Favorites: CR Tactics, ICE Tragedies
March 20th, 2025 - From illusions about ‘10x engineers’ to illusions about Apple’s assembly lines
Josh Barro argues (cached) that Democrats decision not to filibuster the Republican CR was strategically correct. I’ve seen jokey replies to this argument along the lines of “I’m getting my ass kicked _strategically_” but they lost the election in 2024, there aren’t really other options. Trump is doing a bunch of bad stuff that Barro obviously opposes, but blocking the CR will not help (cached) with those and the most likely outcome is that it makes outcomes even worse. On the other hand Nate Silver (and Tim Lee) disagree with this analysis (cached), arguing that details of the current situation might have played out differently than previous government shutdowns. The key question from Barro's perspective that these criticisms of Schumer have to answer (cached) is "how, specifically, would a shutdown have led to a better outcome"
The fact that manufacturing robots outperform humanoid ones isn’t even the biggest issue with this video of Figure's robots being manufactured (it does look cool of course). The video also sparked a post by Greg Koenig (cached) about manufacturing, he argues too many startups see Apple's production process videos and think that's how they should be doing manufacturing. But no! Even the earliest videos from from Apple of manufacturing iphones was at the scale of a million phones a day. There are very very few complex consumer goods manufactured at that scale. Startups should absolutely not be building assembly lines that look like that.
Longer Reads
• Summary of an essay that ran in FT about how people everywhere are reporting higher rates of cognitive challenges. There's a follow-up thread (cached) from Alice Evans that gets pretty dark (src)(cached)
• Dare Obasanjo shared an article arguing against the myth of the "10x engineer", and that leaders should instead focus on building team structures that are more productive. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Travis Kalanick still thinks Uber wasn’t far behind Waymo before they gave up. Tim Lee found the receipts that show they were. (src)(cached)
– Wondering why Harris didn't break with Biden more? His team did everything they could to stop her from running on policy disagreements with Biden. (src)(cached)
– Binance's new legal strategy is to simply bribe Donald Trump for a pardon. (src)(cached)
– It’s now possible to 3D print oil paintings with insane levels of accuracy (src)(cached)
– University students are doing all their CS assignments with LLMs, but then they fail the tests. There are studies about this (cached tweet, study pdf) and it means we really need to be thinking hard about what we are trying to teach in school. (src)(cached)
– New Computer Use models are getting really good (src)(cached)
– China has built some very large invasion barges (src)(cached)
– Notorious NIMBY politician Ro Khanna said some good stuff about YIMBY but then followed that by spouting nonsense about institutional landlords. But that’s dumb, institutional landlords have many good effects. (src)(cached)
– Musk approved data analyst claims her hard drive “overheated” processing 60k rows of data. Ridiculous. (src)(cached)
– Catherine Rampell noticed: "DOGE has decided to stop feeding the bomb-sniffing dogs at TSA?" (src)(cached)
– Perhaps no surprise, but laying off all those IRS agents is going to be very expensive. $300B over 10 years. (src)
– An explanation of CalMatters, a nonprofit that fills a hole caused by a huge fall in the number of journalists covering California government. They've existed for 10 years now and are expanding to cover more states. (src)(cached)
– California YIMBY endorses SB 79 using almost the exact language that I tend to use to explain the biggest problem with many cities along the SF Peninsula: "It's fundamentally unfair to collect tax revenues from everyone for rail operation, but then prohibit people from living close enough to benefit from these investments" (src)(cached)
– Horrible actions by ICE continue, a New Hampshire man with a green card and German citizenship, Fabian Schmidt, was detained at Logan Airport by immigration officers and is currently held by ICE in Rhode Island. His treatment really seems to qualify as torture. The ACLU saw the illegal deportations coming and pre-filed a lawsuit to attempt stop them. Ken White thinks (cached) they were looking for a situation where they could defy a court order in the same way Andrew Jackson did. (src)(cached)
– Since the Trump admin hasn't been able to figure out how to fire some government workers, they're just putting them on leave with pay. Which doesn't seem to actually represent improved efficiency, since, we're paying all the money and getting none of the value. (src)(cached)
– One guy has been posting along the way as he attempts to rebuild after the Palisades fire. Despite promises of fast approvals, it's been over a month with no progress on permitting. (src)(cached)
– Great post about manufacturing, argues too many startups see Apple's production process videos and think that's what they should be building. But no! Even the earliest videos from from Apple of manufacturing iphones was at the scale of a million phones a day. There are very very few complex consumer goods manufactured at that scale. Startups should absolutely not be building assembly lines that look like that. (src)(cached)
– "99% of home mortgages have an interest rate lower than the current market rate" (src)(cached)
– The NYTimes took the time to check Musk's claim that no one has died because they shut down USAID. And guess what, people have died! Many of them children who were depending on the medications we were providing them with at a cost to the US taxpayer of pennies a day. Some of these interventions are literally the most effective opportunities to save a life that have been discovered. (src)(cached)
– Uh, how did Musk get Trump to work as his son's babysitter? (src)(cached)
– OpenAI claims that ChatGPT 4.5 is able to implement many of their code changes on it's own, but many are rightfully questioning the methodology they're using to measure effectiveness (src)(cached)