Favorites: Fission, Forgeries, and Foreign Policy
November 20, 2025 — A big tent for Democrats, skepticism on school laptops, and a new cloud for fights.
I wonder how effective this is... presumably munitions can still fall through this.
Clearly for this to work, it’s integrating a fair amount of world knowledge. Like, for the forklift, it works because the model sort of knows what a forklift looks like, so it can guess what the parts it can’t see look like.
To be specific about what they achieved, they got ‘criticality’ on a fission reaction, the reactor got to a self-sustaining reaction. They’re the first venture-backed start-up to do this, and they got there with just $19 million (cached), very impressive when normally reactors cost like $10B. Next thing you know, someone will have an AI named Galadriel (cached)
Longer Reads
• Thread summarizing an NYTimes article arguing that school-issued laptops are probably a bad idea. (src)(cached)
• Discussion of problems economists are having trying to interpret the economic numbers from China. The steady GDP growth rates have always been suspicious, but in recent years it’s especially hard to figure out what’s going on. Some key paragraphs from the FT article (cached). (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Newsom has a great line for how the Democratic party should be a big tent: “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party”. And he’s right, that’s what it has to be. (src)(cached)
– The only way the US can defend Taiwan in a conflict is with the help of Japan, which is why China pushes to call the presence of US military bases there “Imperialism”. (src)(cached)
– New malaria treatment cured 97.4% of patients, blocks transmission, and kills resistant parasites. (src)(cached)
– US cities banned SROs, and that definitely made it harder for poor people to find homes. But importantly, it only works if eviction isn’t a drawn-out process, because there are shared spaces, if someone is misbehaving you need to be able to remove them immediately. (src)(cached)
– New upcoming unicode characters include a “Fight Cloud”, and more. (src)(cached)
– India met their renewable/nuclear power target for 2030 this year. Solar PV is getting cheaper and cheaper. (src)(cached)
– As surprising as it may seem, violence continues to decline worldwide. Pinker’s Better Angels continues to be proven correct. (src)(cached)
– Now that Waymo is ready to do highways, their remaining challenge is simply manufacturing, and that will require different skills than what they’ve got so far. From this article (cached), the race is now whether Tesla can get actual self driving working before Waymo can get scaled manufacturing working. (src)(cached)
– San Francisco is requiring old high rises to replace their sprinkler systems, at a cost of something like $300K per unit. That’s crazy! The rate of structure fires in San Francisco is minimal. (src)(cached)
– Russia has begun attacking Poland with drones. They’re destroying railways (src)(cached)
– Prices for Russian oil have fallen to $36 USD equivalent per barrel. This has happened despite the fact that they’re also selling less due to strikes against their oil refineries. (src)(cached)
– Sam D points out: “the most under-appreciated local government success over the past three years? it’s actually Baltimore imo -murders down 60% -major pro-housing reforms including ending parking mandates, legalizing single-stair buildings, and permitting denser housing” (src)(cached)
– It’s been possible to automate piano playing for way over a century, yet people are still paid to do it. This is applicable to expectations around the future of AI. (src)(cached)
– Anti-phonics foolishness was telling kids not to sound out words. In math, they’re telling kids not to memorize multiplication tables, probably a mistake. (src)(cached)
– A Chinese mole in Kathy Hochul’s staff was forging her signature on documents while Hochul was Lieutenant Governor. (src)(cached)
– “British Soldiers Banned from Discussing Secrets in Vehicles Due to Chinese Espionage” makes me feel a bit better about the US banning Chinese-manufactured cars. (src)(cached)