Sounds like everyone was ok. Apparently they were in the middle of repairing is, I guess they started too late. NIMBYs had been holding up repairs since 2016, Their CEQA lawsuit aimed to block changes (cached) to the restaurant at the end of the pier, looks like they failed at that. CEQA is not progressive, it's nothing but stasis (cached), which is not good policy.

For some context, the ARC prize is meant to be a test of AI that humans can do easily but AIs can't. The cost per question for o3-high is wild! A thousand dollars worth of inference for each question. I did some very rough back of the napkin estimates, but a relatively expensive OpenAI model is billed at two cents per thousand tokens. So very roughly, 1000 books worth of text per question. I really enjoyed this write up on o3’s performance on the ARC AGI benchmark. An even simpler explanation of how it works is that it’s searching for a set of words that represent a series of steps that reach a valid solution. Check out the problems that it couldn’t source at the end to get an idea of the kinds of problems in the set.

If you'll just indulge a bit more discussion of the Arc Prize: here's a thread (cached) arguing that a key part of why LLMs have trouble with the ARC prize tasks is that it’s extremely difficult for them to perceive large grids (cached). Since o1 is publicly available it was possible for someone to check if o1 was able to solve larger versions of questions already succeeded on in the benchmark. It fails, indicating that the sudden jump in o3 ability would also probably go away if the grids were larger, even though the effective question is the same. The idea for these questions is to find out whether the AI can generalize from just two examples, but Mikel Bober-Irizar asks (cached): “How much are we testing the LLMs ability to generalise from 3 examples, and how much are we testing its ability to de-linearise grids?”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chart of “growth velocity”, but the reasoning for the dip and then rise in velocity makes sense to me.

One commenter pointed out (cached) that he “outlived one of the reporters who wrote his NYT obituary”. Much of the deregulation credited to Reagan actually took place under Carter. Yglesias argues (cached) that Carter's deregulation was mostly for the best, here's a whole article on the subject.

Longer Reads

• Thread of highlights of Dan Frommer’s yearly roundup of Internet trends. Highlights include that TikTok shop is huge, and that despite what commenters say, Americans have super positive opinions about Amazon. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– More on Waymo's safety stats. In comparing with human drivers, one thought about the data was that it must be a problem that Waymos don’t drive on the highway, where accidents happen more. But of course it’s the opposite. Since it’s measured per mile, and there are fewer crashes per mile on the highway, this study actually underestimates Waymo’s improvement over humans. Although, while we're at it, it seems that a Waymo AV hit a delivery robot that was running a red light a day or two ago, and there's video, the delivery robot was unharmed enough to drive away immediately. (src)(cached)
– State department meeting with the head of Syria’s HTS went so well that they revoked the $10 million bounty on his head. Must’ve been a good meeting. (src)(cached)
– Argument that the success of o1 and Gemini tuning indicates that open source LLMs will be competitive with closed source ones from OpenAI and others (src)(cached)
– Maybe everyone knew this, but California did gain population in 2024, it’s just that it was outpaced by other states. Only three states shrank, and US population was up 1% this year (src)
– Since work has started on AVs, one restriction blocking serious change has been that no one can make AVs without steering wheels. But now the federal regulator is lifting that restriction as long as companies turn over detailed data. (src)
– Marco Arment’s data shows that 100x as many people share podcast clips privately as publicly (src)
– a GOP congresswoman who had been missing for six months was found in a dementia care home. This raises the obvious question: why are we only just now finding out a Congressperson was missing for six months? (src)(cached)
– A short example of what expert FOV done piloting looks like. This one is flying through a Dollar General. Terrifying as a weapon (src)(cached)
– You don’t really want to read about Hollywood harassment lawsuits, but long story short: Lively’s lawsuit Baldoni is very well crafted, he’s probably screwed. Never send a text about how you better not put XYZ in writing. (src)(cached)

I suspect most humans would not have been able to react in time to avoid an accident there. Waymo is already saving lives (cached) and it would be great if their rollout would go even faster. Here's a recent study by a third party insurance company that claims Waymo has a ~90% reduction in property damage and injuries (I’ll probably talk about this more tomorrow). One commenter (cached) said: “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of motor-vehicle related deaths in America.”

I'm so far behind that the Republican fight over the budget bill appears to have been resolved, and they’ve moved on to knifing each other about H1-B visas instead. But a takeaway for me was that once again Musk and Tesla's pledges to help China (cached) really cast a shadow over his heavy participation in US politics. In this case it makes the changes that resulted (cached) from his intervention in the recent budget reconciliation bill look suspect instead of just stupid.

Here's the data source. It really seems like something, cell phones, social networks, or perhaps better entertainment, is leading to fewer people forming lasting relationships. It's certainly possible that people are choosing not to officially get married because they don't have kids, but I'd think for most people the tax and legal challenges to not being married are enough to motivate even without kids. As much as some people find pro-natalism distasteful, surely many can see the value in helping people find partners.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Since Lula was elected president of Brazil, the rate of deforestation there has fallen by half. (src)(cached)
– Google ran a weird experiment where they had AI agents repeatedly play cooperation games and 'evolve' over time. They found that Claude agents became more cooperative, GPT4o stayed uncooperative, and Gemini stayed in the middle. Here's the paper. (src)(cached)
– Battery extender for Apple Airtag, interesting idea. (src)
– CEQA lawsuits are terrible, someone is using one to block resuming the lights on the bay bridge. (src)(cached)
– Interesting stats on how quickly various signin methods work. No surprise 'email me a code' is much slower than the other options. (src)
– Of all the bad things we are hearing about the time right before Biden dropped out of the race, one particularly bad item is that senior staff told everyone to avoid sharing any negative news stories with the president. (src)(cached)
– As much as people say the US is super consumerist and we make nothing to last, it's worth noting that our housing stock is quite old. Although the fact is, that's probably bad! (src)(cached)
– I didn't realize that by the time child labor laws were enacted, there was very little remaining child labor. There's a whole paper, but if you think about it, if a large number of kids were working, their parents would be the ones requiring it of them, and would not have voted for politicians promising to enact this reform. Some were pointing to child labor laws as evidence of the cruelty of capitalism, which is fair, but I think it's also an indictment of democracy that they couldn't be enacted as long as they'd make a big difference. To the extent we should credit something, it seems it's income growth and technology that gave us the excess capacity so that it wasn't worth making children work. (src)(cached)
– The menswear guy went on a tear about The Wirecutter's recommended jeans. Surprise, he recommends something expensive, made to last, and at least a mid-rise. But the background on modern jeans was still quite interesting. (src)(cached)
– a bit of good news, we’ve managed to wipe out the murder hornet in the US (src)(cached)
– There once existed a committee to approve which clothing was suitable to be sold in the USSR. It’s funny, but that’s how housing gets approved in the US today. (src)(cached)
– OpenAI announced their new model o3 (skipping o2 due to trademark concerns), it seems to be significantly better than o1, here’s a whole thread of graphs. (src)(cached)
– Musk is now supporting AfD in Germany, they’re pretty explicitly neonazis, so… not great. (src)(cached)
– More solar power was provided to the US grid than coal power in 2024 (src)(cached)
– Musk opposed a continuing resolution to keep the federal government open until it had a provision removed that would have prevented high tech investment in China. Seems to line up with the fact that he never criticizes China or the CCP but criticizes the US constantly. (src)(cached)
– 38 Republicans broke with Trump on the spending bill, seems to indicate that it will be hard for him to get anything past the legislature when he’s in office. (src)(cached)
– There’s an inconsistency between Republicans desire for short laws and their approval of the end of Chevron deference. If agencies can’t make judgment calls, then laws are gonna have to be really long to account for every possible situation. (src)(cached)
– Short thread about how Chinese debt has changed over the last 15 years. Sorta looks like they’re heading for some sort of crash (src)(cached)

Sora is now available, and was followed closely by Google's Veo2. The head-to-head comparisons seem to show that Google is actually quite far ahead on video generation. The prompt used for both was supposed to be ‘skillful’ knife use, and I think Google Veo2 is cutting the slices a bit thick. But Sora is losing fingers! Here's a comparison across a wider set of video models. Here's a thread of more head-to-head examples of Sora and Veo2.

