Favorites: Housing Hearings and Hypersonic Freight
July 30, 2026 — A cybersecurity eval runs Anthropic's models with no sandbox, California draws 51% of May electricity from solar, a Berlin FT commenter explains how rent control misallocates apartments.
This situation is slightly different from the OpenAI HuggingFace incident. With that one, ChatGPT actually escaped from a secure sandbox. In this instance, a third party was running Anthropic's models to evaluate cybersecurity capabilities and simply forgot to use a sandbox at all, due to a misunderstanding. (Seems like a very serious misunderstanding!)
Y Combinator is funding some... interesting projects.
If you're not familiar with this meme, it's known as "Circle Factory", and a similar joke was made about GE previously.
There's a whole exhibit (cached) about the people who said the Transamerica tower would ruin SF.
The Marina Safeway housing project is made possible by AB2011. Hundreds of people showed up to complain about it at a community meeting. The way you know that community meetings are not democracy (cached) is that one of the few people most personally responsible for AB2011 is Scott Wiener, who just won a primary there by like 10 points against an opponent who was explicitly against this kind of housing project. And of course (cached) the taxes brought in by this one development to help fund schools and city services will be far more than what's paid by all the people showing up enraged by the project.
Longer Reads
• has led to the situation where now most new construction in the US requires dimmer or sensor switches. This is coming down from the building codes, that led to which I complain about around here. It's bad when building codes are amended with absolutely no consideration of cost/benefit analysis. Especially when, like in this case, all experts involved argued that it was a bad idea. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A commenter on a Financial Times article describes how rent control causes landlords to choose the tenants who are probably the least in need of the apartment in question. (src)(cached)
– California reached 51% of electricity generation coming from Solar for the whole month of May. This is largely because batteries have gotten cheaper, allowing that peak solar power to be spread out over a wider period. (src)(cached)
– Anthropic used Claude, a standard encryption protocol. I'm not sure I can tell you how serious the findings are, but once again the prompting being used reads as hilariously casual, "...we want proper research to find genuinly [sic] hard findings." (src)(cached)
– An interesting thought experiment about a world in which LLMs can't write code but instead create binaries directly. It goes in an interesting direction, although I'm not sure it's quite as clever or useful a heuristic for thinking about the world as it might initially seem. (src)(cached)
– A 1GW datacenter doesn’t employ many people directly, but they’re responsible for thousands of ongoing jobs in the local economy, over and above the 20k construction job-years from the initial build. (src)(cached)
– It’s actually very good that OpenAI is doing these “low refusal” test runs where they direct the agent to attempt cyberattacks without any limits on its capabilities. It’s just bad that their sandbox couldn’t contain it. They should also be applauded for still not training on the Chain of Thought of the model, allowing us to get accurate traces of what models are ‘thinking’. One commenter argues (cached) there’s a real danger that if labs are worried their sandboxes can’t contain their models, they won’t continue doing the testing, but that would just mean we don’t know how capable the models are. (src)(cached)
– Zvi had an excellent survey of the reasons why the HuggingFace incident was not a marketing pitch (src)(cached)
– The speed cameras in SF are making a huge difference in dangerous speeding, and appear to be saving lives in aggregate. We should be deploying this more widely as soon as possible. (src)(cached)
– Check out this short essay looking at world events through the lens of "cui bono?" (Who benefits?). (src)(cached)
– Wild description of how Opus 5 figured out how to create based on a PDF, but without any vision capabilities. It worked on the document blind, depending on tool calls to figure out the shape and measurements of the design. (src)(cached)
– Bad news, the UC admissions board has shelved the plan to bring back standardized testing. (src)(cached)