Favorites: Musk Walk-Back, CEQA Wins, and Budget Bill on the Brink
Mid-morning gibraltar edition: House may pass the BBB, Waymo scaling laws, and MacOS Tahoe transcribes twice as fast
Only 4 house Republicans (cached) need to vote against the bill for it to stop here, but it seems likely it'll pass very soon. Senator Lisa Murkowski voted for it, but immediately (cached) told house republicans they shouldn't vote for it. Amazing to watch Musk realize (cached) in real time that the entire idea behind the bill is entirely false. The more Americans learn about the BBB, the less they like it (cached).
The only way to really ensure that your LLM connected to a terminal isn't going to blow everything up is to put it inside a secure VM. Frog disallowing `rm` to avoid disaster is not going to be successful. This is mostly funny because it’s pretty much exactly how Claude Code works, the interface makes you approve only certain kinds of commands, but almost anything you do on the command line can be leveraged into running any command you want. Block running bash along with rm? Well you can use python to run bash commands.
I laugh, but an equivalent photo of San Francisco shows a worse situation, but still a bunch of NIMBYs scream that the Sunset is full. And of course there are NIMBYs everywhere, here's one holding a sign that opposes Highrises in Midtown Manhattan (cached)!
Abundance has had some real wins recently in a modern day Hamiltonians vs Jeffersonians fight (cached). Governor Newsom gave Ezra a shout-out (cached) in signing the CEQA reform bill that absolutely flew (cached) through the legislature. People are still mad at Ezra. The second quote is a real quote from Abundance.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Ars Technica covered the physics of perfect cacio e pepe. The trick is to use a classic cornstarch slurry with just a teaspoon of cornstarch, but to bring above 60°C before adding the cheese. Much simpler, more reliable. (src)
– The reporter who told Trump about TACO probably erased trillions in global GDP (src)(cached)
– Japan is developing artificial universal donor blood. I think one of the inputs is expired donor blood, so it's not exactly going to be massively cheaper or more abundant. (src)(cached)
– "War refugee turned Nobel prize winning scientist in the US posts about Trump administration cuts to funding for his biomedical research. 'Within hours' he gets an email from China offering to move his lab to any Chinese city with guaranteed funding for 20 years" (src)(cached)
– As long as interest rates remain high, YIMBYs should be considering accelerated depreciation of assets to motivate building of new apartments. When Reagan signed ERTA in 1981 it lead to a massive increase in building that dropped as soon as it was repealed in 1986. (src)(cached)
– Trump says he’s again extending the deadline for a TikTok deal. And once again he has no authority to do this. (src)(cached)
– The narrative linking Japan’s stagnation since 1991 to its financial crisis is largely a myth, this short post argues that it's almost entirely about demographics. (src)(cached)
– San Francisco adopted a "Vision Zero", aiming for zero traffic deaths. They set detailed targets. They've made zero progress because they've essentially ignored well established approaches from other cities. They spend $25M per year somehow. (src)(cached)
– Grouping kids by reading level in school instead of by age made everyone happier, and scores improved. Seems like a good idea! Here's the article, it's weird that this is a contrarian take, and even weirder (cached) that teacher's unions often fight this reform. (src)(cached)
– Here's some stats about why the Jones Act still sucks. Hurts the economy, hurts offshore wind, impoverishes Puerto Rico, and doesn't accomplish it's stated goal of an american merchant marine fleet. (src)(cached)
– Scott Wiener is introducing legislation barring police from wearing masks or covering their identification, "The guy arresting you shouldn’t look like the guy in a ski mask robbing a liquor store". (src)(cached)
– Waymo published research indicating that AI scaling laws apply to self driving technology as well. Some have argued this means Tesla was right with their strategy of getting tons of vehicles collecting data onto the road fast. (src)(cached)
– China has a ton of high speed rail, arguably they've overbuilt, with tons of extremely unprofitable lines. They also have plenty of airplanes. But it is a useful experiment in finding out over which ranges people are most willing to use HSR given current speeds. Turns out, the sweet spot is like 100 to 150 miles (LA - San Diego) rather than 300 or 400 miles (SF-LA). (src)(cached)
– A US engineer managed to 3d print a VTOL drone that can fly for over an hour, up to 130 miles, and has a thread about challenges. But the crazy thing is that he can't open source the design because it's actually export restricted under US law. (src)(cached)
– Trump in 2020: Make Juneteenth a National Holiday. Trump on Juneteenth 2025: Too many holidays! (src)(cached)
– Kevin Erdmann: "In 2008, federal agencies cut about 15 million families out of the traditional mortgage market, and as a result low tier rent across cities has accumulated 40%+ inflation, devastating families with lower incomes in every city." Another commenter adds, "The Big Short popularized the idea that giving mortgages to low income people was evil and caused the recession." (src)(cached)
– The new transcription service built into the new MacOS Tahoe seems to have similar accuracy to OpenAI's whisper, but it runs a bit more than twice as fast! (src)