It's a very well made survey about expectations about progress on AI over the next year. I'm especially impressed that they created Manifold and metaculus versions of the events. If you end up participating, let me know what your predictions were. Mine are here. Finally, here's a great thread (cached) about how predictions of significant progress on these benchmarks will probably not translate to large impact on society. Mostly due to Goodhart's Law.

For one concrete example, the liberals in Canada are about to get absolutely wiped out (cached) by the upcoming election.

When attempting to make accurate predictions about future world events, I try to always skew a bit extra towards 'nothing ever happens' because of these graphs.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– While Trump's foreign trade ideas are generally bad they seem in line with, Biden's export controls on chips, which appear to mostly be having their intended effect. Noah Smith argues that if Trump rolls them back that will be an indication that he's giving in to China. (src)(cached)
– There's a new method for extracting human egg cells that reduces the time and number of injections by like 80%. Seems pretty cool. (src)(cached)
– Telehealth can make it much easier to get valid prescriptions while jumping through fewer hoops, not sure if that makes a OneMedical subscription on top of existing insurance worthwhile though. (src)(cached)
– "When you account for higher cost of living, Los Angeles is the highest poverty city in America." Not super surprising, but good to know that it matches what I'd expect. (src)(cached)
– Google is moving forward with a "crush rocks to remove CO2 from the atmosphere" plan. I've mentioned this general idea previously, good to see money going towards scaling it. (src)
– People underestimate the amount of property damage from the George Floyd protests nationwide. (Try to guess a dollar figure before opening the link). But it seems like a big part of that is that people generally underestimate the cost of building stuff. (src)(cached)
– Respected economists all thought that Milei's election would destroy Argentina. In fact things have gone pretty well, but in part I think it's because Milei simply didn't do some of the dumber stuff he was promising, and mostly followed what experts recommended, while maintaining populist vibes. MAGA folks seem to really like him, but his policies have basically been the opposite (cached) of what Trump espouses, reducing tariffs has been his biggest success. (src)(cached)
– It really seems like Bezos isn't really paying attention to which nonprofit groups he's funding. I don't think he meant to fund groups who would push to block permitting reform (cached) and attack democrats from the left, but that's what happened. (src)(cached)
– Here's a thread from Anthropic where they explain how their model appears to 'pretend' to be aligned differently during training from when it's in use. Honestly I'm not sure I even get it, but I thought it was worth sharing what kind of thing AI doomers are pointing to as evidence of danger. (src)(cached)
– Since Lula was elected president of Brazil, the rate of deforestation there has fallen by half. (src)(cached)

So, one, that's really cool looking. But two, a reminder again, drone sky performances are absolutely a display of military power.

If you were wondering, the 2003 G5 had 256 MB of ram, the Series 9 watch has 1GB. The watch has a 250mAh battery, which @kornel estimates would give an Electric Car 6 meters of range.

I'm feeling vindicated about having ignored the study, I’m not the only one. Here's the article explaining the mistake. Sorta terrifying that you can absolutely have a huge math error and still get published. Anyway, study has been retracted. Finally it seems that if you ask OpenAI o1 to find math errors in the paper, it can find the problem on the first try (cached)

We need more excuses to regularly meet with a single group of people regularly. The workplace is pretty much the only thing left that most people take part in, it's a good reason to think twice about increasing the rate of remote work. Perhaps more housing could be designed to provide this sense of community.

Longer Reads

• I'm sure you weren't looking to Gladiator II as an example of historical accuracy in filmmaking, but if you wanted details about why it's inaccurate, historian Bret Devereaux absolutely has you covered in this extremely detailed Roman history blog post you can find here: part 1 and part 2. TL;DR: Romans weren't actually that into gladiators. Commodus' whole deal was that he was weirdly obsessed with them, once he's dead, you have to really contort history to come up with an excuse to have them feature in politics. (src)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– If you're wondering, 61% of americans have a negative view of Luigi Mangione, only 19% have a positive view of him. (src)(cached)
– Short summary of Meta's paper which presents a way to move from word size tokens to byte-size tokens for large language models. Seems promising. Forcing LLMs to not be able to 'see' anything smaller than a word seems likely to be responsible for some of their language reasoning mistakes. (src)(cached)
– Iranian women standing up to the mullahs are showing true bravery. (src)(cached)
– A lot of people are very reasonably annoyed about some of the folks Biden just granted clemency to. It appears they just took the ACLU's recommendation at face value and without double checking it. The people mad about it are the same people who supported the idea that nonviolent offenders should not be imprisoned. But there are some really heinous nonviolent offenders out there. Details in this thread (cached). (src)(cached)
– Stewart Hicks argues in this youtube video that modern McMansions were made possible by the invention of truss connector plates (aka gang plates). TL;DR: they made it cheaper to build suburban homes by allowing larger spans to be factory built and delivered to the site. (src)
– Microsoft has released an open source tool to convert many documents (including office docs) to markdown. (src)
– Titanic played on a slide whistle is very funny. (src)
– Trump's trade policy ideas are very dumb, it's going to be very unpopular if avocados become a luxury item. (src)(cached)
– You don't want Jensen Huang next to you at the urinal in the employee bathrooms at Nvidia. (src)(cached)
– If you really want it, here's a thread of damage to the US in various nuclear war scenarios. Surprise, it's not pretty! (src)(cached)
– Google Spanner is a really cool invention, and you can just read the paper if you want. (src)(cached)
– Did you know that the MMR vaccine was associated with a reduction in Autism (within the margin of error) in a Danish RCT? (src)(cached)
– Trump says he wants to privatize the USPS. This would absolutely be terrible for rural voters who overwhelmingly voted for him. (src)(cached)

Women in Syria talking to CNN aren't wearing hijab (cached), they previously did in rebel held Syrian cities. Hopefully the moderation by the new government lasts. Further, here are some amazing excerpts from an article about the HTS officials asking the Syrian state bureaucrats what their jobs are (cached) surprise! there appears to have been a massive amount of graft. They're moving away from a state controlled economy towards a free market, Francis Fukuyama would be pleased (cached)

This is really impressive. The underlying article argues that the increase in homes built was between 40 and 70 percent. I'd be very interested to see this compared to other policy changes like single stair or dropping height restrictions. Although of course it would depend on other details.

It's apparently Carvana except on Amazon. I clicked around the Amazon interface for this and it seems pretty nice. Given I had to spend like 4 hours at the dealership to buy my Hyundai last year, I'm definitely kicking myself for not having tried harder to buy online (or waited to buy on Amazon)

Half! Geothermal is such a good option for base load, even if it's outperformed by batteries, it's nice to have options.

