Favorites: Fiction vs. Fact, Fertility Cliff
July 22nd, 2025: SharePoint hack hits nuclear agency, Anthropic wants power equal to Nevada, and tariffs push Amazon prices up 5%
Wild concept: "mixed fiction", a previous work by Kriss definitely seemed like it was real to me until I saw this new article and the controversy it created. Many enjoyed (cached) this new article. Some rationalists were quite displeased (cached) with the mixed fiction concept. Yudkowsky in particular (cached) Scott Alexander defended Kriss' work and pokes fun at Yudkowsky in particular for having engaged in similar antics. Anyway, the author doesn't care (cached). I personally was mildly annoyed, like others (cached), but it's also an intriguing sort of writing that stayed with me, so I guess I can't argue with results.
Andor is pretty great, and the message of that Luthen's speech or Cassian's quip is not dissimilar from what Yglesias talks about with "politics as a vocation". If you want to win, you don't always get to do the thing that feels best in the moment. It might feel good to fight about the things you care about, but the messages that win with the public are the ones where the public agrees with you. Fighting against the foolishness that has caused the California High Speed Rail project to spend billions accomplishing nothing might feel good but if you want to win, inflation is the thing to be talking about.
Oversized elevator requirements were discussed a lot recently. Pointlessly bad choices followed by refusal to learn from other countries can have an enormous impact. If you want more, here's a diagram of the differences.
Longer Reads
• Total fertility rates in Latin American countries have fallen off a cliff. Columbia fell from 2.5 in 2000 to 1.2 last year. This thread gets into some reasons. The most significant was falling marriage rates. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A guy responsible for managing like $2B in capital/investments seems to have publicly had a psychotic break from interacting with ChatGPT. Don’t let AI re-enforce your craziest ideas! (src)(cached)
– The job market for entry-level software engineers has actually improved in recent months, basically up at the pre-AI level now (src)(cached)
– people in China are using remote controlled quadcopters to carry produce harvest, the carrying capacity on this thing in the video is wild! (src)(cached)
– Trump’s anti-immigration policies have sparked significant backlash not only among Democrats and independence, but among Republicans too. 40 percentage point drop in republican survey respondent saying they want immigration decreased. (src)(cached)
– Very cool article explaining how all the major display technologies work at a basic level. (src)
– The innocent makeup artist who has been imprisoned in El Salvador is now free and in Venezuela. Here’s a thread with the whole history of what happened. (src)(cached)
– Veo3 renders various video games as community theater productions, including dialog. (src)(cached)
– Britain’s pension system sets benefits with an absolutely wild formula. The cost will surpass British GDP (cached) in our lifetimes, Global GDP a couple generations later. The logic of why this is is so clear (cached) that it's hard to understand how anyone can defend it. (src)(cached)
– A great point about Effective Altruists, while their values may not align exactly with your own, many of them exhibit incredible moral character. You can't ignore that! (src)(cached)
– The reason I’ve come to oppose Inclusionary Zoning at this point can be summarized by paraphrasing this post by Domalewski: housing is unaffordable because we make it hard to build, other social goals (cached) are important, but we should fund them through broad taxes, not taxes on the *thing we have a shortage of* (src)(cached)
– Anthropic is arguing we need to be scaling electrical capacity extremely fast, they expect to need a 2GW data center in 2027, and a 5GW data center in 2028. Over the course of a year, that’s as much electricity as Nevada (cached), and there are 10 other states that use less. (src)(cached)
– SF’s new mayor, Lurie, has an impressive approval rating, even above water with the progressives. Breed had an overall positive rating of 28%, although fwiw, Breed got sorta screwed (cached). (src)(cached)
– At this point solar is more dependable in Texas than coal. More than a third of Texas’ coal capacity is offline right now. (src)(cached)
– US nuclear weapons agency breached with a Microsoft SharePoint hack. It’s thought that no classified data was accessed. Seems bad! Also seems bad that Trump fired the head of US cybersecurity (cached) a few months back. (src)
– It shouldn’t be surprising, but since tariffs were announced, low cost items on amazon have gone up in price by at about 5%. That’s how tariffs work. (src)(cached)
– I try not to go too crazy with videos of ICE abuses, but here’s a particularly horrible one. (src)(cached)
– The fall of Assad has really put a crimp in Iran’s ability to project power. (src)(cached)