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

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

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

(src)(cached)

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

archaeology department. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↳ (src)(cached)

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

Longer Reads

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

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks ready to sprinkle on some frosting!

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

Exactly as Silicon Valley predicted.

This was definitely news to me!

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

Very impressive, but they sure are slow

Sorry for the long quote, but what an ending!

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

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

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

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

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

Longer Reads

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

Flotsam and Jetsam

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

This is from February, but it’s new to me

Probably reduces evaporation in a way that’s useful if you cover a reservoir like this.

I sorta wonder why they need physical sim cards for this, but still, wild. Here’s the story from abc.

Here’s the original Simpsons bit in question if you’re unfamiliar.

Despite the whole thing nominally being about healthcare spending, the end to the filibuster is the real thing being fought over. Democratic leadership isn’t super clear that this is their goal (cached), but I’m not sure they’d say so if it was.

Longer Reads

• This thread summarizes a Google project to get an AI to play minecraft without it needing to do training runs of actual Minecraft. Instead it learns what to do in training by imagining gameplay, and then shows the best performance on minecraft yet when run ‘for real’. This has significant implications for robotics use cases where it’s not possible to collect tons of real-world training examples. paper, website (src)(cached)
• Great thread on the mechanical physics of screws. (src)(cached)
• Interesting thread about how the Trump admin’s policies around primary care will likely separate the AMA from decisions around how medicare funds are attributed to doctors. There’s a shortage of primary care physicians, and this may help with the shortage. (src)(cached)
• A paper about labor economics and substitutability of skills between non-college and college grads. College isn’t the only way people improve their skills. Here’s more discussion (cached) (src)(cached)
• Thread from an AI safety researcher who is opening up about how OpenAI has been harassing him. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Something like a quarter of Americans have at least tried a GLP-1 drug. (src)(cached)
– Someone got an over-the-shoulder shot of conversation between the Secretaries of Treasury and Agriculture. They pretty clearly can tell privately that they’ve made some extremely stupid mistakes. (src)(cached)
– Current math is that AI-related revenue needs to go up by about 20x in the next few years to justify the level of investment we’re seeing.Certainly possible, but there are ways in which AI could be a success without this happening. (Open models perhaps?) (src)(cached)
– Was the recent rain in CA a blessing in return for passing SB 79? (src)(cached)
– In the fight over rare earth minerals (which aren’t actually that rare) it’s important that china doesn’t even dominate mining of the materials, it’s refining that they absolutely dominate at. (src)(cached)
– I’m close to subscribing to The Bulwark just to read the full text of this piece dunking on Bari Weiss. (src)(cached)
– Here’s a quote from Andrej Karpathy from his interview on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast explaining why he doesn’t expect a fast-takeoff scenario where AI becomes suddenly self improving. (src)(cached)

This is a few weeks old now, but extremely impressive. And if you look at the worst crashes they got into, they’re all caused by an error by the other driver, per a detailed analysis by Understanding AI.

One guy tested with the 24 hour alarm UI (cached) and thought it works there at first but… no, same issue.

I might also label this: “Badge Photo” // “GVC meeting just now”

ffmpeg can be a real pain, I’ve had similar levels of difficulty with HDR encoding, but no LLM has yet offered me a suicide hotline. Maybe I haven’t attempted anything ambitious enough yet. (I sorta assume this post is fake)

Longer Reads

• Almost a decade ago, Geoffrey Hinton said that no one should go into Radiology anymore, given that AI would clearly be able to do it better. And indeed, AI is all over modern radiology, but pay in the field is up. Here’s an article from Works in Progress about why. TL;DR: regulatory/insurance rules require a human in the loop, but those humans are using AI to get way more work done. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Good news: the NIH managed to get back on track for research grants, despite the Trump administration throwing a wrench into things. (src)(cached)
– Eli Lilly has a new GLP1 drug that’s a daily pill instead of a weekly shot, with fewer side effects compared to Ozempic. Here’s the paper. (src)(cached)
– The key to moderating is to be like trump on abortion: moderate your substantive position, but do it quietly. Pretty much the opposite of what some democrats do, where they very loudly proclaim their differences from people to their left. (src)(cached)
– I did not realize that part of the reason we can’t have small restaurants in the US is zoning regulations that make it impossible to operate without multiple employees. Here’s the article, Tim Lee quips “Legalize $4 lunches!”. (src)(cached)
– The suburban parts of Japan looks just as unwalkable ugly as the worst US suburbs. (src)(cached)
– Russia entered Estonian airspace, and there was some reminiscing about how when they did that to Turkey in 2015, they were shot down in seconds. (src)(cached)
– If you want to hear more about why I am not particularly worried about AI doom, check out these comments from The Argument’s coverage of the new Yudkowsky book. (src)(cached)
– New reporting that Tom Homan accepted a cash bribe during Trump’s first term, and that Trump shut down the FBI investigation. Generally that’s considered “bad” (src)(cached)
– Ban on new hotel construction in NYC is probably why Broadway shows are struggling to make a profit. (src)(cached)
– $799 for Meta’s new glasses with a display seem like a pretty good deal, per Ben Thompson (src)(cached)
– Waymo’s new safety stats actually undercount the added safety, because the accidents that occurred were essentially always the fault of the other driver. (src)(cached)

What a fun idea, what a horrible execution, exactly as promised! I do sorta like the title though ChatGPT's is bad, but arguably in a funnier way.