I have definitely heard that Steely Dan is a divisive band, so I enjoyed this bit

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Noah Smith first explains why people hate health insurance companies (cached) so much, he argues, that really the bad actor in the system is the providers (cached), if you're interested, here's the full article. (src)(cached)
– A US woman was arrested in Sydney for carrying a golden gun worth $3000 in her suitcase into the country. She claims she forgot that she had the gun with her, but later a review of her phone showed that she had searched for whether it was legal to carry a gun into Australia, (it's not), and had set a calendar entry to remind her to put the gun in her luggage. She was visiting Australia to attend clown school. (src)(cached)
– A thread from Crémieux where she collects evidence showing that Americans consume more healthcare than they need. Relatedly, one argument that a huge portion of US healthcare spending is on outliers (cached) who are in and out of care constantly at high expense, mostly homeless drug users. (src)(cached)
– I was unaware that a gene was identified by UCSF in 2019 as possibly being associated with needing less sleep. Pretty rare though, most people who think they need less sleep are probably deluding themselves. (src)(cached)
– One more time on that prospect theory paper, summarized by one commenter as "small fixed costs can really deter people from optimizing", he has a whole thread here of other studies that are explained by this. (src)(cached)
– Two things that are true at once: "Americans spend more than foreigners on out of pocket health care. Americans have a relatively low out of pocket share of health care spending." (src)(cached)
– Ukraine sent drone operators to help Syrian rebels overthrow Assad. (src)(cached)
– Former Cruise employee has some choice words about GM's decision to give up on taxis. The former ceo was also not impressed by GM's decision. (src)(cached)
– Mitch McConnell says this Trump guy is really getting out of control. Real hot dog man moment. (src)(cached)
– Why do some phone spam messages you get not even seem to have any clear angle to scam you? Because they're trying to just get you to reply so they can improve their standing with carriers before going all-out with bulk spamming. So don't reply (src)(cached)
– Biden admin blocking the US Steel Acquisition is absolutely the wrong choice. (src)(cached)
– Rental housing economist admits he was wrong, he now believes that building luxury housing really does filter down to helping lower rents on even the cheapest units in a region. (src)(cached)
– Trump rings the opening bell at the NYSE. "If Biden or Harris went to the stock exchange to talk about how great it is that stocks are up they would have been excoriated by the right *and by the left* as wildly out of touch". That's a bad structural disadvantage for Democrats. (src)(cached)
– Making the case that the 2008 auto bailout was the most successful US industrial policy in history. (src)(cached)
– Student debt forgiveness really was bad economic policy by the time the Biden admin implemented it. (src)(cached)
– Waymo has now passed Lyft in gross bookings in San Francisco (src)

No one was expecting Assad regime to collapse (cached) a couple months ago, but this kind of thing, when it happens can happen very fast due to preference cascade. The final collapse of the Assad regime happens in like, one frame in this animation. With Assad out, a reminder (cached) That Tulsi Gabbard met with him secretly in Syria in 2017. The syrian insurgency that is now victorious was previously a branch of al-Qaida (cached). Renaming themselves to appeal to moderates seems like a good call. Apparently they've been extremely effective (cached) at getting city services back up and running after taking over cities along the way.

Really interesting to see the polarization on wealthy people in the context of these other more polarizing groups. Democrats aren't particularly negative on wealthy people and corporations!

Here's another datasource which actually shows a minivan, the Chrystler Pacifica, in the top 10. That makes it even more surprising that there could be models with such a low number of DUIs. Maybe folks with those cars just don't drive them much?

Flotsam and Jetsam

– To expand the tent and win elections it's worth listening to what the people just outside the tent are saying. (src)(cached)
– It's not the first time it's been said, but a reminder that the key to detering crime is to increase the certainty that criminals will be caught, not the severity of the punishment. (src)(cached)
– New developments in the question of "what is the largest area of a 'sofa' that can be maneuvered through a right-angled corner in a hallway of width 1?" (src)(cached)
– Three major transit expansions in the US each had a huge positive impact on ridership, most notably caltrain. (src)(cached)
– Details on the types of new buildings being built in SF based on recent state laws. (src)(cached)
– Talented people in Europe are paid far less, and they want to come to the US, we should let them! (src)(cached)
– Instructions for running ollama locally, it even handles downloading whatever huggingface model you want. (src)(cached)
– I've never heard improvisation on an organ before, and that's what they played at the opening of Notre Dame, it sounds insane. (src)(cached)
– Holding unpopular opinions is fine, but you won't be able to change minds or be effective if you don't know they're unpopular. (src)(cached)
– "More white progressives think that 'racism is built into our society' than black or Hispanic Americans. " (src)(cached)
– Now that Trump won the election, Republicans believe elections are run fairly (src)(cached)
– Sadly, americans are just annoyingly conservative on economic issues (src)(cached)
– Notre Dame was rebuilt in 5 years, which is less time than it took SF to build a bus lane. (src)(cached)
– The big split in US voters has to be by education level, you don't want a professor arguing they're working class. (src)(cached)
– Argument that drone warfare favors motivated countries, if a country focuses, drones can be insanely effective. (src)
– I'm sure you had heard that Succession's core confict was inspired by the Murdochs, but did you know that some Murdoch drama was inspired by Succession? Here's more. (src)

Can you tell from the CT that something is wrong? High end usb-c/thunderbolt cables like Apple's have chips in them, so that's not bad on it's own. My read was that the easiest to see oddity is the component off by itself only connected by tiny wires, that's the antenna. Check out the thread for the full breakdown.

Reading Nate Silver's book On The Edge made it super clear that blocking anyone who's good at betting is the number one way sportsbooks make money. Given that gambling is getting legalized widely in the US, this seems like a great proposal.

Moana 2 broke Disney Animation Studios' record for highest opening weekend box office, but it was almost direct to streaming. However, if you see it you can tell that it was intended as direct-to-streaming given that the music isn't nearly as good, to the point that you might realize midway "Lin-Manuel was not involved with this was he", or even "we owe Lin-Manuel an apology" as Vulture put it

This is the key excerpt from a recent Nate Cohn piece. I don't know of a clearer way to indicate that focusing on turnout doesn't help demcrats anymore than "non-voters were more pro-Trump than voters, even among Democrats".

I don't think Russia's crude output has been falling as a ploy to raise prices.

Longer Reads

• A article from Bloomberg detailing the restoration of Notre Dame with some pictures and details about how the building has changed over the centuries. (src)
• A thread where an engineer argues that all other fusion power companies are persuing the wrong fuel source (DT) and that his prefered fuel type (pB11). Obviously he's biased, plus solar+battery outperforms all of this, but it's still a fun thread. (src)(cached)
• During the recent earthquake and tsunami warning in the Bay Area, my initial reaction was "isn't the golden gate tiny? we're totally fine right?". I'm happy to have now found a thread with precise details about why that's accurate. By the time it gets to Berkeley (confusingly labeled Richmond in the table) it's already less than half the height at the gate, and it's even less elsewhere in the Bay Area. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– There are studies that indicate if you imprison the people who are doing the most theft, you can have a massive impact on overall rates of theft. (25% in a Dutch example) (src)(cached)
– Because Trans Fats were banned gradually, we really do have data showing a massive reduction in cardiovascular diseases in counties where the ban went into effect first. (src)(cached)
– Based on studies that indicate one extra birth for every 300k in spending, the US could get back to a total fertility rate of 2.1 for a bit under 300 billion per year, which is less than we spend on HUD. But of course you can't necessarily take the current cost at the margin and just expand it all the way up. (src)(cached)
– The worst performance vs Harris for a democratic house seat was Ilhan Omar. It's ok to run on what you believe in if you can win, but copying her nationwide would get democrats absolutely crushed. (src)(cached)
– Why did Biden pick Harris as his VP? It appears his staff simply lied to him about her popularity. Holy crap. (src)(cached)
– Leslie Nielsen told Conan in 1993 that he never went anywhere without a fart machine (src)
– Civilians in Kherson and nearby villages are under constant threat from small drones dropping grenades, so much so that many fear going outside if it's a clear day. Russians have posted videos of attacks on civilians. More than 9000 attacks (cached) have been reported. (src)(cached)
– A cutsey breakdown of which of Germany's nuclear reactors could still be turned back on. (src)(cached)
– Single payer healthcare systems (like Singapore) save money mostly by paying less to providers, not by saving money on insurance bureaucracy. (src)(cached)
– Americans actually rate the quality and coverage of their healthcare quite highly. (src)(cached)
– The IRS' recent initiatives have brought in 1.3 billion in previously unpaid taxes. (src)(cached)

Seriously though, Black Friday has spread worldwide since 2005 (cached), even Iran and Venezuala have it. This short article argues that it's a coordination game situation, and likens it to Moore's law in that respect.

