Favorites: Hidden Words, Prediction Markets, and Clean Power
July 6, 2026 — Ukraine salutes the American Dream, Tom Clancy trashes The Sum of All Fears on its commentary track, Ossoff imagines the founders touring today's America.
Anthropic has discovered a way to extract words from Claude's thought process as it outputs text. These are not the standard thinking tokens, they're entirely inside the model's activation values. Here's the summary (cached) of the paper (it's still quite long). Some examples included that if you tell them to answer a math question, this space, (Anthropic calls it the Jacobian space, or j-space) contains the answers to sub-parts of the math question. If you ask a model to think about one question while answering a different one, you can indeed see the answer to the hidden question in the j-space. Finally, if you tell it not to think of something while answering a question, just like a human, you'll see its j-space contains the forbidden concept, but also the word "damn" and "failure". Anyway, this all shows that the models think in words (cached) they never actually output. This also works on open models, including the censored ones by Chinese labs, if you ask Qwen about Tiananmen Square, you can see in it's j-space that it knows what happened (cached) even though the output tokens never acknowledge it. (src)(cached)
That’s Maine’s former speaker of the House, she ran against Collins and lost in 2020. The current partisan environment is more favorable this year and she might win if nominated in Platner’s place. Realistically though, Polymarket says much more likely to be Troy Jackson, but he has his own closet of scandals. Speaking of predictions, there was of course a massive spike in the "platner drops out" market as this news broke, but there was also a huge jump upwards in odds of democrats winning the Maine race in response to this news at the exact same time (cached). The people who previously thought somehow Platner's scandals were good actually good (cached) should really be rethinking their model of politics (cached). And folks who tried to attack the previous woman who came forward should probably be apologizing as well (cached). Finally DSA folks proud of winning primaries should really not be so proud (cached) of themselves. (src)(cached)
My understanding is that it's actually more like 6 flags. A lot of Fourth of July content. Lithuania (cached), Germany (cached), France (cached), Finland (cached), Scotland (cached), and of course Ukraine (cached) and Taiwan (cached) all had great content. Many of those other countries had their own celebrations of America's 250th anniversary. Schwarzenegger had a particularly moving post (cached), and Ossoff delivered a great speech (cached) on what the founders would think of us today. One person pointed out how wild it is (cached) that "250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the Pope is American, the son of the King of England* lives in the United States, and his grandchildren, who are also direct descendants of George III, are American citizens" Finally, I liked this quote (cached) from another commenter: "The US is so much more than whatever random dude happens to be in the White House". (src)(cached)
Longer Reads
• Some economic charts about the United States. Every generation has had notably higher income at each stage of their life than the one before it for the last hundred years. There are more charts at the link. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A recent MIT report argues that despite Trump acting to end big parts of Biden's Environmental Bill (confusingly called the Inflation Reduction Act), it seems that we're actually going to get most (like 70%) of the benefits for the clean power improvements anyway. Some people have said that Biden's strategy didn't work, but if Trump was unable to undo it, maybe it worked perfectly (cached). (src)(cached)
– NYTimes published an article about how the UC system needs to bring back standardized testing, and this post summarizes it. I've written about this before, but the upshot is that while standardized testing has problems, all the alternatives are significantly worse. (src)(cached)
– Do you want to see three professional soccer players vs 100 school children? Of course you do! (Clip from 2018) (src)(cached)
– Someone used a Waymo as a getaway car for a burglary, and despite the fact that Waymo turned all the info over to the police, they still haven’t caught the guy because he used a burner phone and stolen credit card. I’m actually quite surprised this worked, and I strongly suspect it won’t in the future (src)(cached)
– Some folks try to argue that while the US has a surplus of consumer goods, we're all dying of brain cancer because of medical bills. And of course, no, the US has easily some of the highest brain cancer survival rates in the world. (src)(cached)
– Discussion from Derek Thompson of the concept of "Ultra-processed food". It's not really a coherent concept, and while some studies have produced evidence that they're bad, it's still pretty mixed, and folks agree that most UPFs are clearly fine. Nutrition is really complicated, but the main thing we know with a lot of certainty is that caloric surplus leads to weight gain. (src)(cached)
– Old clip from the John Adams HBO show, it was pretty great. (src)(cached)
– There's a director commentary track on The Sum of All Fears that includes both the director and Tom Clancy himself, and Clancy has a lot of criticisms of the film, he doesn't hold back. (src)(cached)
– The financial times had a piece arguing that building Data Centers is a great opportunity for the US, here's a summary thread (cached). But an even shorter one from Archie Hall is "Ds say they want electrification, Rs say they want industrialisation. So there's a rather brutal irony that, when a technology comes along offering to deliver both, voters on both sides line up against it." (src)(cached)
– Newer electric vehicles are needing battery replacements at a much lower rate than mid 2010s EVs did. Eventually folks will stop worrying about this as a hidden cost of buying an EV. (src)(cached)
– Taiwan makes all receipts lottery tickets as well in a way to avoid retailers evading taxes. Interesting. (src)(cached)
– Extremely silly video version of this old reddit post asking the age old question: Why didn't Harry Potter carry a sidearm to fight voldemort? (src)(cached)
– James Surowiecki: "I wonder if Stephen Miller read the Declaration of Independence today and noticed that among the grievances the Founders listed is the fact that King George impeded 'the naturalization of Foreigners' and refused to encourage the migration of foreigners to the U.S." (src)(cached)