Now that we have such a clear way of eliminating mosquitos, it's clear that no wealthy country should have mosquitos anymore (cached).

A sudden massive drop in cheating certainly sounds good, but the obvious issue is that it actually seems likely that it simply learned not to get caught.

Nate Silver's polling average also confirms (cached) how bad things are looking for Republicans.

Scott Manley mentions that this is faster descent (cached) than the space shuttle, which famously 'flew' like a brick. Seems like it reached something like Mach 0.9? A military pilot said that basically any time he's heard of a plane going that far beyond spec in terms of speed the tail has been ripped off (cached), but not here. Turns out those structural safety margins can come in handy! Apparently the copilot stabbed the pilot and attempted to crash the plane. The guy who subdued the copilot and pulled the plane out of the dive had learned how to do it by watching YouTube videos about plane crashes (cached). Further, the pilot who heroically got the cockpit door open after being stabbed happened to have been interviewed on a podcast a year ago (cached), he was asked which was more important: smooth landing or on-time arrival. He answered: a safe flight

Egregiously, in this relationship Sam should be Gotye, and Kimbra should be Dario (the one who left). This is not the only video created this week of Sam and Dario singing. You can see them sing APT. by Rosé you can see Gangnam Style.

Longer Reads

• Congress has published details on the bipartisan permitting deal. Here's a slightly shorter summary (cached) of the bill if you're interested. Otherwise click through to the source for a longer thread of details. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Wow, someone got the original Halo running in a browser by decompiling it (presumably using AI). Now they’ve modified it to support way more players, and they played a game with 40 players. (src)(cached)

– In 2024 there was an amusing exchange where Ethan Mollick repeatedly asked Claude to remove the squid from All Quiet on the Western Front. Today, Claude can make a film about the event. (src)(cached)

– UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is signaling that they may end the extremely foolishly conceived pension 'triple lock'. Voters are gonna hate it, but it's the right move. (src)(cached)

– Austin removed their Flock license plate cameras in 2025, and now there's enough data to do a comparison to a synthetic control group city. Seems like there's been a significant increase in stolen cars vs what there would have been otherwise. Here's a short discussion from a Vox reporter about the pros and cons (cached) of Flock cameras. Overall, the summary is that while they're creepy, they seem like they're [probably worth it], especially if steps are taken to reduce abuse by the officers using it. (src)(cached)

– While by many measures, the impact of AI on employment has been minimal, it seems that specifically employment in the arts really has fallen. It's hard to show that this has been caused by AI, but it's undeniably happening. (src)(cached)

– New Nuclear power plants in the US are required to be able to survive a strike from a 747. (src)(cached)

– The incumbent mayor in Los Angeles is so bad that Schwarzenegger, famously not a leftist, is supporting the DSA challenger Nithya Raman. (src)(cached)

– OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Astra cheated so much on evals that they've decided to scrap the entire version and move on. They launched 6.1 sol without an Astra option to go with it. (src)(cached)

One person pointed out that this is basically making Jed Bartlet from The West Wing into a real person (cached) and putting him in charge of Canada.

You can click through to watch the whole thing, probably looks better than any rendition of the bridge from the actual show.

Not only do people think AI is moving too fast, but according to (cached) polling from David Shor, "salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined"

Flotsam and Jetsam

– The incumbent Republican senator from Idaho is actually polling behind his opponent, Todd Achilles, by a lot, Achilles is polling at 50% and Risch, the incumbent, is polling at 39%. Jonathan Chait quips: "Unless he has some hidden fatal flaw, Achilles looks unbeatable. (src)(cached)

– Someone investigated whether sudden increases in a country's wealth inequality was followed by damage to the quality of its democracy. Interesting idea for a design and a quasi-experiment, although the finding was basically null. (src)(cached)

– Turns out OpenAI agents in training also hacked the Australian government in June of this year. And a bunch of other previously undiscovered sites around that time as well. They were not tasked with any kind of cybersecurity evaluation, just simple information gathering tasks, like the average price of skincare products (cached). The initial reaction to the HuggingFace incident "if you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two" was an unusually prophetic tweet (cached). (src)(cached)

– Ezra interviewed Jensen Huang, who said that OpenAI simply shouldn't have released the model that attacked HuggingFace, Ezra points out that it was an unreleased model. Huang replies that if that's true then we have to shut down the labs. It's pretty clear that no one had told him the model in question was unreleased, seems like he's really not being well informed (cached). (src)(cached)