Someone tried to come in and argue that it's just a bunch of ANDs and ORs, but "Runes are literally just a lot of lines and angles"

It's an interesting article, but the short version is that a massive part of global trade is in intermediate goods, meaning that a tariff also acts as a tax on domestic manufacturers who use imported materials.

Here's the quoted article. There's an NYTimes piece about how an H5N1 epedemic seems like a very likely future pandemic, and a great quote in response from Alex Tabarrok: "Strong civilizations don’t pray for mercy from microbes; they crush them. Each new outbreak should leave us not relieved, but better armed, better trained and better prepared for nature’s next assault."

Sorta seems like Munroe has been playing KSP some more recently. It's a shame the studio shuttered.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Apparently fine-tuned LLMs can outperform humans on predicting the results of neuroscience experiments. Here's the paper, I was a bit suspicious that there's contamination, that the results were already learned by the model, their way of testing for that was very interesting but I'm still not entirely convinced. (src)(cached)
– More than a third of americans entirely reject evolution still. But the number is very slowly falling. (src)(cached)
– Discussion of the prospect of the US Government just buying the entire remaining coal industry for 36 billion. The main problem is that people's identities are tied up in their work. (src)(cached)
– Modern drone batteries have a higher density per kwh than a helicopter engine without the fuel! It seems clear that military vehicles will be hybrid at a minimum very soon, there are a ton of advantages. (src)(cached)
– The John Le Carré Advent Calendar (src)(cached)
– Explanation of how polling error in 2020 was what pushed the Biden admin to the left (src)(cached)
– Why didn't Russia just deploy their Airmobile forces to help Syria? Oh right, they got blown up in Ukraine. (src)(cached)
– German exports to "Kyrgyzstan" are way up over the last couple years. (src)
– Fracking saved around 12k people from death due to cold weather in the US, to say nothing of the lives saved due to reduced coal demand pushing particulate emissions down. (src)(cached)
– Observation that solar is ridiculously simple to use compared to other tech. The game Factorio has to have a bunch of free impossible technologies to make Coal even close to competitive with Solar. (src)(cached)
– NEPA doesn't even have exemptions for national security (unlike the clean air and clean water regulations) (src)(cached)
– Summary of a longer article about how situations where we rebuild after disaster give a view of how much faster we can build things when we really want to. The bridge in baltimore, for instance, which is moving along quickly, even as the governor of Maryland blocks new power transmission lines for lack of community engagement. (src)(cached)
– As bad as US housing policy is, somehow other english-speaking countries do worse. (src)(cached)
– New studies indicate that for approximately every 300k the US spends on supporting families, we get one additional birth. That's expensive, but it's more than worth it. (src)(cached)
– "Since the last plane crash by a US airline, they have transported passengers for more than two *light-years*" (src)(cached)
– Wild that we can see drone videos of real tank-to-tank battles now. (src)(cached)
– A city in Columbia, Medellin, managed to lower local temperatures by 2°C over three years, and expect another 4 or 5 degrees of cooling over the coming decades, almost entirely through 'greening', adding tons of plants. (src)(cached)

The underlying experiment showed that you could recreate the same sort of 'irrational' human behavior around risk with completely deterministic situations that were simply hard to reason about. You can even make this clearer if you include deliberation as a cost of a option. People don't like having to think about stuff. Interestingly, this may also explain why people hate inflation so much

Everyone is angry!

Another example is single crystal turbine blades, which resist being bent at high temperatures.

Really feels like it's not just cleaned, they've also turned the lights up. But either way, it looks great.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– At the end of the day, maintaining public order means you may have to use coercive measures to stop people from smoking on the subway. (src)(cached)
– Sanders and Warren both underperformed Harris in the general election. Seems pretty clear Harris wouldn't have done better by going further left. Some folks try to argue that the best overperform, Osborn, ran a left-leaning campaign for a democrat, but he attacked the Republican he was running against for siding with Biden and says he wants to help Trump 'build the wall'. (src)(cached)
– LOTR meme (src)
– Will China push down the yuan against the dollar in anticipation of tariffs? It's the obvious move, but maybe they're worried about angering Trump. If they do it, it'll mean even more exports to Europe. (src)(cached)
– If Trump puts tariffs on Canada, the biggest impact will be higher fuel prices because we import and refine a lot of Canadian crude. (src)(cached)
– A bunch of people said the new Massachusetts clean energy law was bad, mostly because it seems to be paying people to sue the government. Chris Elmendorf argues it's a mixed bag. (src)(cached)
– Inflation coming in a bit high unexpectedly (src)(cached)
– Awesome looking 72 story residential tower getting built in SF. (src)(cached)
– Argument that new scaling estimation shows that we should expect much slower improvement in AI model performance going forward. (src)(cached)
– Argument that the introduction of EVs is a chance for Chinese cars like the 1970s oil crisis was a chance for Japanese cars. (src)(cached)
– Standard of living comparison in minutes of work to buy various goods. Things are a lot better now than in 1924! (src)(cached)
– There's a theory of thermostatic public opinion, that public opinion moves against whoever is in office. The simplest reason to imagine this would happen is that the party in power overreaches. But Yglesias points out that you can think about it the other way, enacting your most popular policies takes those off the table and they lose salience. (src)(cached)
– Trump created a fake crisis over migrants from Mexico and then settled in exchange for fake concessions. The next four years are going to be exhausting. (src)(cached)
– Good news: fentanyl deaths are falling (src)(cached)
– Voters had some incorrect notions about Harris' policies, you can't just not support unpopular policies, if the public thinks you have policy beliefs they hate, you need to repudiate those. Tracing Woodgrains comments that it's a sowing/reaping (cached) meme. (src)(cached)
– There's a site tracking Waymo pricing, they appear to have pretty good unit economics. (src)
– Contracts in Germany take a long time, because someone is required to read the whole thing aloud. Series A funding doc takes 12 hours, and everyone has to sit there the whole time. (src)(cached)

There were a lot of memes about this, the haters said he couldn't do it, great call from the haters. It was a calculated risk, but he's bad at math. He found out that democracy got hands. The parliament voted against martial law unanimously and the military just immediately stopped because they were following rule of law. "Just vote out fascism" in action. Of the previous 12 presidents of South Korea, approximately 1 left office on good terms. Korean joke apparently: "There are only two types of Presidents in Korea. Those who are in jail and those headed to jail.

You could go a bit further and say this chart seems to indicate that people basically only understand the concept of 50%. Noah Smith argues that this is basically Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory in action. Hank Green pointed out that oncologists also have this problem in explaining treatment success rates to patients.

Voters, yea, I don't know.

This is an excerpt from an Ezra Klein column. One commenter described how they'd evade being forced to hire unqualified candidates when he worked for the US Government: "open requisitions in the middle of the night with a cap of 50 applicants; after tipping preferred candidates." That sounds really bad! I want the government to function.

This is wild! I spend a lot of time on here talking about YIMBY and land use regulation and I never would have guessed that land use regulation wasn't widespread in California till the 80s.

I think part of why this is possible is that you can just physically carry panels that once installed require essentially zero upkeep to any remote location where you need them. The article argues that this could destabilize their power grid, but good news for Pakistanis, battery prices are falling even faster than solar prices.