To Noah's point, Nvidia's market cap went up by $150B in response. Seems like a good trade for them!

It's by Scott Alexander, if you want to read the whole thing.

If you're wondering, in the original it's Hitler and Stalin meeting over the corpse of Poland, the cartoonist who made it was on the Nazis’ most wanted list for their planned invasion of Britain.

Hmm, this might be an acceptable dinner time rule, and an excellent exception to the rule. Although, maybe this means you're telling your kids too much about politics. But is that better or worse than listening to Golden on repeat?

Bonkers new H-1B fees are going to lead to tech companies simply hiring outside the US, which in turn will mean even more remote meetings (cached). Marc Andreessen was a fool to think (cached) that the Trump admin would do things that are good for tech. The details make things worse (cached), they've just added an opportunity for graft. And it's not just bad for tech, this will make it harder to get doctors as well (cached). The White House issued a clarification (cached) that say it's 100k one-time, but this is at odds with simply reading the text (cached) of the executive order. Finally, if you're wondering what the correct fix is: get rid of the lottery, just rank all applicants by pay (cached) and take the highest paid ones.

Longer Reads

• If there's one takeaway for how to think about American voters' perspective on climate change, it's that a majority agree it's a problem, but they do not believe doing anything is a high priority. If you want to win votes, you need to talk about lowering energy prices. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Kimmel made a joke that can only be interpreted as him misunderstanding the facts around the Kirk shooter, but it's 100% bad for the US government to threaten anyone's broadcast license over that. There's no spinning it, it's a clear first amendment violation (cached), absolutely blatant attack on freedom of speech (cached) (src)(cached). But now that Disney says Kimmel is going to be back on the air, is it our duty to watch him? (src)(cached)
– If you're wondering why Autism rates are up, the answer is actually not environmental, it seems pretty clear that it was caused by a change to the diagnostic criteria in the DSM 4. (src)(cached)
– Harris' book includes many places where she says Biden made mistakes. Maybe she should have brought those up during the campaign! Another wild tidbit: she says she thought her polling in battleground states showed her ahead (cached), one of her pollsters points is quite certain that's not an accurate read of her polling, someone was misleading her. Nate Silver suggests (cached) that this might be some kind of spin from Harris, but also maybe she shouldn't have hired Biden's campaign team, who were clearly dishonest given how they hid Biden's deterioration. (src)(cached)

There's so much alpha in wandering through nature trying to figure out how stuff works.

There's a lot of other news going on, so I had not heard about this Nepal thing. A VP from Discord quipped (cached) that "This is not what I meant when I told the team we had to design for all kinds of use cases". By the way, the PM's wife actually didn't die, although she's seriously injured.

Ok, I admit that I had to look it up, but a Roman “monitor” is like an advisor who keeps you up to date with something, and “discord” is civil strife. TBH, the Roman “discord monitor” is more like Twitter.

I was not expecting to see Steve Young as the GOAT, but I’ll take it! Here's the full article. It's also worth noting that Young is only best by this one particular measure, but not in Wins Above Replacement.

Longer Reads

• A thread showing where SB 79 will apply in Los Angeles. (src)(cached)
• FBI incompetence will make it plausible that Robinson is not convicted, Patel just has done so many foolish things (cached) that it may be difficult to get a conviction even with very strong evidence. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Excerpts are out from Harris’ new book. She says some negative stuff about Biden, but she still is extremely deferential/cautious (cached). Former Biden staff, on reading the excerpts, are furious. If they’d just said all this mean stuff during the election it would have helped. Her apparent closeness with the Biden admin was a significant impediment to her popularity (cached). (src)(cached)
– Trump confidant Laura Loomer has now deleted her post attacking Charlie Kirk. (src)(cached)
– In response to the argument that Liberals called Trump 'Hitler', Hanania retorts "Vance is the only national politician who called Trump Hitler". But the real highlight is the community note, which reads "RFK Jr also called Trump Hitler". (src)(cached)
– The ICE raid on the Hyundai / LG battery factory was such a bad mistake that the Trump admin now seems to believe it was a mistake. It seems to have occurred in part because they sent Homeland Security agents who normally do counter-terrorism to do worksite enforcement (cached). Plus, who's doing counter-terrorism right now? Not these agents! One person joked (cached) that China should be calling ICE on every promising construction project they can find. It now appears progress will be paused until at least 2026 (cached). (src)(cached)
– California passed SB 79 after like 6 years of trying to pass something along these lines. Texas YIMBYs are impressed with how CA YIMBYs just keep pushing no matter how long it takes. (src)(cached)
– If you do polling about free bus fare, when you specifically offer each of: fewer buses, fewer routes, or fewer city services, a majority of New Yorkers choose to keep bus fares. (src)(cached)
– NY Congressman Thomas Suozzi says he won't be endorsing Mamdani, despite the fact that Governor Hochul has. Suozzi was asked about this, and he admits that given Hochul easily beat him when he ran against her, he's in no position to give her advice. (src)(cached)
– Trump’s deal with China on Tik Tok appears to be a total capitulation to Beijing. They'll get to keep editorial control (cached), even though that's pretty explicitly illegal. (src)(cached)