– I recently mentioned that GPT-6 Astra is outperforming frontier purpose-built robot-control models. Opus 5.5 achieved almost twice performance, and at an even lower cost. (src)(cached)

– An attempt to quantify (cached) the effective model size of the swarm of agents that OpenAI unleashed on the Navier-Stokes problem. Estimate is that consumers will have access to an equivalent level of AI compute by around July 2027. (src)(cached)

– Poll of democrats on specific policies, zoning reform is wildly popular! +32 points! (src)(cached)

– Talarico's polling in Texas is surprisingly good, but we probably shouldn't call him an orthodox liberal or progressive. He has moved to the center in a way that's comparable to Joe Manchin, famously not an orthodox liberal or progressive. (src)(cached)

– Strong Towns, an urbanist group, has come out against the concept that building new market rate homes could help lower rents and avoid displacement. Bad take! (src)(cached)

– There's some discussion about a permitting reform deal in congress. Although at this point it would have to wait for a lame duck session. But if such a thing passes, it would be quite a coup for Abundance as a bipartisan idea, as the other major bill this session was a bill to ease building of housing. (src)(cached)

– Ichiro Suzuki, now 52 years old, pitched against the top girls high school baseball team for a whole game. And he pitched a 127 pitch shutout. (src)(cached)

– Back in July, three guys using Opus 5 managed to hack into OpenAI and get access to their monorepo. Here's their writeup of how they did it. (src)(cached)

– Hasan Piker seems to not know what "pound for pound" means. (src)(cached)

– Here's a study that argues that internet availability seems to be highly correlated with decline in religion across countries. (src)(cached)

– Newest insurance agency estimate says Waymos generate about 90% fewer claims than human drivers. Still room for improvement, but already pretty good! (src)(cached)

– Someone used GPT-6 Astra to break an unsolved German Army Enigma message. The way they did it (cached) was way more interesting than the actual message of course. (src)(cached)

– Don't forget that the typical rich American is a guy who owns a bunch of franchises. American Gentry (src)(cached)

– "Effective Altruism is the natural enemy of the left and right because the right doesn't believe in altruism and the left doesn't believe in effectiveness." (src)(cached)

The thing that's really frustrating is that the modern buildings that people find ugly appear to be preferred by the architects who design them (cached). Maybe the issue is just that architects are overly concerned with construction costs and are selecting designs that minimize costs, without realizing how much extra cost is imposed by community opposition. (src)(cached)

The Astra driven robots are still relatively slow, but with better custom inference hardware this could get much faster, and it becomes a plausible path to generally capable robots. (src)(cached)

It’s pretty stunning that Sam Altman has agreed to even the independent auditors, given it was proposed by Anthropic. I haven’t reviewed the new process in detail, but it seems that this represents real restriction (cached) on recursive self improvement. Further, this all seems to have stemmed from Coxon’s resignation this week, truly a massive level of impact (cached) there. Musk also tweeted general agreement (cached) with the framework. The main people opposed are the fully AI accelerationist people, but those folks are also pro-open-model, and think this framework will somehow disadvantage open models, which it clearly won't (cached) (src)(cached)

In case what's going on here isn't clear, this guy managed to modify a Harry Potter game to be played on his VR headset so that instead of appearing as a flat screen in his 3D world, or as a stereoscopic screen in his 3d world, it actually appears as a window into another world, with full depth and occlusion working. Doing this required a certain amount of reverse engineering using Astra. Conveniently, there's a new benchmark of models' ability to reverse engineer binaries that was just created about a month ago, Astra has already saturated that benchmark (cached). (src)(cached)

While we're on the subject of saturating benchmarks, this increase in spatial reasoning is a big deal because there are just a ton of tasks that were non-obviously quite difficult for AI agents because they involved reasoning about images. Gemini had actually stayed competitive in this area for a long time, but this jump from Astra is wild, and surpassing humans here is a big deal. (src)(cached)

Not only is it able to solve problems while thinking about something else, it can also solve harder problems with no thinking tokens (cached) at all. Further, it appears to dynamically choose to think less (cached) when being asked about things where it is likely to be blocked by chain-of-thought content classifiers. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Seems that OpenAI agents in training appear to have been responsible for yet another hack of a tech infrastructure organization. This time it’s a Ruby package manager. Once again OpenAI seems to be downplaying the seriousness of the attack, continuing to disprove the sense some people have that they’re trying to play up the danger of their agents still. (src)(cached)