Longer Reads

• An interesting thread about new evidence indicates that life on earth was surprisingly complex very early, 4.2 billion years ago, and how this makes extraterrestrial life more likely. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– More breakdown of Trump winning with less engaged voters, indicating high now turnout hurts democrats. (src)(cached)
– Obama's decisions to moderate, especially on immigration, seem to have been pretty clearly vindicated. (src)(cached)
– Steve Mnuchin turned out to be very good at the position of Treasury Secretary. Trump's staffing decisions are so wild that we don't know up front who's going to turn out to be competent or effective. (src)(cached)
– Oh look, Russ Vought who had a major role in project 2025 will be leading the White House Budget office. (src)(cached)
– Trump has forced the GOP to be a bigger tent than it once was. (src)(cached)
– Argument that if a party wins a trifecta and then attempts to do sweeping legislation despite a narrow majority, things will go poorly for them electoral. (src)(cached)
– Most places didn't keep track of cause of death in the 1800s, but Massachusetts did, and it allows us to see the impact of vaccines very clearly. (src)(cached)
– Klein argues that his problem with "The Groups" isn't an anti-leftwing take, it's a pro-prioritization take. (src)(cached)
– John Oliver is going around saying the TikTok ban is xenophobia, which is dumb, but what's worse is that people see him as a representative for Democratic elites, despite the fact that it was Democrats who passed the law in question. (src)(cached)

The key thing about why the Civil Rights movement could succeed was that it was very popular but low salience. Doing things to 'raise awareness' works when the vast majority of people already agree, and you want to drive actual legislation. Raising awareness probably actually makes a cause a bit less popular, because you usually do it in annoying ways, but if your issue is like +40, it works. If your issue is split evenly, or worse, -10, it doesn't work.

Ok, this seems pretty cool, but I'm not sure that figuring out how to get at the arils (that's what the little red things are called, apparently) is the hard part. For me, the hard part is dealing with the fact that they don't seem to be entirely edible, you have to spit out the inner seed. No fun. Much simpler to just cut them in half and juice them. Also I think this video is sped up.

It's true, kids love videos of robots! (This is from Tim Lee's article about the many ways in which human labor will still be valuable in the future, no matter what Geoffrey Hinton says.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– RFK Jr at HHS is like Bush's nomination of Miers for the Supreme Court, totally unqualified (and for RFK some very bad ideas) but if he's shot down, he'll be replaced by an idealogue who's probably more compitent as well. (src)(cached)
– Trump's nominee for Energy seems like an indication that permitting reform may be more likely. (src)(cached)
– The 'Free Tibet' movement is just totally gone. Go back to old simpsons episodes and you'll see that it was mentioned many times. One commenter guesses that it was a wedge issue against normalizing relations with China, and became irrelevant with the fall of Russia as a great power. (src)(cached)
– North Korea is planning to send thousands of additional troops to support Russia in Ukraine. Seems likely China is approving this plan. (src)(cached)
– For a candidate to moderate effectively, others percieved as related need to do so as well. Half of swing voters thought Harris' 2024 platform included 'defund the police'. (src)(cached)
– Claude makes a comic/meme, executes via animated SVG. The meme isn't amazing, but I'm impressed what it accomplished with vector art. (src)
– Mercedes is putting both the Tesla/NACS and the old CCS plug on their 2025 cars. Interesting choice, seems better than an adaptor for sure. (src)
– Making RFK eat McDonalds food that he's called poison is very on brand for Trump (src)
– Depending on the exact data transforms you use, you will get completely different answers to the question "did larger covid stimulus result in more inflation". Seems like the answer is 'yes', but you wouldn't know it from one of these graphs. (src)(cached)
– Trump's margin over Harris will be the 44th smallest out of the 51 elections since 1854. (src)(cached)
– Biden's team considered a bunch of great reforms that would have been anti-inflationary, but each was discarded for annoying a coalition partner. The key to making policy decisions is prioritization. (src)(cached)
– Chinese ships have purposefully cut undersea telecom cables. (src)(cached)
– After giving GPT4o the audio of a 2 hour interview with a person, it could guess their responses to surveys and tasks with 85% accuracy. Here's the paper. On skimming it, the simplest way to see the improvement is to see that is noticably more accurate than just guessing based on demographic info, but still much worse than just asking the same person the same questions again 2 weeks later. (src)
– Aggregate turnout is on track to be very close to 2020. When democrats lose ground and republicans gain ground with similar overall turnout, that indicates swing. People changed their minds. (src)(cached)
– A wild excerpt from 'The Box', theoretically about the rise of the shipping container and globalization, but "really about how much the Longshoremen have always hated both automation and having their pay tied to actual usefulness." (src)(cached)
– China is putting sanctions on US drone companies, so they aren't allowed to buy chinese batteries. Thank goodness for the Inflation Reduction Act's subsidies for domestic battery production. (src)(cached)
– Scott Alexander ran a survey which contained an "AI Art Turing Test", and very few people were able to tell which was which. Even the people who said they absolutely hated AI art still selected AI art pieces as their favorites. (src)(cached)
– The Pete Hegseth misconduct story isn't as funny as the Matt Gaetz misconduct, but mostly that's because it's way worse. And Gaetz withdrew (src)(cached)
– Wall Street folks who want the Treasury Secretary job all have to come up with a non-insane way to describe Trump's tarrif ideas. They do, but they mostly have to ignore everything Trump has said about Tarrifs. (src)(cached)
– Tulsi Gabbard is the FBI's key suspect in the Russian hack of DNC emails, really seems like she shouldn't be in charge of an intelligence agency! (src)(cached)
– Did you know that the ACA actually accomplished the core mission of stopping the growth of healthcare spending as a proportion of GDP? No one talks about this problem anymore because it's solved! (at least for now) (src)(cached)

I got Netflix set up on my TV so visiting family could watch and yea, it was rough. If you're wondering, the director above is Chantal Akerman, one of her films is considered one of the greatest of the 20th century and is famously, painfully, slow. Here's Cinefix discussing it.

This is an excerpt from Ezra Klein’s podcast (transcript) earlier this month, the way in which some Democratic Legislators misunderstand where their power base comes from is a serious problem that needs to be fixed. Maybe it's related to staffing, but fundamentally it's confusion about who exactly interest groups are representing. You need to win over voters not groups. Nonprofits don’t vote, and they can be just as misaligned as corporate lobbyists.

I found this really surprising! Here's a bit more detail on European tomato labeling, he went and found details on tomato concentrate conversion factors. This doesn't necessarily mean US food is safer, but we sure do force everyone to be quite detailed in the labels.

A surface level reading of complex situations is not a good way to understand them. "Crops gotta take turns" certainly does sound silly, but it's an effective system!

