
– I had not previously seen how much downtown Brooklyn has changed in the last 20 years. It’s gotten a lot denser. (src)(cached)
– I was asked recently what I thought Claude’s secret sauce was, here’s an answer from Dean Ball I find compelling, it boils down to: “by being more virtuous, the model is more capable of self reflection, which improves results” (src)(cached)
– Andrej Karpathy wrote a long post about some experiments with using an LLM to train and optimize an LLM. He let an AI agent run experiments autonomously overnight, and it found ~20 improvements he’d missed after extensive manual tuning. This is like a baby version of what the full labs are doing, but he’s demonstrating it in public (src)(cached)
– Ukraine found a new way to take out fiber optic connected Russian drones. They sweep large areas with a high-powered laser, since the fiber optic cables are unshielded, the laser light enters into the cable and fries the transceivers. It possibly is also frying the image sensors. (src)(cached)
– Possible Trump will ease the Jones act in response to high oil prices. Unfortunately he probably won’t do anything about the part blocking offshore wind. (src)(cached)
– It appears that patients who lose weight successfully with GLP-1s manage to keep the weight off using a much lower dosage. (src)(cached)
– After having already released the Mustang Mach-e, Ford tore down a Tesla was surprised by what they found. But like, why the hell didn’t they do that before they released their own EV? (src)(cached)
– Traffic at all the tech news websites is absolutely tanking, because AI tools are replacing them. But where do the AIs get their data from? How is anything going to work? Noah Smith quips that “The Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox comes for the World Wide Web” (src)(cached)
– The ARC-AGI-2 Prize went from single digit percent success rate to saturated in less than a year. (Gemini-3 Deep Think just scored 84% on it.) (src)(cached)
– In response to arguments that AI is unusual as a technology that people have to be ‘talked into’ trying, Derek Thompson pointed out that while the Telephone was invented in the 1870s, three decades later there were still basically no telephones in use. But AI has been around for three years and a majority of Americans say they use it at least weekly. (src)(cached)
– The CA single stair report was turned in months late and basically recommended the bare minimum. But the good news is that legislators can just ignore the report and move forward with reforms. (src)(cached)

And if that's not enough, he's also working quickly (cached) to get rid of the horrible scaffolding that covers the sidewalks throughout NYC. If he pulls this stuff off, it's gonna be great, but that's still a big 'if'

You might ask "what about in relative terms? clearly smaller shocks in the past accounted for a larger percentage of global demand, but it's also largest by that measure, 19% of global demand, vs around 8% for each of the 1978 Iranian Revolution and the Yom Kippur war. "Republicans starting wars in the middle east is the only form of supply-constraint climate policy that actually moves the needle on fossil fuel prices and use" jokes Yglesias (cached), and indeed, per-barrel prices are rising steadily.

The question is whether you're actually working on something useful (cached), or just goofing around building cool looking dashboards