If you’re wondering, the meme is from Shōgun, and Marino’s translations always cut to the heart of the matter. To be fair (cached), the new AirPods can act as a universal translator, so that’s cool.

Political violence is uniquely bad, it makes it impossible to conduct normal politics. They have yet to apprehend the shooter. Democrats and Republicans have loudly condemned the attack (cached), which makes it more noticeable that Republicans didn’t condemn the assassination of a Minnesota state congresswoman. Trump said calling the families or the governor was a 'waste of time'. It’s a real indictment (cached) of modern social media that the clips of this murder and of the Ukrainian woman on a train have circulated so widely. It was better when that sort of thing was confined to darker corners. While we know absolutely nothing about the shooter, it’s worth noting that there has been a campaign amongst far right influencers (cached) against Kirk in recent years for not being pro Nazi enough.

The Russian incursion into Poland is yet another scary item. I understand Russia said they didn't intend it as an act of war, but that they also didn't say it was an accident.

I can imagine romantic attachment to line-drying clothes _in the abstract_. But I can’t imagine actually doing that activity every week and saying “ah yes, it’s dumb to try to automate this”.

He also laughed at a Biden quote until he realized Biden was quoting Trump.

Longer Reads

• Short thread on who funds the Revolving Door Project, a nonprofit who spends a fair amount of time talking about wanting to take down big tech, including Amazon. Their largest funder is an eBay cofounder. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A Texas town trying to avoid building new apartments has come up with something even worse than parking mandates: they're requiring apartments to be 8 stories. exactly one story too tall to use the cheaper 5-over-1 construction technique, but too short for steel construction to pencil. (src)(cached)
– LA councilmember Padilla, who I recently linked to when she said some insane stuff in a debate over SB79, is being recalled for not being NIMBY enough. (src)(cached)
– Chronic PM2.5 (particulate air pollution) associated with higher Parkinson’s and Dementia risk. (src)(cached)
– New jobs numbers are not promising. Trump admin could still change course, but they probably won’t. As one commenter said (cached) like a trolley problem where you have a lever that just says "stop the trolley, but admit you're wrong". (src)(cached)
– Solar has surpassed coal in Texas, and combined renewables have surpassed gas there as well. (src)(cached)
– A thread summarizing problems with the book “The Language of Climate Politics”, whose author is not a real climate scientist. (src)(cached)
– Berkeley set up a rental registry, so we have data on how many homes sit vacant for at least 6 months. Zero apartments have, but many single family homes are empty. Kim Mai Cutler jokes "Prop 13 is the real vacant housing giveaway". (src)(cached)
– Tesla has announced even larger utility scale turnkey battery systems, and they've doubled their production capacity. They'll be able to build as much as is already installed in CA and TX combined every year. (src)(cached)
– If there weren't enough problems at the FBI, this lawsuit by two fired agents alleging they were fired for not saying who they voted for in 2024 seems extremely bad. (src)(cached)

Would be sad to lose Berkeley, because otherwise this seems worth it, it's just so obvious.

There are questions in the replies about whether these welds are as strong as traditional welding, but they sure look impressive.

People who don't live in the Bay Area (and some who do) act like self driving technology is still over a decade away (cached). I don't know if it's still true, but a year ago there were people who thought that AI breaking high school essays was more than a decade away. The future is here already, it's just geofenced to San Francisco and Austin.

ICE sent a military convoy to that new Hyundai plant (cached). I mentioned a few days ago, they arrested 300 people, all but one had valid work visas. The last one had a training / conference visa, which covered what he was doing. Just absolutely insane to be undermining new manufacturing like this. Trump’s approval on border security is now below 50% (cached) and he's at 43% overall (cached) in a recent poll. Sadly, the percentage of Americans who say immigration should be increased is not up by as much (cached).

Flock, who make drones for police, is claiming that their drones are solving 700k crime reports per year (cached). Seems quite impressive, although you’ve gotta discount for the fact that this is startup hype.