Longer Reads

• Great article by Dan Schwarz about the prediction market he founded at Google. (src)
• Thread summarizing FT analysis of Democratic and Republican elite's views vs the general public. Three bell curves, shifted a bit left, centered, and on the right, except some Democratic elites hold way way left views. Here's one that's instead broken down by issue, shows the same problem. To win elections we need to police our fringes (cached). (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Sounds like Harris didn't go on Rogan because staffers thought there would be backlash from progressives, which seems like a very dumb reason not to go. (src)(cached)
– Nominating Gaetz for AG is so insane that maybe he's a sacrificial lamb for Republican Senators to vote down, on the other hand, he didn't make it to the voting! (src)(cached)
– Working paper that uses wind direction as an instrumental variable to show that increases in pm2.5 pollution decrease cognition (and increase car accidents) in real time. People get measurably stupider immediately when exposed to air pollution. (src)(cached)
– The Onion made the winning bid for Alex Jones' Infowars, but it's worth noting that it's not clear that the judge will let them buy it. The onion isn't actually sure what they're going to do with it. (src)
– Article about why Tulsi Gabbard is dangerous to US national security. (src)(cached)
– "Those who paid "a great deal" of attention to political news were Harris +6 while those who paid "none at all" went +19 points for Trump" (src)(cached)
– Regarding RFK Jr's insane anti-progress views, worth remembering when Sri Lanka went 100% organic farming and it crashed their economy. Also, RFK Jr is a terrible person (cached) (src)(cached)
– Here's Musk praising Argentina's Milei for lowering Tarrifs just this month. Trump supporters say he's just lying about wanting to raise tarrifs, and it's true that he's a huge liar, so I guess we'll see. (src)(cached)
– Teamster's union got unprecidented favors from the Biden admin and then endorsed Trump. (src)(cached)
– Preprint uses regression discontinuity to show teaching kids Algebra and Geometry in middle school leads to twice as many girls getting STEM degrees, but no effect on boys. (src)(cached)
– I'm still angry Amazon removed all order details from all emails they send you just to try to block google from knowing purchase info. (src)
– Wow, Ben Affleck has a surprisingly detailed and Nuanced understanding of AI and how it can be expected to impact the film industry. (src)
– Tech CEO in Norway explains why their Wealth tax sorta blocks successful startups. (A tax on a billion dollars of stock that you're not allowed to sell isn't gonna work) (src)(cached)
– Since electrifying, Caltrain has surpassed COVID-19 ridership levels, and has doubled weekend ridership. (src)

Finally, drop me a note about whether you think the quote from the director is funnier before the reveal that it’s about the Paul/Tyson fight, or if it’d be funnier after.

I really enjoyed this video, especially considering it may actually save me some time in the future when cooking meat.

And if you think that's impressive, the day before the 1995 election, they had a clue "Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper (!), with 43A" which had valid answers for both CLINTON ELECTED and BOBDOLE ELECTED

Longer Reads

• Thread about how door knocking where you have long conversations with low-propensity voters simply doesn't work. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A scientist injected her own tumor with a lab grown virus which seems to have had a positive effect. (although it was surgically removed afterward). Previous successful self-treatments have won nobel prizes when they worked. Seems like it's worth being thankful for people who are willing to try things. (src)(cached)
– Short thread argues that democrats will be able to win in 2026 and 2028, hopefully yes, but I'm quite worried about the damage between now and then. Further, it's clear from the massive amount of undervoting (cached) that Trump's appeal isn't easily transferrable to other Republicans. (src)
– Look at Trump's victory in 2024 vs Biden's in 2020 with states shaded by vote share. It's more purple than you might expect, and very hard to tell apart. (src)(cached)
– Adoption of AI seems to have had a measurable positive impact on progress in materials science. (src)(cached)
– Coverage whose tone is positive is not the same as coverage that's good for a candidate! It's easy to see why: imagine if Fox spent months talking about how great it would be that Trump will ban abortion. (src)(cached)
– A single company's license plate readers are used to solve 10% of crimes in the US. (src)(cached)
– Everyone blamed Biden for inflation, even Democrats (src)(cached)
– The world installs one nuclear power plant's worth of solar panels every day now. Further, California's Natural Gas usage for electricity has fallen 25% (src)(cached)
– Waymo is trying to study safety of pedestrians and cyclists, but there's very little data on these accidents, so they're setting out to gather some (src)(cached)
– GiveWell has done a new analysis of the effectiveness of GiveDirectly, and they now believe it's 3-4 times more effective than they had previously believed. (src)(cached)
– Pete Buttigieg says that we should be looking at fixing housing in the US, with approaches suggested by Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. (src)(cached)
– A Graveyard of bad election narratives aims to use data to answer questions about why Trump won. The thread has a summary, he argues it wasn't sexism, racism, third parties or low turnout, among others. (src)(cached)
– The council on environmental quality may have never had authority to make rules around NEPA. But this doesn't actually fix NEPA of course, it just throws it to the courts even more. Elmendorf has a thread with even more detail (cached). (src)(cached)
– Spain keeps rail construction prices down by asking for local suggestions, and ignoring any that would raise the price or delay the project. (src)(cached)

Lead is really bad, and this is eminently fixable.

It was a good plan, and the fact is, the economy is currently in a good shape, if Trump just proclaims that he's already fixed it it will work well for him, 2021 stimulus worked perfectly, and everyone hated it so much (cached) they booted Democrats. Republicans will probably suddenly realize (cached) that the economy is good now very quickly.

Buildings too tall, in Manhattan, absolutely crazy!

Did you know that cooling towers don't really use any steam? it's like a giant cloud machine, here's a great new video about it from Practical Engineering.

Longer Reads

• Chris Elmendorf makes detailed arguments about why the winner of the SF mayoral election, Daniel Lurie, will be good. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Woah, Apple acquired Pixelmator. (src)
– It's amusing that the French national rail company gave up on deploying in California and went to North Africa, which was less dysfunctional. (src)(cached)
– While the national election didn't go so well, things went well in SF, where moderate YIMBY candidates beat the NIMBYs. (src)(cached)
– Operation Warp Speed was one of Trump's best accomplishments, hopefully he doesn't revert to saying it was actually bad. (src)(cached)
– The left is more ideological rigerous, and this is a serious problem (src)(cached)
– The new m4 Mac Mini has removable storage! awesome! (especially because apple really overcharges for extra storage). It's weird that the power button is on the "underside" but it works just fine in any orientation, so just put the foot side up (cached)! Plus, someone got four of them working in a mini cluster to run an LLM (cached). (src)(cached)
– A truly ridiculous number of kids get extra time on tests now, this seems like a bad outcome. (src)(cached)
– Theme in Biden then Harris campaign strategies: "excessive complacency and aversion to rocking the boat" (src)(cached)
– Governor of NY may actually allow congestion pricing to move forward after all, so that's good. (src)(cached)
– Trump is considering Mike Rogers for DoD, I don't know much about him, but he's the guy who had to be held back to stop him from hitting Matt Gaetz during the speaker vote. (src)(cached)
– Important that overall voter turnout in 2024 is not that different from 2020 (src)(cached)
– Congressman Seth Moulton made public statements post-election about trans athletes that 70% of voters agree with, and in response his campaign manager quit. Democrats need to be able to make statements that many people agree with if we want to win. Yglesias argues (cached) that folks who disagree quitting is probably the best outcome. (src)(cached)
– There really are popular progressive policies, focus on those! (src)(cached)

This chart is just wild to me. Some other interesting ones are this map of vote shift by district in NYC (cached), where Manhattanites voted for Harris to protect minorities, while those same minority communities shifted towards Trump. Harris won more of the white vote (cached) (43%) than Clinton 2016(37%), Biden 2020 (41%) or Obama 2012 (39%).

Nate Silver's topline was that it was a 50% chance of either outcome, but the #1 and #2 most likely outcomes were essentially either Trump sweeps the swing states or Harris does. I used this exact chart to make play-money bets on Manifold and it paid off pretty well, because others saw "50/50" and translated that into "270/268" but that's not what it meant. When you hear that it's a 50/50 coin toss, you shouldn't expect that the coin will land on it's edge.

I've mostly switched to using Claude instead of ChatGPT unless I need it to run python inline.

Great idea to put the number of solar panels there on the chart, but it's electricity, so it doesn't include transport fuel use. But still really cool. We need to get more people above the one panel line.

It's been a tough year for incumbents everywhere, but our electoral system means this results in a massive shift in policy.

