This was posted as part of Anthropic's blog post about how they've moved off of git (cached) which was becoming the main bottleneck in submitting code. But my goodness have they started committing code fast!
There was actually a lot of discussion of this Politico story, but it pretty much all comes down to this graph. But to make things worse, here's some data about how we basically don't have an estate tax (cached) anymore.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Here's an overview of the most recent modeling of the effect of California Prop 40 on state finances. What's wild is that the effect is happening before we even vote on it. It seems pretty clear from this data that the loss in income taxes has outpaced any possible gains from the wealth tax. It was a bad idea, it's destructive, and we have already lost a ton by even putting it on the ballot. (src)(cached)
– Wedgewood polls definitely turned out to have been faking their polls. One thing that's particularly terrible is that they've been publishing polls that showed the left-most candidates outpolling moderate Democrats (cached) against Republicans. One of their polls may have actually caused one of the moderate candidates to drop out (cached) of the Michigan Democratic Primary. It even looks like Wedgewood committed some wire fraud (cached). (src)(cached)
– Since OpenAI's Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis proof, there has been a bunch more progress, which is nice to see. (src)(cached)
– Cool website (cached) that contains a really great visualization and sequence of events of the Hugging Face incident. (src)(cached)
– Here's an attempt to do a pre-mortem of an AI-enabled terrorist event. They expect that if something happens, then the model in question will not have state-of-the-art safety classifiers as of 2026, or will be open-weight and abliterated. Not particularly surprising as predictions go, but useful to see it written down I guess. (src)(cached)
– Turns out the vast majority of people who work as archaeologists are doing it on behalf of companies that provide National Historic Preservation Act reviews of sites. This is a major part of what slows down modern large projects of any kind. "Indiana Jones and the empire of regulatory bloat" jokes one commenter (cached) (src)(cached)
– China is so dominant in tons of industries, likened here to the US after WWII, but the major difference is that the US was actually interested in spreading manufacturing know-how worldwide. China has begun clamping down on many different technologies simultaneously. Harbor dredging technology even! (src)(cached)
– Here's a story about a bunch of different people who moved to Europe because they thought the US was collapsing but moved back soon after when they realized that Europe is not the magical paradise they had been promised. Here are some choice quotes (cached) (src)(cached)
– Trump admin asked the DHS to hack some voting machines 'as a test of their security', but also directed them not to tell the voting machine companies about anything they found. They were told to only report back the info to the White House (cached). Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Google is getting closer to setting up automated wet-lab systems, where they can run repeated experiments with no human involvement. Very cool, but also makes me worried someone will do something like this but without the safeguards. (src)(cached)
– Americans were polled about the political affiliations of various tech leaders. While they seem to have reasonably surmised that Musk is a Republican (cached), they also think Dario Amodei is, which is clearly wrong. (src)(cached)
– Turns out the anti-Waymo group in DC is just a front for Uber. Sorta the least surprising answer to who is funding them. While we're on the subject, some in DC might point out that there are only about 200 Uber drivers living in the district, there are thousands of people who would benefit from Waymo availability, and that may be enough to sway the city government. But we should go further, think of the number of people killed in car accidents that could be avoided, that's the real benefit (cached) we should be thinking about. (src)(cached)
– The feud between Yglesias and Stoller continues. This time they're arguing over whether the US requirement for 1500 hours of flight experience for US commercial pilots is pretextual. In Europe it's 200 hours, and no one thinks that it's unsafe to get on a Lufthansa flight because the pilot might not be experienced enough. Stoller is purportedly pro-competition, but in this case he thinks the anticompetitive regulation is good, actually. (src)(cached)
– Now that it's possible to decompile apps, people also have been decompiling mundane apps, in this case a block puzzle app, only to discover that a huge portion of the game's code is about adjusting the difficulty to optimally extract money from users. (src)(cached)
– Here's a very long analysis (cached) of Anthropic's proposed AI regulation bill, which many have been disappointed about. Kelsey Piper also had some analysis (cached), the highlight of it is that they're quite scarred from having been jerked around by the Trump admin, and it makes them concerned about unchecked Executive Branch power. (src)(cached)
– Starshield in Ukraine (SpaceX Starlink for military use) is still being throttled, although Ukraine is now reporting that intelligence sharing has resumed. Various figures in the Trump admin and Musk are all now trying to blame each other in the press for the situation, but none of that actually helps Ukraine (cached). They also can't keep their story straight (cached). There's an extent to which they can tell that it would be untenable (cached) to fully take Russia's side, which limits how far they can go. They can try to put some sort of legalistic sheen on things, but it's total bs (cached). Here's a thread with the latest (cached) from a WSJ article. (src)(cached)
– When one person acts confused about why Americans think they're closer to being a millionaire than to becoming homeless, we have simultaneously two responses. On the one hand, we have polling, and it's the reverse, Americans do see homelessness as more likely. But also, the US has 25x as many millionaires as homeless people. (src)(cached)