Favorites: Chips, Homes, and Pokemon
August 17th 2025
Tarrock quipped that we're building homes for computers faster than we're building homes for people. This factoid is from an article that is the beginning of a multipart series (cached). It tickles me that one of their ideas is to secure critical infrastructure by migrating the core code (cached) to memory-safe (and thus more secure) Rust.
I had not previously considered danceability of the model selector as a feature.
Check out the article for the other five graphs. Worth noting that the OpenAI revenue one is now out of date, they've now passed 12 billion annualized revenue. I recently skimmed a debate between Eric Newcomer and Ed Zitron, who wrote The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble. I think the revenue numbers are really quite important to the question about whether there's any value here, especially considering they're still doing it purely with subscriptions, which historically have been a relatively poor way to scale monetization on the internet. It's just very clear that as much as some people think AI is worthless, there are hundreds of millions of people who are using it regularly.
Ever the showman, Trump sure knows how to get people's attention. I understand the stealth bomber is not usually used at that altitude of course.
Longer Reads
• Instructions on how to locally finetune the LLM google released that runs in half a gig of ram. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– An interesting study of a natural experiment with blinded grand juries shows that juries have minimal-to-zero black-white racial bias. Here's the paper. (src)(cached)
– Alex Danco is an executive who's Shopify to join a16z, where he'll be essentially working as a blogger. In his post announcing the move, he describes how he believe modern blogging works to spread ideas far beyond the actual readership, to people who will retell what they read verbally. "most of the audience of any successful post does not actually read it. They are told it by someone who did read it." Patrick McKenzie argues (cached) this applies to basically all modern public writing, not just blog posts. (src)(cached)
– New study shows that rent control increases tenants’ risk of unemployment by reducing mobility, especially for those with unearned income (Social Security, etc), since moving means losing their housing benefit (src)(cached)
– Really fun blogpost digging into why one guy was getting insane responses out of the AWS API for using OpenAI's new open weight model. (src)
– The rate of aluminum recycling in the US has fallen from a peak of 65% in the 90s to just over 40% today. "More than $1 billion worth of beverage cans were dumped in U.S. landfills just last year, the trade group estimates. By weight, that was similar to all the primary aluminum produced by U.S. smelters." (src)(cached)
– An excerpt from an article of "Light Epistemological Bullying" discusses how it's bad to be negatively polarized, and you should really look down upon people who proudly use it as a justification for changing their political views. (src)(cached)
– The fight between Altman and Musk over whether Apple is holding Grok back is pretty funny. Altman calls Musk's inability to get traction for his post a "skill issue" (src)(cached)
– Hey, it's not just the US doing stupid things on vaccines. More than 30% of people eligible for one of the few cancer vaccines in existence turning it down in the UK. But of course, the population being dumb isn't the only option, the Trump admin is destroying our ability to innovate (cached) in biotech through ancient ideas about scientific methodology. (src)(cached)
– As much as folks are disappointed with GPT5, it’s doing great at Pokémon. It blew through (cached) pokemon red completing the game in about a third the time of o3, it seems that it had fewer issues with spacial reasoning. (src)(cached)
– Great article from Yglesias arguing that you can't win over Union voters by giving them union-specific giveaways. The Biden admin spent millions in federal money to keep blue collar union pensions afloat, and union members moved drastically towards Trump in return. Union members care about social and cultural issues more than they care about their unions. (src)(cached)
– Pretty huge drop in Trump's approval rating among people who voted for him, especially young people. (src)(cached)
– Because of a legal ban on facial recognition for their police work, the DC police have found someone who's just really good at recognizing faces, and they're having her look quickly at lots of photos. In the world of Dune where the Butlerian Jihad has banned all thinking machines, this person would be a mentat. But in the real world, where this technology exists and is quite widely deployed, it seems quite wasteful to be doing this manually. (src)(cached)