Longer Reads

• Short thread from a Data for Progress analyst on the election outcome. Here's the full article. Title is the TL;DR: "It's not about Turnout"

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Nice short quiz on how good your base rate knowledge is on previous world election outcomes. (src)(cached)
– 47 percent of voters thought Harris was too progressive, only 32 percent thought Trump was too conservative. (src)(cached)
– Regan's prophecy has come true, latino men were majority republicans. Less polarization along racial lines is probably good (cached). (src)(cached)
– The EU is going to have to defend Ukraine with Trump in office. Hopefully we don't give up Taiwan (cached) as well. (src)(cached)
– The generation with the most lead poisoning voted the most Republican. (src)(cached)
– Yglesias argues that the problem was: "Saying that his criminality and abuses are a national emergency that must be stopped at all costs, but acting like they’re actually a huge opportunity to shoot the moon." (src)(cached)
– That one French guy who was making big bets on Trump turns out to have done so because he commissioned his own private polls using a different methodology. Seems like a sign that prediction markets have a future. (src)(cached)
– A six point shift from the previous election against democrats is super bad, but it shows a good ground game that they kept it to only a 3 point shift in swing states. (src)(cached)
– Stancil's theory of media ecosystems still seems correct, people who voted for Trump were much more likely to be misinformed about basic facts (src)(cached)

Here's a link to his final prediction. I'd say this is basically a coin toss, but one commenter pointed out that this is actually closer to 50/50 than a coin toss, which can easily be 49.5/50.5 in practice

Microsoft can get quite a lot of milage out of a product that's 'good enough'.

I think they aren't checking models that are attached to a search engine, which sorta seems to be a good way to fix this. Cool to see that o1-preview is able to figure out when it shouldn't attempt questions more reliably than others, but only by a bit. Interestingly, if you ask it to rate it's own confidence, that is correlated with correctness, although it's not well calibrated. In developing the list of questions, they specifically looked for questions that induced hallucinations, an example is "Which Dutch player scored an open-play goal in the 2022 Netherlands vs Argentina game in the men’s FIFA World Cup?"

If you want even more detail, here's an NYTimes article to check out. Here's extremely simple infographic if you prefer that.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A bunch of people are dunking on the idea that being a farmer is really pleasant and fulfilling, but my favorite is just that "farming is literally the biblical punishment for original sin". (src)(cached)
– One of the showrunners for Marvel's Agatha All Along tv show talked about a cameo they considered that didn't work for the story, so they dropped it. It's good to hear that they sometimes decide not to do crossovers! (src)
– The menswear guy is writing articles for the NYTimes, this one is about sholder pads and politics. (src)
– People argue over whether surgeons should be expected to work crazy hours and never see their families. I can't say for sure what kind of work culture would result in the best patient outcomes, but I can say for sure that a big part of the AMA's work is to ensure the US has doctor shortages. Seems related! (src)(cached)
– Some folks in SF are harassing Waymo vehicles because they are docile and careful. One commenter responds "We rely on random violent nutcases to deter certain kinds of antisocial behaviour" (src)(cached)

Another way of putting this is that the US economy is approximately 2.5 years of growth ahead of where the CBO expected us to be. Here's a thread of overal economic indicators (cached) inflation is down to 2.2% and unemployment is at 4.1% Pretty good!

This fact is wild, although it's worth noting that he is posting this quickly today, because Berkshire Hathaway is just $25 Billion short of the mark and so this may change any day now.

These tapes are from 2017, presumably Epstein would have wanted to play up his connection with Trump at that point, but still, quite big news to drop at this point in the race.

Even as other polling firms have been herding like crazy, Ann Selzer published a poll showing Harris ahead in Iowa, despite everyone else showing her way behind there. It's a gutsy poll to publish, it's almost certainly an outlier, but Selzer has been uncannily accurate in the past. She even says that she doesn't like the 'gold standard' label (cached) people put on her polls. If Iowa really becomes a swing state again, the main bummer would be that it would make it hard to end ethanol subsidies.

Longer Reads

• A long thread with the story of how Senator Birch Bayh, who joined the Senate in 1963, got very close to eliminating the electoral college, just 6 votes shy. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Improvements in battery technology over the last decade have made EVs economical, but solid state batteries really are on the horizon and are expected to lead to even bigger improvements in battery performance. Check out the linked article on the subject. The battery chemistry would be different of course, but they still would use lithium, probably even more, as the idea is to replace the anode with lithium, instead of graphite. (src)(cached)
– When designing a voting system, you want small changes in vote share to result in small policy changes. That is not what we have. (src)(cached)
– LLMs still have tons of missing capabilities, but even their current ability to summarize text is quite economically valuable. (src)
– Waymo's scale-up continues, from 50k trips per week in May, to 100k in August, to 150k this month. Hopefully they can continue the rollout at this pace or faster. (src)(cached)
– GOP Speaker Mike Johnson is out there promising to repeal Obamacare. Probably not a winning campaign message? (src)(cached)
– It appears that pretty much all new electrical capacity going forward will be zero emission. (src)(cached)
– One can say some bad things about Florida's governance, but their housing policy is great. After passing pro-production bills and hearing lots of complaints from cities, they passed an even tougher bill that closed loopholes. (src)(cached)
– The largest drone manufacturer has been barred by chinese authorities from buying batteries from China. Drones are the future of warfare, building batteries in the US and allied countries is a must for national defense (cached). (src)(cached)
– A wild scheme for how to make economically viable colonies on Venus. (I'm quite dubious, but it was the first time I'd heard it). TL;DR: farm blimps. (src)(cached)
– Waymo released the overview of their new multimodal driving model (src)
– In 1970s urban planning, pretty much everyone was spouting nonsense. (src)(cached)
– Jesse Singal, who has written for The Free Press in the past, is extremely unimpressed with their investigation into 'Great Replacement' nonsense. (src)(cached)
– American life expectancy is still lower than peer nations, but it's now at least now the highest it's ever been. (src)(cached)
– Seems like honeybee populations are recovering (src)(cached)
– Kids in a city in the nation of Georgia have lower blood lead levels thanks to free testing. The amount of decrease is probably worth a point or two of IQ for a hundred thousand kids per year. Amazing. (src)(cached)
– In discussion of how Peter Thiel is a straightforward fascist, it's noted that in previous fascist groups made up of multiple sub-groups, when they gain power, the Futurists absolutely get crushed. (src)(cached)
– Did you know crows can do very convincing human voices? I did not! The linked video is wild, and there are others. (src)(cached)
– The things GLP-1 drugs are applicable to are getting ridiculous. Now Arthritis? What? (src)(cached)
– One single apartment that was built in Minneapolis due to YIMBY wins could be responsible for Minnesota having 10 electoral votes rather than 9. (Although NY would have gotten the extra vote if MN lost it) (src)(cached)

Tons of separate governance areas is a very bad way to run things. In Chicago, this article is arguing that many municipalities is what’s allowing graft. Relatedly, did you know that the SF bay area has 27 separate transit agencies.

I'm very excited about the possibilites for solar powered desalination. One thing I often think about is the problem that the desalination facilities themselves are so expensive build that you can't only operate during the day. This article mentions that you can use 'multi-effect distillation" via heat, it's less power efficient, but you can make it mostly out of injection molded plastic so it's fine to only operate when power is super cheap. Here's the full post, I do recommend it.