Longer Reads

• Over the last three years, London has almost entirely stopped building new homes. Here’s a detailed thread about why. One of the factors is that they copied the US dual-staircase mandate, despite first calculating that the costs outweighed the benefits by more than 100x. (src)(cached)
• Great thread of new kinds of inspection and maintenance robots that are being rolled into service. Where previously you might need to build scaffolding over a smokestack or a ship hull to inspect it, which could take a month, now a robot can just scan the whole thing up close, looking for defects. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– It’s important to know which progressive issues are winners with the electorate. 58% of voters support a woman’s right to an abortion “for any reason whatsoever”. Up from 42% 12 years ago. (src)(cached)
– Interesting idea from some families in Portland, Maine: they got landlines for their kids instead of cell phones. (src)
– A ton of people dunking on Ken Klippenstein, who seems to be under the impression that the US educational system is worse than Germany’s. But whether you measure by PISA standardized tests or by percentage of the population with post-secondary education, the US does quite well. Generally Europeans end up getting a skewed understanding of the US (cached) (src)(cached)
– Musk keeps lying about the costs and benefits of LiDAR and Radar in self driving applications. There are reasons not to use them, but it’s not that they make the car's perception stack less accurate. (src)(cached)
– If you're wondering why power costs are going up so much recently, it's last-mile infrastructure, poles, wires, undergrounding, and transformers. (src)(cached)
– "You can tell if a country is, basically, living or dying if it focuses more on dreams or memories". Don't let old people end property taxes and defund education. (src)(cached)
– A missile fired from a drone shot down a russian fighter jet, probably the first time in history that has happened. Also, china is now showing off their unmanned fighter jet. (src)(cached)

Gemini 2.5’s image editing capabilities are now top notch. Although I still am not impressed with its Ghiblification capabilities, it’s probably now the best image editing AI out there. Here’s some colorization I did:

I tend to get the best results when I don’t ask for colorization. There’s too many examples out there of that not looking very good. While it can’t intuit hair color from a B/W photo, it’s simple enough to fix it if you know the correct color.

We need to get rid of double staircase! It's ugly, it wastes space, and it doesn't seem to do anything to improve fire safety!

I really appreciate that Nate Silver handled the math of whether an all-out war in Gerrymandering between red and blue states would advantage Republicans or Democrats. Seems likely to be either a wash or a slight Dem edge.

It’s not like every Eastern European country had this kind of growth after the Cold War. Some didn’t do these kinds of reforms, but mostly the others were just extremely corrupt. There’s really no substitute for low levels of public corruption the core thing (cached) Russia was lacking. On the other hand, the UK's lack of progress is impressive in a sort of grotesque way (cached), how do they stay as prosperous as they have with such a horrible degrowth electrical policy. Part of the answer is that this is measuring income, not wealth (cached), the UK is still very wealthy.

In case it’s not clear, that’s an assembly line for SpaceX Starship, a Saturn V class heavy-lift rocket, except each one is reusable. We really should be finding a way to incentivize creation of new large-scale factories in the US. In recent years it seems like it's just Musk and Hyundai (cached). but the current administration’s tariffs in input materials are going to hobble new factories. Even Mike Pence knows that the structure of Trump’s tariffs hurts American manufacturing instead of helping, and he's out there posting about it (cached).

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Some Vaccine efficacy measurements were undercounting effectiveness because they weren’t correctly accounting for the benefit of converting symptomatic infections into asymptomatic infections. (src)(cached)
– Another, clearer note on why Newsom is probably not a good national candidate, this time by analogy: In the NBA, the tournament structure means that if you’re in the Finals, it means you beat a lot of other very good teams. But in Politics there’s no such structure. Newsom has never beaten a Republican in a close race. Yglesias goes further and argues that the skills you need to win a Democratic primary are probably *anti-correlated* with the skills you need to win a national general election. (src)(cached)
– From an opinion in the SF Chronicle: "[W]hen I hear leaders I respect hesitating, quibbling over whether SB79 is 100% perfect, I have to ask: What world are you living in?" (src)(cached)
– Solar power is taking off in Africa because it’s cheaper than anything else. (src)(cached)
– 74% of California voters say the proposed CEQA reform would be a positive. Another 14% say it doesn’t go far enough. (src)(cached)
– A city councilmember in Orange County is approving new homes near transit because of SB 79, even though it’s not even passed yet. They know that such a project will inevitably get built so they’re moving forward now so that they have more control. Here's the article if you want details. (src)(cached)
– John Gruber recommends this great video explaining the design of AirPods, great graphics from the high res CT scan of the device. (src)
– I'm a bit late to the party, but it's impressive that Mamdani cooked up a citywide scavenger hunt based on an Eric Adams scandal in just a few days. (src)(cached)