Favorites: Helicopter Havoc, Trade‑War Turbulence, and TurboTax Triumph
April 5 2025: Gemini turns papers into playable games while Microsoft’s agents still can’t debug like humans.
A helicopter suddenly fell apart over the water in NYC. There’s some discussion of how it happened exactly, early guesses were that the main rotor clipped the tail right off, which is apparently a thing that can happen?? (it’s called Mast Bumping) But video emerged showing it in level flight beforehand, so maybe something else happened. Anyway, it’s worth noting that motorcycles are 25x more dangerous per hour.
Apparently it’s dimethyl sulfide or DMS, and potentially dimethyl disulfide or DMDS. (Not that I’ve heard of either of these compounds before). To be clear, this is merely the most significant evidence yet of extraterrestrial life. It’s still quite weak, and Ars Technica got into the details.
The situation with Trump and illegal deportations is too depressing for me to write about much, the only glimmer of hope is that his actions are moving the needle against him on opinion polls.
I’m not sure I agree this is the order he’ll do things, but yea, this sums up the financial situation.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Gemini 2.5 has gotten quite good at generating playable web games inline. Ethan Mollick suggests having it turn an acedemic paper into a playable web game that illustrates it's key points. (src)(cached)
– DOGE sabotaged the governments ability to fix software problems, and now there’s a glitch blocking collection of the be tariffs. (src)(cached)
– Secretary of education thinks it’s ChatGPT is a kind of A1. She sounds like she wants to get steak sauce into schools. (src)(cached)
– Some crosswalk buttons were hacked to output ai generated audio of Zuckerberg or Musk. Follow the link and you can hear it. It appears the pins to access the crosswalk button firmware are easily accessible. (src)
– Microsoft found that setting an ai agent up with some debugging tools could allow it to perform better on their debugging benchmarks. Claude was already the best, and this made it better, but they’re all still far behind human performance (src)
– A useful overview of what the US would do if we were actually serious about ensuring we aren’t depending on China for critical strategic components. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee and others point out that OpenAI’s plan to remove their nonprofit status really does seem illegitimate, separate from any kind of AI alignment argument. (src)(cached)
– I mentioned the embryo screening company Orchid previously, and here’s a thread arguing that their claims about BMI and IQ are tenuous. I’m still unclear whether genetic diseases can be handled by this. (src)(cached)
– Teachout is confused about the trade offs of various taxation schemes. Long story short: tariffs are not pigouvian, congestion pricing is. (src)(cached)
– Sure looks like DOGE employees are credibly threatening to murder the IT admin who said they shouldn’t have unlogged access to whistleblower records. Within minutes of accounts being created for the DOGE employees, someone was trying to login from a Russian IP with their new accounts (cached). And digging into the details, 10GB of data was exfiltrated to Russia (cached) not long after. (src)(cached)
– We’re now in a serious trade war with China, and trying to drum up allies, but no one is interested because we’re just finished having a mini trade war with the entire world. (src)(cached)
– TurboTax bribing Trump appears to have succeeded in shutting down IRS DirectFile (src)(cached)
– American manufacturing was taking off last year, with tariffs and uncertainty that has all collapsed. Here’s some graphs (src)(cached)