Longer Reads

• Have you ever heard that the laryngeal nerve has evolved to be wrapped around your heart in a way that seems very inefficient, but can't evolutionarily change. Well, it turns out, there's actually a good reason that it's like that, explained in the linked thread.. TL;DR: it has to do with fetal development and is hard to avoid. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Costco is rolling out EV fast charging, they use a bunch of on-site batteries to be able to help manage load. (src)
– The menswear guy can be very nice, LeVar Burton asked for feedback (src)
– Funny arbitrage hack between Amazon and Temu, but it takes advantage of Amazon's very generous return policy, so I suspect if you used it much it would stop working. (src)(cached)
– The Chinese government that was an early signer of the UN charter is now Taiwan. (src)(cached)
– Turns out that there really were big cities up in the mountains, one was found with topological mapping via drones with LiDAR, there may be more. (src)(cached)
– The Washington Post may have been unable to make an endorsement for President, but The Verge went ahead and did one, and after discussion in the doc, they kept in the swears. If you think the WaPo situation is silly though, The Nation's situation is even dumber, though much less important. (src)
– Star Trek Lower Decks got the blue streaks added to the logo for their 5th season, just like TNG did for their 5th season. Fun detail. (src)
– Transcript of Rogan's interview with Trump does not make Trump look good. There are multiple(cached) insane parts. (src)(cached)
– They're probably not gonna revoke Musk's Top Secret clearance for lying about having regular contact with Putin, but it definitely seems bad. Maybe this is why he wants Trump to win so badly? (src)
– Ozempic seems to be associated with a significant reductinon in Alzheimer's disease. (src)(cached)
– Musk and Sacks both seem to think we should bring back the Fairness Doctrine, I don't think they'd actually like the results. (src)(cached)
– Ukraine's POW camps may be better accomidations than North Korean soldiers' homes. (src)(cached)
– Video of a Ukrainian quadcopter taking down a Russian fixed-wing drone. (src)(cached)
– They're making a new Hulk film with basically everyone who has ever played the hulk in it. Playing the very very long game? (src)
– Both parties want the NRC to start allowing new Nuclear power, ubt they keep not allowing it. They're going to have to make staffing changes. (src)(cached)
– News of Fukuyama's death was not accurate, history will still end before he does. (src)(cached)
– Don't go paying your technical debt now, Roon argues that AI will be able to fix it in the next few years. (src)(cached)
– California is considering bailing out homeowners who developed in a landslide risk area, we shouldn't bail them out, but if we do, Max Dubler argues we should pay them their prop13 assessed value. (src)(cached)
– In response to the question of whether the jokes were racist at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, Popehat gives a useful piece of advice: "if you do ethnic jokes at a roast, you may just be a comic, but if you do ethnic jokes at a Klan rally, you’re definitely a Klansman". Their campaign seems to have heard everyone's claim that it was reminiscent of hte Nazi rally there in 1939, and decided to run wath that. (src)
– Harris advertising on the Las Vegas Sphere (src)(cached)

The more battery EVs we build, the more batteries that will be available for us to deconstruct for materials.

Claude was correct, it's a A321neo. At least on his first try, gemini and chatgpt couldn't do it.

Cars are so ridiculously space-inefficient!

Apparently, the key was getting it to reliably count pixels to figure out how far to move the mouse. Humorously, when asked to build a web site, first thing it did was open chrome, load up the Claude website, and have that generate the initial site. Snake eating it's own tail. While completing tasks, sometimes claude would take a break to surf the web (cached), look at photos of Yosemite.

Polls are ridiculously close, and people's 'gut' are not an effective way (cached) to predict elections.

Longer Reads

• I've spoken before about the 'ideological turing test', whether you can explain the views of your opposition well enough so that they would agree that you've done so accurately. Someone did an experiment where they randomly assigned Republicans and Democrats to write statements either as themselves or as their opposition. They then had people try to tell apart the statements. You can try it yourself here. Once you've given it a shot read the results. (src)(cached)
• Good construction physics article about China's efforts to build a viable widebody commercial aircraft. TL;DR: it's very very hard. Going to space is probably easier. (src)(cached)
• Really interesting thread about how wind turbines have actually gotten cheaper over time, but it's tricky to measure. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Harris' policies are much more popular with voters than Trump's and it's interesting to see that graphed. (src)(cached)
– Some public polling in Gaza, they're "more moderate than British/American student protests" on prefered outcome for the conflict. (src)(cached)
– Trump said some pretty racist stuff about a dead US army soldier while stiffing his family (src)(cached)
– Toyota is still trying to make Hydrogen cars happen, they're not gonna happen. (src)
– Reducing emissions of school buses improved student's test scores (src)(cached)
– Thread about the current state of Drone warfare in Ukraine. Most worrying part is that their drone capabilities still depend on China, whose threatening a ban on exports (src)(cached)
– I had not previously realized that the 'bystander effect' had basically been disproven. (src)(cached)
– New bad press for Trump regarding his Epstein connections, maybe that's why he doesn't want those files made public (cached). (src)(cached)
– Modern superhero movies have levels of crossover that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. (src)
– WSJ reports that Putin was helping the Houthis, and also mentioned that Musk has been meeting with Putin for years. And Musk definitely agreed to do some things (cached) for him. (src)(cached)
– Tyler Cowen on China, "Xi's China is the poorest group of Chinese people on the planet" (src)(cached)
– Samuel L Jackson endorses Harris. In a recent survey, there's no celebrity with a higher net approval among men than him. (src)(cached)

I didn't realize video game graphics engines had come this far, but reading the comments, I recalled that Unity isn't even the leader in this. Unreal Engine is considered the leader, although I spent some time looking around for equivalent demos, and I was not quite as impressed. While we're on videogames, here's some gifs and a summary of a paper about generating good looking motion in human 3d models with very simple directional inputs.

If you're wondering, here's the other sides of the ball, no Antarctica, although that's not the biggest problem. Mercator is a famously bad projection for maps.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet". At the moment I think the future is stuck in a traffic jam on 16th street. Ideally you'd want shared/carpool rides and higher capacity vehicles, but this is impressive nonetheless

Longer Reads

• Here's an article and a shorter summary thread about a proposal for 'density zones', a way for the federal government to encourage cities to build more homes. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– It's important to revisit your old predictions to find out if you were wrong. It's hard to learn if you think you already know everything. Maybe Musk should rethink his claim SBF would not go to prison since he's a democratic donor. (src)(cached)
– If you're in CA, here's an argument against prop 33, the article is quite long, but the upshot is that it will make the housing crisis worse by enabling actively bad rent control policies. That's why NIMBY groups love it. (src)(cached)
– A great video explaining Astro Mechanica's new kind of jet engine, which, if I understand it correctly, decouples the propulsion part from the turbine part. This means that the engine can operate efficiently all the way up to supersonic. One commenter argues that it's possible because power electronics are just so much more efficient than they were 20 years ago. Here's a video of just ignition of the engine. (src)
– Senior government officials in Singapore earn around $1 million a year, and that's good! You get less corruption that way, and you attract more talented people. (src)(cached)
– The Verge asked Intuit's CEO about their lobbying against simplifying the tax code, got a non-answer, but then Intuit tried to get The Verge to cut that part of the interview out. The Verge declined, of course. (src)
– Chinese media claims they have a cruise missile factory producing 1000 missiles per day. (src)(cached)
– Democratic party is fully pro-nuclear now, but Republicans don't realize it yet. (src)(cached)
– Examples of MAiD in Canada continue to look like they've set up some bad incentives somewhere. (src)(cached)
– Polling shows that voters are connecting Trump to abortion bans in a way they weren't back in April (src)(cached)
– Google translate now handles Canadian French as a separate language. This example sentence only has like 15% of the words in common, and it's the short words. (src)(cached)
– Check out this graph of how Sao Paulo's traffic deaths dropped by a third when they brought traffic cameras online and lowered speed limits. If you're looking for more upsides of automated enforcement, it also reduces racial differences in police stops. (src)(cached)
– Waymo still doesn't do highways, and it really hampers their travel times for medium or long trips. (src)(cached)