Favorites: Musk-Trump Meltdown, Solar Surge, and Senate SB 79 Success
June 8th 2025: Solar hits 11 % of U.S. electricity, AI leaders quietly swap hype for products, and NYC’s trash solution actually works.
This sounds right to me. The luminosity control net based diffusion generations like the one above (more examples) are stunning to me and would be exceedingly difficult to do by hand. If it wasn’t for instant over saturation they’d be more memorable.
Single stair reform is gaining steam. It’s worth beginning a discussion with fire departments.
I liked the original "beans have to take turns" meme, wild to see the US Government defunding agicultural research considering how valuable it's been in the past. Look how much our soybean yields have risen over the decades (cached).
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Everyone told Musk he's gonna get stabbed in the back by Trump. And right on schedule... Musk finally went public with the fact that he thinks the spending bill is terrible (cached) and the tariffs are bad as well (cached). So Trump threatened to end SpaceX/Tesla contracts (cached), Musk threatened to end development of the SpaceX Dragon built for NASA (cached). So Trump said Musk wanted an EV mandate and Musk called him a liar (cached). Musk then followed up by saying (as others have) Trump is in the Epstein documents (cached) and should be impeached (cached). It's good I cached those, because some of the tweets are now deleted, but the one where Musk points out that he'll be active in politics a lot longer than Trump will (cached) is still up. Trump seems to have deescalated a bit (cached). But they're not even fighting over the most important part of the bill, which is that it's going to cut millions of americans off (cached) from healthcare. (src)(cached)
– some data indicating that falling birth rates are because people aren't finding partners, rather than because partners are having fewer kids (src)(cached)
– Los Angeles' La Sombrita project was famously horrible, but NYC's implementation of enclosed garbage containers is basically the inverse, they saw other cities do something better, they copied it, and it's working great. (src)(cached)
– SB 79 passed the California Senate! (src)(cached)
– Eric Adams is getting kicked out of office for the Turkish bribes, but annoyingly he's made huge progress on NYC's worst problems (src)(cached)
– The US is such an unstable place to do business right now that some US companies are moving to China. (src)(cached)
– A surprisingly high proportion of people who go off GLP-1s keep the weight off. (44% regain some or all the weight) (src)(cached)
– The Secretary of commerce admits that there's nothing other countries can do in terms of lowering their own barriers to US trade that would cause us to lower tariffs on them. (src)(cached)
– Stephen Miller is so hell bent on doing more deportations that he’s redirecting unrelated law enforcement agencies away from critical activities. (src)(cached)
– Pretty straightforwardly clear that the TACO attack on Trump is the wrong strategy for democrats. He hasn’t backed down on tariffs! (src)(cached)
– Truth social was not able to handle the influx of traffic caused by the Trump/Musk blowup. (src)(cached)
– The fact is, Musk is somehow even more unpopular than Trump. Disassociating himself from Musk might actually be good for Trump in terms of public opinion. (src)(cached)
– And now Steve Bannon is saying they should try to deport Musk. (src)(cached)
– Solar supplied 11% of US electricity last month. That's up from 8% a year earlier. (src)(cached)
– Democrats passed legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act that disproportionately helps red states, and then Republicans come into power with the publicly stated goal of finding a way to take money away from Blue states. (src)(cached)
– Major figures in AI are pivoting away from talking about super intelligence, now it's all about productization, because AI isn't an exponential, it's a sigmoid. all exponentials are actually a sigmoid you don't see yet (src)(cached)
– In the US, Unions often stand in the way of lowering costs of public services, but it doesn't have to be that way, in France they often favored policies that resulted in labor-saving automation. (src)(cached)
– One thing about a future of more AI driving is that with fewer crashes, it'll be possible to make cars less bulky with less space needed for components that reduce the damage from a crash. (src)(cached)
– "The government deliberately spread disinformation about aliens and Area 51." The rumors about Aliens were literally planted by the US government. (src)(cached)
– Ezra Klein responds to critiques of “Abundance” about a lack of a theory of political power with a very direct explanation of his theory of power. (src)(cached)