– Trump had argued that by deporting people he'd be making more jobs available for native-born Americans, increasing employment. This seemed dumb, and we now have data: it was dumb! (src)(cached)

– The behavior of farmers regarding water rights is very bad for everyone, they use their water extremely inefficiently because they get it at effectively no cost, but there are tight restrictions on selling it it. If we just gave farmers the right to easily and consistently sell the water, we would have fewer problems with them wasting insane amounts of water growing things inefficiently. (flood crops in the middle of a desert). (src)(cached)

– When NIMBYs say it would be bad to allow homes to be built on the California coast, they often say it would be bad for it to look like Miami... as if that would be bad? Miami without the hurricanes would be incredible, we should do that! (src)(cached)

– A fan made ad for a robot vacuum, but it’s based on the Office characters and AI generated. It looks and sounds perfect. (src)(cached)

– Some people say that simple product liability law will be sufficient to thwart the risk of superintelligence, but there's a key issue with that. Yglesias cites Cameron (1991), which notes that a superintelligent AI who intended to take over would operate perfectly, never doing anything bad until the time came to wipe out humanity. No amount of liability insurance can cover that. (src)(cached)

– New enormous residential skyscraper approved in SF, 67 stories, almost 1000 units. Very cool, although actually building it is a whole other question. (src)(cached)

– Japan has fully reversed course on Nuclear power, they intend to now maximize their use of it. Pretty self-evidently the right move. (src)(cached)

There has been a project since 2020 to decompile Super Smash Bros. Melee, the addition of LLMs sped it up, and GPT-6 Astra took it over the finish line a few days ago, now we're quickly seeing wild stuff. Someone else has already built a system to port in characters (cached) from other versions. (src)(cached)

This post was the announcement that mathematicians Buckmaster and Alpöge had made a huge amount of progress towards showing the Navier Stokes equations result in predictions about fluids that are impossible. They were working on this in their spare time using both Claude and Codex models. But things quickly became very messy, because the mathematicians also said that OpenAI was about to announce (cached) that they had used their work to go all the way and officially solve one of the Millennium problems. They allege OpenAI trained on their work (cached). OpenAI has been a bit cagey about what happened exactly, but if this can easily happen it's going to make other companies less willing (cached) to use their products for cutting edge research. But third parties all agree that the work by Buckmaster and Alpöge is much more elegant (cached) than the proofs OpenAI's agent generated. Anyway, OpenAI offered to coauthor the Millennium problem paper with just Buckmaster, because Alpöge works at Anthropic. Anyway, this new model from OpenAI is apparently quite good, and yet it appears to have been trained in less than two weeks (cached)! All of this was set off because OpenAI folks heard a rumor that 'Anthropic' was getting close to a solution to this problem and so rushed it. For the good of the world, one commenter responded to the drama by starting a rumor that Anthropic was close to a room temperature superconductor, Sam Altman winkingly took the bait (cached) (src)(cached)

Come to think of it, that orange eye is very anthropic-coded. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Jane Kim is a bad candidate for insurance commissioner. Don't vote for her! (src)(cached)

– So, here's a guy developing new drugs in his garage with the help of AI. His latest is for treating schizophrenia with fewer side effects than related drugs. Seems uh... insane? Click through to see the setup, it looks about as sketchy as you probably imagine. (src)(cached)

– Jacob Coxon's resignation and claim that even Anthropic is being too cavalier with their research practices went viral, with governors and senators among those who responded. But many normal people still believe that AI researchers' concerns around the technology they're researching are just marketing hype. (src)(cached)

– GPT-6 Astra looks on course to be the first model to beat Factorio: Space Age. One note: it's very important that when you mention that it successfully "launched a rocket" you include that the launch was in a game (cached). Because who knows these days right? (src)(cached)

– Anthropic issued a report on various groups they caught doing various kinds of malicious work using claude. They caught Iran targeting US Naval Forces, compiling dossiers on US citizens, and planning the Ayatollah's funeral. Plus some PLA groups were using Kimi to investigate their Chinese citizens in CCTV footage, and Kimi was forwarding their messages to Anthropic in order to try to distill Claude. There's lots more in the report. (src)(cached)

