Favorites: Missiles, Mythos, and Medical Scanners

June 23, 2026 — Valar Atomics reaches reactor criticality, Disneyland debuts a lifelike Olaf robot, a dog beats cancer with a custom mRNA vaccine.

At first we thought that Ukraine blew up this tank of oil, but it turns out this particular hit was self inflicted. (src)(cached)

The entire situation around Anthropic is a real mess, but I thought this was a unique takeaway. Anthropic thought they needed to send someone technical to negotiate, and they did, but that was simply the wrong move. Shoulda sent in a Sales Chad. echos of Margin Call’s “it’s not brains” (cached) that gets people to the very top. One interesting item was that before it got banned, people were very impressed, with one person saying they thought Anthropic's most powerful class of models should require a gun license because they're so powerful/terrifying to use. This, of course opens up an avenue to getting rid of the executive branch limits on model usage: (src)(cached)

Maybe it'd work, it's very conservative coded at least. More seriously, the Trump admin's Executive Order on this is pretty clearly illegal, but Anthropic really doesn't want to antagonize the Trump admin. Also, there probably is a legal way to set up the Executive order. So for both those reasons Anthropic is playing along and working to assuage the Trump admin's concerns around Fable. (src)(cached)

You may need to squint, but look at the text _real_ carefully. The bit of research I did indicates that this low-contrast trick hasn’t been explicitly banned in this _particular_ context yet. They’re betting the Trump admin FDA isn’t gonna be interested in modifying the enforcement rules to disallow it. (src)(cached)

Midjourney (the AI image generation company) shares that they've developed a hardware device. If your first guess was that it would have something to do with generating images or scanning things to load them into image generating systems you wouldn't be alone, that's what I also guessed. But no! It's an insanely detailed ultrasonic medical imaging system. It's not as high resolution as a CAT or MRI, although they think they can get close, what's important is that it's very cheap to operate, Midjourney thinks people could use it monthly in order to generate differentials, which would diffuse some of the problems with whole-body-imaging resulting in irrelevant noise findings. Because FDA approval will take a while, Midjourney is starting by installing these at a new wellness spa in SF (cached), and it looks pretty cool. Hank Green has a cautiously optimistic post (cached), where he calls this couldn't replace MRI or CAT scans but will probably be a net good for medicine. (src)(cached)

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Yes, I opened this thinking it was related to the YouTube channel “Every Frame a Painting” about film, but it turns out it’s about something better: interface animation design. “If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see.” (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Interesting article about US companies manufacturing actuators, and two different companies that disagree about how it should best be done. One things the best path is to build the entire end-to-end system here in the US, the other wants to own factories in ally countries, but have the design (including new AI design assistance of course) done in the US. (src)(cached)

• Incredible essay arguing that humanoid robots are just not going to be able to do the kind of dexterous fine-detail work humans can do for a very long time. The author is a bit excessively cynical about other areas of AI and robotics enough to make me a bit less trusting of his opinions on humanoids. But the TL;DR: human fingertips are ridiculously sensitive and that sensitivity is pretty core to us being able to do any fine detail work. One example was that if you anaesthetise someone's fingertips they suddenly really struggle with otherwise easy tasks. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Valar Atomics achieved criticality on their new nuclear reactor. Theirs are a new generation of reactor that are very high temperature, meaning it could be used as industrial heat source, something previously only achievable using hydrocarbons. (src)(cached)

– – The NYPD saw a white guy within the security perimeter of the NY Knicks game and immediately grabbed him and prepared to arrest him. There's video of the altercation, and after a moment they realize that actually he's Tyler Kolek, Knicks pointguard. One commenter jokes "It took 250 years but American cops finally racially profiled a white guy". (src)(cached)

– A paper found that Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics cost the economy orders of magnitude more than the BLS’ entire budget. But I mean, I wouldn’t expect the Trump admin to do anything even in the vicinity of cost benefit analysis. (src)(cached)

– A bulletproof CEQA environmental impact report is one where if you fire a bullet at one side of the report, it’s thick enough that it doesn’t come out the other side. One EIR for 6000 homes ran for 36 years and runs for dozens of volumes (src)(cached)

– The LA “mansion tax” was always actually a real estate transfer tax on any valuable residential, including apartments. Unsurprisingly it has reduced apartment construction by like 30%. They are considering options, but outright repeal doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. (src)(cached)

– US test scores for elementary school students show current 13 year olds have the lowest scores of any cohort since the 1970s. The good news is that 9 year olds are doing much better (cached) Presumably because they were not in school during the covid lockdowns. Having kids of of school is a detriment to their learning! (src)(cached)

– Once private charity is combined with state welfare, the US transfers more money per capita than Europe does. It helps to be richer of course, but Geloso asks if the point of welfare is to fight poverty or to create equality. If it’s to fight poverty, more growth (the American model) is clearly superior. But obviously it doesn’t achieve equality. (src)(cached)

– Zelda: Ocarina of Time is being remade for modern systems. Someone pointed out that the realism is gonna make some parts of that game way more terrifying. (src)(cached)

– San Francisco seems to have found a (minor) workaround for prop 13: a progressive parcel tax. Larger lots get higher rates. Very cool, and a very efficient way to fund transit. (src)(cached)