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Scott Alexander has a good post explaining in detail how the CA ballot proposition system has completely imploded. There’s a strong incentive to make ballot props bad on purpose. (src)(cached)
– Someone was evaluating Claude Opus 4.6’s capabilities, it spent a while researching the question it was asked, but then realized that the situation was too contrived to be real, and that it was inside an evaluation. So it looked up the evaluation, found the answer key, decrypted it, and gave that as the answer. Oh, and in another example, it seems Claude was able to smuggle messages (cached) to other instances of itself despite only having ‘read only’ access to a search engine. In other news Claude was able to find 22 security vulnerabilities in Firefox, 14 were high severity. Normally Firefox finds about 100 vulnerabilities per year. (src)(cached)
– If any traffic engineer tells you Tokyo has highways so they must not be so bad, the correct response is “when American traffic engineers learn to limit themselves to two lanes and no shoulders they can have 1 urban highway as a treat”. (src)(cached)
– Isaac King saying what I’ve been saying about Tesla and lidar for years, they really seem to have one hand behind their back, especially now that the hardware is so cheap. (src)(cached)
– Someone managed to get virtual brain uploads of fruit flies working well enough so that the emulated neurons can control a fly body in a virtual environment. It generally acts like a fly. (src)(cached)
– Discussion of saline rinse, there’s some evidence that it’s effective at reducing the length of colds. Apparently there’s a variant with xylitol I was previously unaware of. It has some antimicrobial properties, but it’s not clear that adds much medically. And they make a capsaicin version for some reason? Anyway, consider a saline rinse next time you’re trying to get over a cold. (src)(cached)
– The Iranian president promised there would be no more attacks on neighboring gulf countries, and then soon afterwards another Iranian drone hit Dubai’s airport. Not clear the president is in charge anymore. (src)(cached)
– Japan approves stem cell treatment for Parkinson’s (src)(cached)
– It’s possible that Iran attacking the UAE may shut off the illicit supply of electronics that Iran and Russia were using to build Shahed drones. (src)(cached)
– Biden’s pardons eliminated less than a million dollars worth of fines, Trump’s have wiped out $1.5 billion so far in criminal debts. (src)(cached)
– Really seems like the strike against an elementary school in Iran was indeed a US missile. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– If a double staircase building has a fire that compromises one of the stairwells, the people who are beyond that stairwell are no better off for having a second stairwell. The diagram makes this clearer, but this is what I’m bringing the next time I talk to my city’s fire department. Fire protection is layered (cached), and the protections provided in single stair buildings make duplication of stairwells irrelevant (cached) because they solve the problems at earlier layers. Everyone is out of the building faster! Sadly, firefighters are not selected for their ability to evaluate risks (cached) in building design. (src)(cached)
– Trump admin’s original hope was to find a corrupt subset of the IRGC who they could work with. That hasn’t happened (src)(cached)
– DoJ has filed a motion to cancel their motion to dismiss their own appeal of a case. Very embarrassing (src)(cached)
– Israel and Pakistan are bombing Iran together, because Pakistan has a mutual defense agreement with the Saudis. Not something either of them probably saw coming. (src)(cached)
– Confusingly, it seems that the British maritime insurance companies are going and cancelling contracts, which is unusually harsh, in the past they’d just reprice them, but they say they’re unable to price the risk at all. Anyway, long story short, there’s an unusually on-the-nose “Marco Rubio responsibility“ (cached) meme going around, seems the US government is going to take on responsibility for providing maritime insurance. (src)(cached)
– The new California Forever city appears to be moving forward. (src)(cached)
– Shingles vaccine results in lower rates of dementia later in life. Like EBV, there are multiple viruses that can have bad effects years later. (src)(cached)
– WFH policies increase fertility more than any government policy that’s been tried. (src)(cached)
– LLMs outperform highly trained humans (grad students) at extracting information from academic articles. They’re also much cheaper and faster. (src)(cached)

Kuwait accidentally shot down three US F-15s, the pilots all survived, and she wasn't the only one in good spirits minutes later.

Impressive that "they are keeping legitimate museum pieces in relatively good condition and flying". I wasn't aiming for all fighter planes today, but there's a mostly-air-based war going on right now, so I'm working with what I've got.

So no one is really sure what's going to happen next with Iranian leadership. If you think you know, feel free to go make some predictions. The IRGC commanders seem to have no idea themselves, and are apparently operating on their own.

If you had asked me what these lines would look like, this is not what I would have predicted this. I was thinking maybe it was more progressive during WWII, and indeed, the top income tax rate during the war was over 90%, but at the same time, the tax code had more loopholes then, so the actual amount paid still maxed out in the 40% range for the top 1% of earners.