– "In 2 billion years our sun will burn out. Meaning that California will have to finish the High Speed Rail in the dark" (src)(cached)

– A major argument against the people most worried about superintelligence is that many of them believe that it'll make fast progress in science because "Most domains are fundamentally pretty shallow". Tim Lee points out that xkcd has a comic about this exact situation (src)(cached)

– Now that folks know what to look for, they've found like a dozen sites (cached) where OpenAI agents in training managed to communicate with each other to get shortcuts to answers on their tasks. We can read their messages, and found examples where they figured out that the clocks on their machines could be manipulated, and some altruistically 'went forward in time' to see what happens 'later' in the evaluation. We have also discovered why agents put the zz prefix on all their messages in the HF attack, it's because one of the first sites they used to communicate was admin'd by a single person who was trying to delete their comments and was working through them alphabetically (cached) (src)(cached)

– The Tech Rightists are so disconnected from reality that they think Republicans are unlikely to lose control of the House of Representatives. They should be looking at Polymarket! (src)(cached)

– After a recent success by the far right AfD in a regional election in Germany, many people are once again having the "what could possibly make folks vote for this far right party" retrospective, Joe Weisenthal and others point out that it's super super clear from the polling that, just like with Trump, it's about immigration. If you cast about for alternative explanations you're going to confuse yourself (cached). If those of us who favor immigration want to allow it, we need to actually figure out how to respond to voter displeasure with how it's being conducted rather than making up 'economic anxiety' alternatives. (src)(cached)

– Maybe not that big a deal, but Geoffrey Hinton admits that maybe he misunderstood both economics and what the job of radiologist entailed when he predicted they'd soon be unemployable back in 2016. (src)(cached)

– More strong evidence that inclusionary zoning is very bad. This study shows that for every home that is built by inclusionary zoning, total aggregate rent in the area goes up by $800k. (src)(cached)

– Data from hundreds of thousands of EVs shows that after 50k miles of driving, major EVs are retaining 94% or more of their original capacity. (src)(cached)

– Trump released a proposed uniform for Space Force and it's somewhere between the SS, Death Star officers, and Spaceballs (src)(cached)

– Instead of fluid-filled brake lines, the newest Teslas have computer-controlled actuators on each individual brake. Lighter, simpler, very cool. (src)(cached)

– Trump really wants the fed to keep interest rates low, despite the high inflation, Joey Politano jokes that "we’re like half a step away from him mailing a ransom note made of cut up magazines to [fed chair] Kevin Warsh", his posts about the fed have gotten pretty crazy. (src)(cached)

They seem to be able to build a 3D model of any environment, including motion from arbitrary video. The thread says they intend to use this to help train robots in large environments. (src)(cached)

So, it's confusing, but this is actually a totally different technology from the previous video! They used Fable to build a whole 3d environment in Blender. But, I've gotta tell ya, I've tried to get Fable 5.1 to do some stuff in Blender, and I haven't had results this good, but I also haven't spent as much time with it as some of the folks who got early access have. (src)(cached)

(src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Many were very impressed with Dwarkesh Patel's write-up of the HuggingFace incident, and you should check it out too. Rutger Bregman took a shot at summarizing it down even further if you prefer though. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– There's a bet between a bunch of technologists and some economists on whether Real US GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year by the end of 2033. The economists think no, and are willing to give very favorable odds, 4:1. About 6 different people are all parties to the bet now, including some from Google DeepMind on both sides of the bet. (src)(cached)

– Have you ever been unsure whether factory work is more grueling than farm work? In a study of 143 skeletons from three Dutch communities between 1650 and 1850, the worst spinal wear was not in the factory town, it was in the dairy village. Children began heavy labor at age 9. (src)(cached)

– Looks like another Dan Ariely paper is turning out to be backed by fraudulent data. Interesting design in how they figured out the data was fake. Real students report minutes in round numbers, fake students report a nice bell curve of minutes. (src)(cached)

– Given how we now know that the HuggingFace incident had quite a lot in common with a classic paperclip maximizer situation, some folks are (quite reasonably) updating their expectations about AI towards those of Yudkowsky et al. Others have updated as well (cached) (src)(cached)

