Favorites: Massing, Shovel Blades, and Attention
July 10, 2026 — Platner earns nothing from the oyster farm that defines him, a single infusion cuts LDL cholesterol by 62%, a professor moves the final in-person and a third of the class drops.
Everyone reacted to that post from Tworek (a former OpenAI VP) because he referred to the transformer architecture in the past tense. “OMG, what are they moving on to? What have they found?”. But xAI has rented out much of their compute capacity to competitors, so their best chance at figuring out what the alleged new architecture is might be listening to the vibrations of the Blackwell GPUs they rented out. But Grok 4.5 was just released and reviews are surprisingly positive, so maybe it worked? (src)(cached)
First of all, I can’t say enough good things about ornamentation instead of massing breaks for making buildings look good. Secondly, I think this building on the left is a good example of what California ornamentation can be: details without relying on brick or stone for a fancy look. Anyway, if you want to have a look at the specifics of LA’s objective design standards you can do that (cached), it’s pretty bad. (src)(cached)
I uh… that’s not the kind of building design that I would recommend cities adopt, but… whatever you gotta do to get the building built. (src)(cached)
Longer Reads
• Lovely blog post about how economic growth is everything, the “causal mechanism for almost everything we care about”. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– You know how they say the trick in a gold rush is to sell shovels? Samsung has just overtaken Nvidia to be the most profitable company in the world. It turns out maybe you want to sell shovel blades to the shovel maker. (src)(cached)
– Pretty strong evidence that on take-home exams in university, everyone is cheating by using AI. A professor switched the final from take home to in person at the last minute, and something like a third of the class immediately dropped out. Of the remaining ones, their scores fell precipitously from their midterm grades. You do expect some drop from in-person timed to take-home, but these scores dropped by like… half. (and that’s the students who didn’t drop!) (src)(cached)
– Platner had confided in various friendly publications that even though he’s billed everywhere as a humble oyster farmer, he doesn’t actually make any money on that. McArdle jokes that in the same way that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Platner is a Rich person’s idea of a poor person. (src)(cached)
– More interesting findings from the J-Space discovery: when you have typos in your prompt, the model is spending some of it’s mental energy thinking about how stupid you are. At least Qwen certainly is. (src)(cached)
– Every kid deserves to be taught at the level they’re ready for, and refusing to do that is one of the worst-polling Democratic-aligned policies out there. We need to end it, it’s the right thing to do, and also it’s popular. (src)(cached)
– Platner is refusing to pull out of the race unless he can choose the new candidate, which folks are rightly pointing out is crazy. When they sent a shortlist of three names, one of them was a 70 year old who the Platner campaign clearly didn’t even think was a serious recommendation. The process the Maine Democratic Party has settled on looks like it actually will respect the will of the people (cached) who voted for Platner, while crucially not including him or his team directly in any way. (src)(cached)
– Would be nice if Jared Golden agrees to run for the Maine Senate seat, since he’d be the most likely to win. But unfortunately many involved in the decision don’t care about winning the election as much as they care about winning factional battles. (src)(cached)
– A majority of British people support the ‘triple lock’ which is the mechanism by which the British government will be impoverished over the coming decades, transferring a huge amount of money from the young to the old, far beyond what was originally envisioned when their pension system was created. (src)(cached)
– It’s not the first time making this joke, but US corporate taxes are already the economically ideal way for the people of the US to profit from the success of US corporations. But no, Trump wants to take a 5% stake in AI companies. That way lies madness. (src)(cached)
– Who remembers that it was Sanders who was the last to say we should drop Joe Biden as the candidate. Clearly they liked him! But here we are a couple years later and leftists act like Biden was the devil for his policy on Israel. At the time Sanders was willing to explain that he felt it was worthwhile to compromise (cached) on foreign policy because of how great Biden’s domestic policies are. But why not make that trade-off in other situations? (src)(cached)
– Gene editing for lowering cholesterol. Very cool phase 1 results for VERVE-102, but very small number of people, so give it time. (src)(cached)
– If you’re wondering how building safety professionals could possibly have justified to themselves and others that we should have such wasteful fire codes, here’s a specific quote example. During congressional testimony, this NFPA representative says that the US needs wasteful fire codes because compared to Europeans, Americans are too stupid. In my opinion, that’s not correct, and not a good way to make policy. (src)(cached)
– It was a while ago, but the homeland security policy that green card applicants must return to their home country to apply will be unbelievably damaging if put into practice. One commenter jokes “China could drop a nuke on Silicon Valley and it still wouldn’t do this much damage”. (src)(cached)