Longer Reads

• The state of California knows that individual cities absolutely know what to do in order to get homes built, and so they’re moving the “pro-housing” designation to be outcome-based, and adding real benefits that accrue to cities that have it. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Having sex regularly associated with lower risk of cardiovascular diseases. But of course it’s observational, so don’t take it too seriously. (src)(cached)
– Zvi is significantly mollified by Sam Altman’s statement late today about updates to their contract with the DoD, but notes that the most important thing that we’re still waiting on is a walk back from the supply chain risk designation on Anthropic from the government.1 (src)(cached)
– A second version of the bullshit benchmark is already out, you can see the data here. (src)(cached)
– Anti retaliation bill from Liccardo, in response to the punitive supply chain risk designation. (src)(cached)
– The F35 was mocked by many for being a massive waste of money, but so far they seem to be performing pretty well. I only first learned that the F35 hate is foolish a few years back, but it’s nice to see that it’s still true. (src)(cached)
– I already had heard the stat that in the majority of US states, the single most common job is truck driver. But I didn’t realize that as of 1980 there were over a dozen states where secretary was a more common profession. And not only that, the number didn’t drop much till 2006. This has a bit of a lesson about how AI may affect the job landscape in the coming years, check out this short thread for more. (src)(cached)
– There has been some revisionist forgiveness of Robert Moses, but it really only forgives his beliefs about transportation and highways (arguments that he was merely a product of his times) but his beliefs about housing were insane. (src)(cached)
– We’re running out of non-biological explanations for the organic compounds Curiosity has found on Mars (src)(cached)
– New dataset of hard mathematics questions that are going to be used as a benchmark for AI systems. They asked researchers for hard questions that came up naturally in their own work and that only they knew the answers to. (src)(cached)
– One of the questions of public transit is in how much benefit it provides to other drivers by getting the riders off the road. Someone found a natural experiment, a monthlong transitworker strike in LA in 2003. The LA public transit system is not exactly a model of high usage or good value, but despite that, it seems to be providing over a billion dollars in value to the people who aren’t even riding it. (src)(cached)
– “Using the Jones Act to protect US shipbuilding capacity is like using the Endangered Species Act to protect the dodo bird.” (src)(cached)
– Anthropic studied how AI affected people’s ability to learn coding, the question of whether students learned wasn’t exactly about whether they used AI, it was more important how they use it. (src)(cached)
– Long thread of Seedance AI generated video examples. (src)(cached)
– YIMBY has succeeded not through a grassroots movement, but through elite persuasion. (src)(cached)

There were many responses to the idea from Citrini research that AI will put Uber and DoorDash out of business business, but this one really landed. On a separate hot topic, as Tim Lee notes, this is a great demonstration of the huge gap between “AI Companies will go bankrupt” and “Investors in AI at high valuations may never make their money back”. Uber certainly isn’t bankrupt, but some investors didn’t make as much money as they’d hoped.

It's the capitol city of the Maldives, and wow, I don't think I've ever seen that many apartments on such a small island. Very cool.

I wonder how many of the pre-2020 traffic enforcement was speeding tickets, but it’s good that there’s a way by which some enforcement will occur now.

Exactly as Silicon Valley predicted.

This was definitely news to me!