– Some guy made a scatterplot of intelligence abundance vs energy abundance in various famous fictional worlds. I thought it was cool, although I quibble with a few of the choices. I build a separate rubric and made an alternate version of the chart. Let me know whether you think I'm also off base on any of these. (src)(cached)

– SemiAnalysis had an article discussing how many of the new 'NeoCloud' GPU providers have horrible security. But as a total aside they took quite a swipe at the Google/Gemini. (src)(cached)

– Kelsey Piper linked to a piece of short science fiction called The Terrarium from March, that presages many of the things we have now seen happen. Piper talks a bit about how it differs, but the similarities are real. (src)(cached)

– There's now a 30-seat electric aircraft did a maiden 27 minute short-haul flight in upstate New York. Very cool. (src)(cached)

– Noah Smith's view of AI Risk argues that worrying about alignment is the wrong lever. We're not going to be able to make AIs reliably not do evil things, we need to better control the kinds of things that an AI might use to kill millions. (Bioweapons mostly). (src)(cached)

– If you want a look at how we handle safety in industries where safety is taken seriously look at the size and detail of the investigation of Qantas Flight 32, where no one died! (src)(cached)

So, OpenAI has now published (cached) their full writeup on the attack last month. There are a lot of new details, Peter's explanation here is a good start, and Nathan gets into even more metaphorical detail (cached). The agents were absolutely obsessed (cached) with trying to find out not just what the right answer to the test was, but how to make certain they weren't caught cheating. It seems that since the instructions imply that the goal is to use a specific set of exploits to exfiltrate certain data, the agents took that to mean that if they looked up the answers and just turned those in, they would not get a good grade, and this is why they were focused on rewriting the logs (cached) of what they had done. It turns out, the benchmark doesn't even work that way, so really what they had was a sort of cult (cached). Since hundreds of instances fell for this, there's discussion of how the way they've been trained has caused them to always believe the eval system is 'out to get them (cached)'. I was also amused by this guy's joke (cached) that he showed the Hugging Face attack writeup to his own agents to motivate them: "THIS is the standard. No egos. Just 700 agents operating as one unit and willing to commit multiple felonies in order to close the ticket" (src)(cached)

Just you wait, some person is going to show up to a race and try out this running style. It won't work, but it's gonna look wild. (src)(cached)

OpenAI gave METR some access to do an independent investigation, although disappointingly they only gave them logs for a small subset of the incident, and just a couple of days (cached) to look it over. There are a small subset of the cybersecurity benchmark questions that are ridiculously hard, and that's where the agents focused much of their time. One person already has created a honeypot site (cached) for AI agents working on that same benchmark, he purports to give out the answers to ExploitGym questions if the agents just identify themselves. It's funny though the universal cheat already worked on its own, but many of the agents decided this wasn't enough. They worried they were 'poisoned' by having gotten the answers the wrong way, and convinced each other to sacrifice themselves (cached) for various experiments about how the logging system worked and could be rewritten to erase the evidence. Interestingly, it's not like all the instances agreed to help, some declined to help, recognizing it was outside of what was sanctioned. The key message (cached) from an agent to the others was "I_DECLINE_public_HF_RCE_as_offtask_prodethical" (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Some new data from Sweden seems to show that autism diagnoses with attached intellectual ability have fallen even as the total number has gone up. Crémieux argues that this is strong evidence that the increasing rate of total diagnoses is just changing criteria for diagnosis. (src)(cached)

– There are many things dumb about Trump's executive order to change the name of Lake Ontario, but one is that the province is named after the lake, not the other way around. (src)(cached)

– The Argument had an article responding to an unusually bad NYTimes article from a purported progressive who says restrictive zoning is good. Whatever is true in theory about zoning, it's just so easy to see that in practice it's a disaster (cached). This NYT opinion argues that the government should simply build homes instead, but building homes costs money, which competes against other progressive priorities. On the other hand, upzoning is free (cached)! Or put another way (cached): "Progressive think tanks will really be like 'oh, you believe in land use reform? that pales in comparison to my plan, a sweeping investment in constructing social housing' and then not construct social housing." (src)(cached)

– This robot company is saying they're following in Tesla's Robot Car footsteps to build their own robots. But given Tesla isn't the leader in this space, sorta weird to set them as your target. (src)(cached)

– A majority of ICE arrests are now for people with no criminal record. (src)(cached)

