Favorites: Cabinet Constraints, Waymo Gains, and an Unexpected AI Win
February 27th 2025. U.S. sides with Russia, ChatGPT won’t fill a wine glass, and Tesla still has exactly zero driverless taxi trips per week.
Seems really bad if a cabinet secretary can't even spend money. Here's the article, some Republican Congressman was upset, but I'm not sure how far that'll go.
I thought this was an amusing result, and there's more detail in the thread. Premier AI-Doomer Yudkowsky actually thinks this is very good news (cached): if there's a single bundle of ideas that all go together as 'good' in LLMs, that can make us less worried that some random part of them will decide to become malicious separately.
Here's the Reddit post about this, worth noting that the original VB code extracted from the EXE wasn't very complicated, the python equivalent was only 100 lines or so. He even shared the Claude conversation.
First of all, high quality Tesla trolling with that chart legend. Second Waymo hit 200k rides per week, which is a big increase, but the pace of the increase (cached) has slowed a bit.
Longer Reads
• A short thread regarding the helicopter/plane crash in DC a while back. Links to a longer article on the subject (src)(cached)
• Short thread with details about the work the US paid for in stopping Ebola in Africa that has come to a halt. (src)(cached)
• Somehow I didn’t know that the founder of DJI wrote a paper in 2011 that is the basis for all modern airborne drones. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Hegseth fired the head of the navy and vice chair of the Air force, but it was probably more worrying that they fired the senior JAGs of the Army, Navy, and USAF. That's who tells military leaders whether a given order is illegal. Unlike some other trump admin orders, Yglesias points out that this one is actually legal for them to do, but still extremely concerning (cached). (src)(cached)
– Trump Is going after foreign policy hawks in his own administration. Marco Rubio may have given up a safe senate seat just to be either impotent or fired. (src)(cached)
– It’s just name recognition, but Harris leads the field for 2028 nominee (src)(cached)
– Bezos has a serious Bond villain vibe now, although he’s not the only tech CEO you can say that about. (src)(cached)
– nationwide there’s actually more of a shortage of small apartments, not family sized ones. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee had subject matter experts compare Google deep research with OpenAI deep research. OpenAI came out on top most of the time, but that’s not surprising when it costs $200 a month and Google’s is free. (src)(cached)
– Progressives in Denmark stayed in power despite a rightward sentiment throughout Europe. They did it by moderating mostly on immigration. (src)(cached)
– Huge new fees for Chinese owned shipping in the US (src)(cached)
– ChatGPT can't show you a glass of wine full ot the brim (src)
– a little Andor tidbit (src)
– OpenAI deep research now available to plus users ($20 per month rather than $200) (src)(cached)
– UN vote RE: Ukraine now has the US joining Russia. Even Iran and China abstained. Yikes. Plus we pressured Israel (cached) to join us. Also, Turkey now favors Ukraine joining NATO (cached) (src)(cached)
– Pretty open-and-shut case of assault by a Republican congressman against his mistress, but it was in DC, so Trump's AG has just refused to allow police to arrest him. (src)
– Looks like now Trump is favoring the Nippon Steel / US Steel deal, but with some fig leaf tweaks. Seems good. (src)(cached)
– When you poll people to explicitly trade off between Neighbourhood character and cheaper housing, they choose cheaper housing by a wide margin. At least in DC, I’d be interested to see polling like this in California. (src)(cached)
– The US government shutting down all their EV chargers is really dumb. (src)(cached)
– Trump admin tried to make it look like Biden ordered half a billion dollars of Teslas (src)(cached)