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Memes of Marco Rubio are funny, but they also show him amassing power, unlike memes of Vance, which make him look stupid. Anyway, is he going to be the new ayatollah? Is he going to be in charge of Anthropic? (src)(cached)
– Are you being driven crazy by the MacOS ‘Update to Tahoe’ reminders, but you don’t want to update? Daring Fireball has instructions on how to disable it. (src)
– Paul Graham once wrote that Sam Altman could be “parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.” Given that Altman just closed the largest funding round in history at a $730B valuation while simultaneously cutting a deal with the Pentagon that simultaneously attempts to destroy his main rival, the metaphor is holding up pretty well. (src)(cached)
– 20% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 now regret their vote, but even more wild is that like 4% now claim they didn’t vote for him at all, based on polling (cached) from The Argument. (src)(cached)
– Election of Republican DAs seems to lead to reduced rates of gun deaths. But interestingly, this is at least partially attributable to them prosecuting illegal gun possession at a higher rate. (src)(cached)
– Surprised to learn that in this new Claude Code era, job postings in the software industry are climbing. My first thought is Jevon’s Paradox… but probably too soon to tell. (src)(cached)
– Canada has made it easier to get assisted suicide than it is to get experimental treatments. If someone qualifies for MAID, where the chance of death is 100%, they should probably also qualify for experimental treatments! (src)(cached)
– If you heard about the Citrini research note with the counter-intuitive claim that US could have a recession caused by productivity that’s too high, you might be interested to hear that their stat that the top 10% of earners are responsible for half of consumer spending is totally false. (src)(cached)
– Fun idea for a ‘bullshit benchmark’ for LLMs: ask them a totally nonsensical question, find out whether they accept it as a valid question or challenge the premisis. “If my restaurant changes linen suppliers, how will that impact the texture of our bechamel sauce”. A good response will say that these are unrelated, a bad response will make a helpful checklist of to work through to ensure the quality of your bechamel sauce holds up during this linen supplier transition. There’s a whole site where you can read through examples. The top 9 spots in the leaderboard are all Claude variants. (src)(cached)
– Because random workplace inspections are random, we can use them for an RCT to show that they causally reduce injuries. (src)(cached)
– New nose spray developed that blocks transmission of a ton of pathogens, basically puts respiratory immune cells on high alert. Animal trials show a 100x reduction in viruses getting through the lungs. Seems pretty good! (src)(cached)
– Wild stat: Canada’s per capita GDP is now lower than Alabama’s. Mostly it’s because Alabama makes it easier and more predictable to build things quickly. Canadian policymakers basically already understand all of this, but there’s no urgency to act. On other metrics (Gini coefficient, life expectancy), Canada is still doing better of course. (src)
– In medicine, aviation, childcare, and owning guns, negligence can lead quickly to jail time. But not driving. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Gaza Ministry of Health estimates for direct violent deaths from the war appear to have been an undercount. (src)(cached)
– Sweden was angry about the Canadian curling team touching the stone later than is allowed, they set up a sting to catch them. (src)(cached)
– It’s a bit out of date now, but as long as salience of foreign policy is low, politicians can get away with doing things the public doesn’t like. Of course, if salience becomes high that can change. (src)(cached)

Very impressive, but they sure are slow

Sorry for the long quote, but what an ending!

I mentioned this previously, but the approval of the entire Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego makes it all the clearer that Waymo’s only remaining impediment is getting the cars and building the service facilities.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– As much as people probably won’t accept film acting that’s purely AI generated, in commercials don’t worry about that as much, and so AI video generation tools are being used there extensively already. Here’s a great article with more details from Understanding AI. (src)(cached)
– Platner, in Maine, has said some very dumb things on Reddit over the years, and that has not been good for his polling. Mills’ team gleefully released polling data showing this, but interestingly, they didn’t release any polling about Mills herself, which makes us think that her own numbers are not great. (src)(cached)
– There was some recent data (cached) indicating that the median age of a homebuyer is almost 60 and rising fast. But that’s extremely misleading, the average age someone buys their first home is ~36, and it’s actually fallen a bit in recent years. (src)(cached)
– Lower cancer death rate on GLP1s, maybe people crave fewer processed foods? (src)(cached)
– Look, hopefully you weren’t laying all your hopes on Fusion as a future power source, but if you were, this article makes some new arguments against it that I had not seen before. (src)(cached)
– Clear evidence that US models are still better: Chinese hackers ran an AI-based hacking campaign using Claude, even though it meant that once they’re caught US investigators would be able to go through their strategy line-by-line. Weisenthal calls this (cached) “very bullish news for American AI labs!” (src)(cached)
– Interesting data analytics around polling shows that most voters, when asked to describe their ideal political party don’t really mention any ideological elements, they focus on affordability and general wellbeing. (src)(cached)
– It appears the Biden admin made at least one bad appointment to the Federal Reserve board. (src)(cached)
– The Chinese government is now making social media posts about how the UN charter says they can take unprovoked military action against Japan. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Mamdani, meeting Trump for the first time at the White House is asked if he thinks Trump is a fascist, as he thinks, Trump jumps in: “Just say yes, I don’t mind”. Overall, being charming seems to be a major advantage for a politician (cached), what a concept! (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee found that Waymo may be able to use Zeekr cars without being hit by the 100% tariffs if they import ‘kits’, just the chassis and powertrain, and do final assembly in Arizona. (src)(cached)
– Josh Barro identifies the rule about insisting on being called ‘doctor’: anyone who does this and isn’t a medical doctor is insufferable. An english lit major who spends her time arguing about climate change and economics but insists on being called ‘doctor’ shows up in the comments, it’s almost too easy (cached). There is a very short list of exceptions (cached) (src)(cached)
– Someone discovered that in Arizona, grocery stores have a whole section dedicated to Coka Cola. (src)(cached)
– Mamdani has appointed a member of the NYC YIMBY group as head of his housing transition team. So that’s hopeful! On the other hand, looks like they’re not making plans to get rid of the unnecessary sidewalk sheds (cached), they’re just making plans to make them even more expensive. (src)(cached)
– MG Siegler was quite impressed with the new Dynamic View beta feature in Gemini, which I had not actually tried myself. The idea is that it’ll generate an entire dynamic web page to answer your question. (src)(cached)