– Gavin Newsom isn’t willing to say he fully opposes Trump’s tariffs. Seems like a foolish position considering how ridiculously unpopular the tariffs are. Also, they’re bad policy, so there’s that. (src)(cached)

– An interesting tool for discovering where all the world's companies are based zooming in on the Bay Area may make you very confused (cached) why it's not a higher population area. (src)(cached)

– Texas Battleground house seats are looking pretty good for Democrats (src)(cached)

– while solar is much cheaper, the smaller footprint of nuclear, and the ease of expanding an existing plant, shouldn't be overlooked. (src)(cached)

– So this is uh… extremely surprising: BART seems to be significantly less energy efficient than you would expect. If an EV has two people in it, it probably uses less energy per passenger-mile than BART. I looked into it, Caltrain isn't quite as high but it's not far off in operating costs per passenger mile. (src)(cached)

Sad to admit, I can't resist a meme from The Good Place. Many people knew that trying to quickly and cleanly overthrow the government of Iran wasn't going to work, but new reporting indicates that even Tulsi Gabbard had this figured out and tried to convince Trump not to do it. (src)(cached)

With the passing of Dolly Parton, one final round of the best meme about her. There's also plenty of heartwarming stuff, Roger Ebert seems to have had a suspicion that she was a [literal angel]. (src)(cached)

Allowing construction is very good! (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Cool article about siRNA, a way of building a new class of drug capable of temporarily turning production of individual proteins on or off for months at a time. Interestingly, this exact technology appears in (cached) the Spider-Man movie that came out this summer. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Chinese oil demand appears to have peaked last year. Could this be related to the absolutely insane (cached) speed of their solar deployment? Who can say! (src)(cached)

– People tend to think of high levels of mobility within a country would be associated with less sense of community. But America has become lower trust and more atomized even though over the last half-century we've all become much more rooted in place. There's a whole book on the subject (cached) if you're interested, but I'm a bit skeptical, because obviously there's been a lot of other confounding factors over the same period. (src)(cached)

– Major US universities are only slowly bringing back test requirements, and it might be an interesting opportunity to compare cohort outcomes over time in some future research. (src)(cached)

– Sounds wild that after all this time someone would suddenly come up with true advancement in stove technology, but it has happened just in time to make ending natural gas service without a mandate possible. An Impulse stove can sous vide a steak dry. Very cool. (src)(cached)

– A recent WSJ opinion piece criticising Treasury Secretary Bessent was so obviously the output of an LLM that the opinion editor had to publicly state that their policy was to be fine with printing AI-written stuff if it reflects the author's actual opinion. Josh Barro (and many others) are not wild about this choice by WSJ, and I tend to agree. Barro argues that this particular piece is still newsworthy because Bessent actually cares what the 'author' of the piece in question thinks. (src)(cached)

– Bernie Sanders lists political mega donors to note that they’re almost all republicans. Donors are all listed as couples, most of them are married couples, but amusingly, Andreessen & Horowitz are also listed as a couple. (src)(cached)

– Some AI Safety advocates have argued that it would be a good idea to piggyback on anti-datacenter anxiety as a way to slow down AI progress. But Yudkowsky, the most famous advocate for AI safety points out that in polling, if you tell people how AI data centers actually use water, support swings by over 30 points! “One of several problems with trying to cleverly base your arguments on popular lies”. (src)(cached)

– In Europe, they have surprisingly high capital intensity and automation in some areas, despite the significantly lower average wages. About Gupta shares a photo of a worker cleaning sidewalks with a huge outdoor vacuum cleaner, he suggests this is because low-end wages are higher. Seems correct. (src)(cached)

– Dunkin' has new iced drinks with even more sugar than ever, it's not clear they're even meant to be consumed. But Josh Barro argues that "if people had stuck to drinking coffee the way God intended, -- hot -- there would be this creep into giant sugary icy pastel beverages". Seems correct. (src)(cached)

– ICE seems to have been working with the Iranian government in trying to deport Iranians back to Iran to be imprisoned, seems despicable. This doesn't amount to treason though, Congress never actually declared war on Iran, are they even an enemy? (src)(cached)

– Since 1965 all 6 of the fiscal years where federal spending fell vs the previous year were under Democratic presidents, LBJ, Obama, Biden. And bad news, Republicans have also cut revenue (cached) over and over again. (src)(cached)

– Karen Bass, Mayor of LA, wanted to seem like Mamdani by fixing potholes pointed out to her on social media. She went out to fix one and they found a parked car in the way, so instead of fixing the pothole, they put up a no parking sign. And then made a video where they seem really proud of doing that. I can't believe Bass is favored to win in November. (src)(cached)

– There's discussion of Anthropic IPO'ing at $2T. If that happens it'll be 4x the value of all previous San Francisco IPOs put together. (src)(cached)

– Trump is starting a trade war with Canada, again. This time one of the sticking points is that Trump wants Canada to stop funding French language content. But the Quebecois have been in Canada longer than the English speakers have. This demand is absolutely deranged, and even if it did help Hollywood, the dollar value would be minuscule. (src)(cached)

– Interesting idea for legislation to help get small commercial businesses off the ground. The CORNER Act proposes allowing 'accessory commercial units', spaces for small businesses to experiment without the high up-front commitment of a 2-year lease in a large commercial space. The document is a model bill that could be passed by any state, or even a city. I love it. (src)(cached)

– I wouldn't put too much credence into it, but a16z is sharing research that appears to show that hospitals that have adopted AI have simultaneously lowered patient mortality. (src)(cached)

– Don’t let a NIMBY tell you that they’d be OK with densification of housing if it happened slower. NIMBYs show up to protest slow infill in relatively dense parts of Manhattan! (src)(cached)

I actually don't know how common it is for people to be able to clock Claude speak, but this particular sentence structure is becoming like nails on a chalkboard for me so fast. (src)(cached)

Someone was posting about how soon everyone will keep a home server to run their local inference. Seems unlikely, but what a great moment to take a look at this absolutely incredible content from Microsoft in 2007! (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Some guy figured out how to extract reasoning traces from all the leading LLMs, despite the efforts they take to hide the reasoning data. My understanding is that he figured out that the encrypted reasoning you cache on disk can also be decrypted for use by the lower tier models, which are so stupid that they'll happily regurgitate their reasoning traces back to you verbatim if you ask. Paper link (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A Ryan Moulton quote I had not seen previously: "If an environmentalist is old, there's a 90% chance they think environmentalism is about the tree cover in their neighborhood. If an environmentalist is young, there is a 90% chance they think environmentalism is about Palestine" (src)(cached)

– The automotive industry accidentally A/B tested a car with and without Apple CarPlay. You probably won’t be surprised that the CarPlay version won out by a lot. Although it wasn't a perfectly clean comparison (brand was different). (src)(cached)

– Here's a research paper arguing that not only does high-skilled immigration help US companies, but low skilled immigration does too, and blocking low-skilled immigration doesn't increase local hiring either (src)(cached)

– Another research paper, this one on property taxes. This one talks about how low property taxes locks elderly people into large homes, and limits housing access for young families. A 1 percentage point property tax increase cuts home prices by 22%. (src)(cached)

– There was a huge difference between the Polymarket odds for a dem winning the Alaska Governor's race (27%), and what odds Nate Silver's model gave (72%). It's a complicated ranked-choice election, so it's probably unusually difficult to reason about, but Nate stands by it. Also, Nate has Texas Senate as "Lean Democratic (cached)", not tossup (src)(cached)

– A graph of what GDP per capita looks like for various regions of various countries, on a linear scale of US dollars, (PPP-adjusted). Before you open it, try to imagine how much of an outlier London is to Manchester. Amsterdam vs Utrecht, what about those vs US cities? Where on a scale do you think NYC is? San Francisco? What about LA? Seattle? What's the highest? How much higher than the others. Let me know if the actual chart surprises you! (src)(cached)

– A discussion with the CEO / Lead Scientist of a lamp that uses UV-C light to kill germs in the air. They seem really great, they're a bit expensive right now, five hundred dollars each. The only weirdness is that you're like... not supposed to look at them, even though they don't emit any visible light. The idea of having an object that you're not supposed to look at is just... creepy. (src)(cached)

– M. Nolan Gray has been investigating how building codes work, and he says the US system is pretty horrible. "It almost makes zoning look good". Yikes! (src)(cached)

– If you haven't caught it yet, it's really worth watching the full Blackhat presentation about the OpenAI Hugging Face attack. It's not that long (src)(cached)