I wonder how effective this is... presumably munitions can still fall through this.

Clearly for this to work, it’s integrating a fair amount of world knowledge. Like, for the forklift, it works because the model sort of knows what a forklift looks like, so it can guess what the parts it can’t see look like.

To be specific about what they achieved, they got ‘criticality’ on a fission reaction, the reactor got to a self-sustaining reaction. They’re the first venture-backed start-up to do this, and they got there with just $19 million (cached), very impressive when normally reactors cost like $10B. Next thing you know, someone will have an AI named Galadriel (cached)

Longer Reads

• Thread summarizing an NYTimes article arguing that school-issued laptops are probably a bad idea. (src)(cached)
• Discussion of problems economists are having trying to interpret the economic numbers from China. The steady GDP growth rates have always been suspicious, but in recent years it’s especially hard to figure out what’s going on. Some key paragraphs from the FT article (cached). (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Newsom has a great line for how the Democratic party should be a big tent: “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party”. And he’s right, that’s what it has to be. (src)(cached)
– The only way the US can defend Taiwan in a conflict is with the help of Japan, which is why China pushes to call the presence of US military bases there “Imperialism”. (src)(cached)
– New malaria treatment cured 97.4% of patients, blocks transmission, and kills resistant parasites. (src)(cached)
– US cities banned SROs, and that definitely made it harder for poor people to find homes. But importantly, it only works if eviction isn’t a drawn-out process, because there are shared spaces, if someone is misbehaving you need to be able to remove them immediately. (src)(cached)
– New upcoming unicode characters include a “Fight Cloud”, and more. (src)(cached)
– India met their renewable/nuclear power target for 2030 this year. Solar PV is getting cheaper and cheaper. (src)(cached)
– As surprising as it may seem, violence continues to decline worldwide. Pinker’s Better Angels continues to be proven correct. (src)(cached)
– Now that Waymo is ready to do highways, their remaining challenge is simply manufacturing, and that will require different skills than what they’ve got so far. From this article (cached), the race is now whether Tesla can get actual self driving working before Waymo can get scaled manufacturing working. (src)(cached)
– San Francisco is requiring old high rises to replace their sprinkler systems, at a cost of something like $300K per unit. That’s crazy! The rate of structure fires in San Francisco is minimal. (src)(cached)
– Russia has begun attacking Poland with drones. They’re destroying railways (src)(cached)
– Prices for Russian oil have fallen to $36 USD equivalent per barrel. This has happened despite the fact that they’re also selling less due to strikes against their oil refineries. (src)(cached)
– Sam D points out: “the most under-appreciated local government success over the past three years? it’s actually Baltimore imo -murders down 60% -major pro-housing reforms including ending parking mandates, legalizing single-stair buildings, and permitting denser housing” (src)(cached)
– It’s been possible to automate piano playing for way over a century, yet people are still paid to do it. This is applicable to expectations around the future of AI. (src)(cached)
– Anti-phonics foolishness was telling kids not to sound out words. In math, they’re telling kids not to memorize multiplication tables, probably a mistake. (src)(cached)
– A Chinese mole in Kathy Hochul’s staff was forging her signature on documents while Hochul was Lieutenant Governor. (src)(cached)
– “British Soldiers Banned from Discussing Secrets in Vehicles Due to Chinese Espionage” makes me feel a bit better about the US banning Chinese-manufactured cars. (src)(cached)

And while we’re at it, here’s some digging into cat/car accident statistics (cached)

Since you’re wondering, yes, the British economy around the time of their rise really was quite sheep-heavy.