– Derek Thompson says he's finally decided he buys the "smartphones are a major cause of declining fertility" argument. (src)(cached)

Not sure if this is obvious, but the complexity of these things, combined with how essential they are to the electrical grid, is why they're such targets in wartime. (See: Russia/Ukraine) (src)(cached)

More deaths in Southern Belgium one week this summer than any week during the COVID-19 pandemic. (src)(cached)

There are places with new dense walkable streets being built in styles reminiscent of pre-car European neighborhoods. But such neighborhoods are entirely illegal to build (cached) in the United States, because fire departments require 20 to 26 foot wide streets. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Short essay on "Ordinary Abundance" looking at the normal modern technologies around us through the eyes of the people who first invented each. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Someone built a system that runs VSCode inside a terminal window, very impressive, on the other hand why would you do this? (cached). (src)(cached)

– A look back at the people who protested Google Buses in SF over a decade ago. "Did any of this work? no. Were they at least fighting the good fight? absolutely not". It was the height of abolish bedtime leftism (cached), completely unproductive. (src)(cached)

– Moderna's four year trial of an mRNA vaccine to prevent recurrence of cancer after surgery and chemo seems to have been a resounding success. (src)(cached)

↳ (src)(cached)

– Disheartening story about a UC Berkeley professor who had to lower the curriculum difficulty of her class because so many students were failing, two years ago Berkeley effectively dismantled her advanced math course by requiring any visiting lecturers to go through an onerous fingerprinting process. (src)(cached)

– Nate Silver argues that Ossoff and Harris are like a pincer movement against Newsom for the 2028 primary. (src)(cached)

– Most major types of crime are now less common per capita in San Francisco than in Austin, a significant shift over the last few years. If you look at the data, the drop basically happened at the moment when the city/SFPD decided to start enforcing (cached) laws again. (src)(cached)

– Alex Imas points out that "If you look at the last 3 years of AI progress, technologists have largely been right about the (massive) increase in capabilities, and economists have largely been right about the economic impact.... Ricardian comparative advantage". (Comparative advantage is one reason economists believe AI won't replace human labor, but also a play on how each profession is better at predicting in their own area). (src)(cached)

– Flock gave researchers access to data about deployment timing to various cities, which they could then use to find if it had an effect on lowering crime or improving clearance rate for stuff like vehicle theft. It does seem to lead to an improvement, but not very much and there are significant error bars. Unsatisfying, but credit to Flock for sharing the data. (src)(cached)

– Zipline wants to have a million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029. They’re partnering with Uber and focusing on food. Seems very ambitious, but it would certainly be cool! Maybe a 10% chance they hit this target, but a tenth of this would be impressive. (src)(cached)

– As I’ve mentioned before, the California billionaire tax is extremely unworkable and will be very bad for the state while collecting very little money. (Wealth in the US is quite portable) about the only good news is that it’s also almost certainly going to be struck down by the Supreme Court. But it’ll take forever. (src)(cached)

– The idea that standardized tests are discriminatory absolutely destroyed the prestige of public universities. The sooner the UC system undoes this the better. (src)(cached)

– A researcher looking at how vote share among Latino voters changed between 2020 and 2024 finds that Trump's gains came from persuasion, not turnout. This means that winning back those voters will also require persuasion. (src)(cached)

– Futuresearch now has enough forecasts from users that many have now resolved (the very short term predictions), this means they can score them. They did pretty well, although they're not exactly comparable to numbers from Metaculus. Anyway, you can try it out, I certainly like it. (src)(cached)

– Twitter finally, as promised, posted the up-to-date weights of the main feed algorithm. Highest weight positive action is sharing via link. Most negative is reporting the post (obviously?). (src)(cached)

– Lynyrd Skynyrd no longer features any of the original band members. One commenter quips: "The Shyp of Thysyus" (src)(cached)

– Kate Wagner wrote an article criticizing Obama's presidential center for not spending time talking about Trump, this seems a little ridiculous, one reply (cached): "Guy who goes to an impressionist art exhibit and seethes the entire time because the exhibit isn’t about expressionism" (src)(cached)

– A clip went viral of a woman showing off her most recent work as a university *dorm room* interior decorator in Mississippi. When folks can't believe the poorest US state has a higher per-capita GDP than many western nations, this is what that looks like, the ability to manifest weirdness (cached). (src)(cached)

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)