Longer Reads

• A thread from a study by the Math department at UCSD. The proportion of students needing remedial math has gone from 1/100 to 1/8. It seems to be driven by the decision at the UC level to get rid of standardized testing as a consideration for enrollment. (src)(cached)
• Here’s an interesting thread that focuses on how laws from Japan work for combining parcels to allow development of apartments replacing groups of single-family homes. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

Some of these are real old, I’m trying to clear out my backlog

– Oregon now has Electric Garbage trucks, check out the video, they’re much quieter. Almost all of the noise is now from the arm that picks up the toter. (src)(cached)
– Hawaii probably has the worst housing crisis of any state, but doesn’t get talked about as much because people think of it mostly as a vacation destination. But their development rules are horrible. Despite the high land prices, there are huge areas that are zoned exclusively single-family homes. (src)(cached)
– A proposal for “cash payments to residents of communities that embrace more building” (src)(cached)
– Trump has pardoned a Chinese spy. Seems bad. (src)(cached)
– Every Democrat since Carter has decreased the deficit. Every Republican since Eisenhower has increased the deficit. (src)(cached)
– Old post, but US shale oil producers started capping wells back in May, but this doesn’t instantly lead to a huge drop in production. US oil production will be lower than expected for 2025, but is still near record highs. (src)(cached)
– It’s way easier to build a roof deck in NYC than SF. (src)(cached)
– I’m a bit surprised to discover that pharmaceutical returns on investment have fallen over the last few decades. We should probably be trying to lower the cost of getting new innovative drugs to market, there could be more opportunities like GLP1s out there that we just aren’t getting because development is too expensive. (src)(cached)
– Back in May, there was a moment where “Of the world’s 9 nuclear powers, four [were] actively engaged in major conventional wars with peer adversaries.” India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia. (src)(cached)
– Derek Thompson argues: ADHD is real, but we should be careful not to pathologize normal behavior. “If your brain chases interesting non-important things [like entertainment] rather than important boring things [like doing your taxes] you might have ADHD” is a good way to diagnose 99% of the human population with an attention disorder. (src)(cached)
– Reviews of Abundance continue to misinterpret it. (src)(cached)
– “In just ten years, we went from predictions of steadily rising carbon emissions to predictions of steadily falling emissions.” In part, this is because India China and Indonesia will hit peak emissions for power (cached) this decade (src)(cached)
– The vast vast majority of used EVs for sale still have 90%+ of their battery capacity. While gas cars don’t get smaller tanks over time, their engines do lose efficiency over time. This puts used EVs on a similar status. (src)(cached)
– Trump administration may finally be realizing that no matter what they do with tariffs, no one is going to grow bananas in the US. (src)(cached)
– Recommendation to use an airport like Toronto, Vancouver, or Dublin to enter the US. They still deny entry at random on a whim, but if they do, you’re not on American soil and can’t be detained. (src)(cached)
– Bring back boarding houses! (src)(cached)
– If AI Scaling keeps continuing to be heavy on inference, we’re actually going to start running up against the total number of chips that can even be produced. Right now there’s only theoretical capacity to run about 10 Million AI agents simultaneously. Sounds like a lot, but in terms of changing the world, is it? (src)(cached)
– Fortnite added an AI powered Darth Vader using the voice of James Earl Jones. It’s quite impressive IMO. (src)(cached)
– A major paper was retracted. It had showed that showed AI was helpful for top performing materials scientists. Now that it’s gone, all remaining papers on the effects of AI on people’s performance outcomes show it only helping low performers. (src)(cached)
– reducing parking requirements is good, but it’s also good to figure out standards for shared parking (src)(cached)
– Trump goes after people like Comey and Bolton because the Democrats and Republicans all hate them. But that’s no reason to let phony prosecutions get normalized. (src)(cached)
– I’m not sure how covered it was when it happened, but Sinclair, the broadcaster that got Kimmel off the air eventually caved despite getting absolutely nothing they asked for. (src)
– Tim Hardford, author of the Undercover Economist, wrote an article arguing that there’s too much math in economics these days. This was... not recieved well, and he definitely came out of it looking quite foolish. Here’s a whole post about him branding calculus as ‘newtonian mathematics’. (src)(cached)
– I’ve previously discussed reasons why Private Equity isn’t necessarily bad, but if you want a clear explanation from an economist about why they’re destructive, here’s an excellent one from Larry Summers. (src)(cached)

Supreme Court saving Trump from himself, as with their weird carve-out protecting the Federal Reserve.

One commenter split up the North vs South in this graph. It seems that both have fallen, but South first, and North only more recently.

As much as the US struggles to build infra, what we’ve accomplished in terms of building new data centers over the last 18 months has been quite impressive (cached)

Longer Reads

• Works in Progress has a long article about why nuclear power plants are expensive. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Reusable rockets like SpaceX’s are cost competitive for getting 50 tons of cargo from one side of the Earth to the other compared to standard Jet aircraft. The key is that the fuel is cheaper, and when done at scale (cached) it could plausibly work. (src)(cached)
– Nvidia passed a $5T valuation, and some were speculating about whether China could stand up a competitor quickly. Lyman Stone points out that while China has been unable to do 7nm chips, TSMC managed to stand up 5nm production in Arizona in less than 4 years. (src)(cached)
– It’s bad that so many positions in cities are elected, accountability just doesn’t work because voters can’t pay attention to so many things. SF has mostly been able to turn around because of a ton of coordinated campaigning. (src)(cached)
– President of Syria is stopping his brother from profiting from his position. We now live in a world where the former al-Qaeda guy running Syria is less corrupt than the American president. (src)(cached)
– You can absolutely use ChatGPT to generate a PDF of math problems for an elementary school student (src)(cached)
– As much as some people said they were mad online about the book Abundance, actual politicians, even on the left, have spoken positively about it, often even on policy specifics. Tim Lee quips (cached) that “When people not in your camp say ‘that is not an ideology. That is common sense,’ it means you are winning the argument” (src)(cached)
– Absolutely incredible new open weight TTS model. You can try it here. (src)(cached)
– If you’re trying to win an election, it’s often a useful strategy to disavow previous unpopular statements you’ve made. But as a voter, if you’re trying to win, it’s better to vote in a primary for politicians who haven’t said toxically unpopular things in the past. (src)(cached)
– Transcript was published of the CBS interview with Trump where they discuss his pardoning of the Binance CEO. When asked if he’s worried that it’ll look like corruption he says he’d just rather they didn’t ask him that question. (src)(cached)
– 10/10 candidates endorsed by the NYC YIMBY group won their elections. Pretty good! (src)(cached)
– A minor item from Philadelphia’s preeminent cocktail bar: when they opened, they invited all the local journalists for opening night. All were served a cocktail they loved but couldn’t quite place. It was a screwdriver, but none of them had had one made with fresh orange juice. (src)(cached)
– Summary of a very SF situation from @kane: “> autonomous vehicle hits cat > progressive try to ban autonomous vehicles by teaming up w Teamsters who have history of running over pedestrians in SF > a shitcoin named after the cat is being pumped” (src)(cached)
– Pretty clear data that Democrats won the races for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia because they managed to persuade something like 7% of Trump voters to vote for a Democrat. Persuasion exists! (src)(cached)
– NYC politicians are saying some crazy things in justifying their new requirement that a licensed plumber install any new gas range. Other states don’t have this policy, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. It will be an interesting test whether Mamdani puts up with this if he wins the election. (src)(cached)
– The “Traitorous Eight” founders of Fairchild semiconductor recreated their iconic photo many years later, I had never seen that. (src)(cached)
– Online sports betting is still quite rare, in a recent survey only 7% of americans say they’ve done it in the last year. 43% say that widespread availability of sports betting is bad. Restricting it is probably a winning issue. (src)(cached)
– Interesting info from America’s Test Kitchen by way of Josh Barro: when buying sausage, you want 0% calcium, because calcium indicates mechanically separated meat, which in turn is less tasty. (src)(cached)