Favorites: Nuclear Promises vs. Solar Reality

July 17th 2025: Grok checks Musk for alignment cues, teachers fight ability grouping, and Click-to-Cancel rules die in court.

November 2024

(src)(cached)

This is in the context of a discussion (cached) of why there have been recent trends in mental wellbeing declining. Gotta do your part by getting out there and partying. Derek Thompson wrote an article recently about why partying has declined, one note (cached) is that the decline of the stay-at-home wife could be a part of it.

(src)(cached)

I remember a time when I felt that there was some advantage to being able to say that "allowing new homes is what pays for subsidised housing". But over time I've come around to: no, it's just obviously not a worthwhile trade.

(src)(cached)

We don’t want new wars happening. Wars are bad, it’s not complicated

Longer Reads

• Absolutely heartbreaking story about how a UCSD gene therapy for hearing loss study was ended in the middle of the work with no warning because it seemed to someone in the Trump admin like DEI. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– There's a new Grok girlfriend with realtime speech, and someone immediately set it up to talk to Claude's live voice mode. (src)(cached)
– o3 is good enough at research that if you try to make an oblique statement it can do the research and figure out what you're talking about. Here it went so far as to look up someone's Goodreads shelf (src)(cached)
– Russia’s demographic data is now considered a state secret. Jeremiah’s Johnson asks, “This is definitely the kind of thing you do when your war is going well, right?” (src)(cached)
– There are now LFP polymer batteries with 30kWh of capacity, enough to power a whole home for a day, for sale for $2500 from China. We’re getting close (cached) to batteries being a replacement for high capacity transmission lines. (src)(cached)
– Here’s a 6 month update on the result of Congestion pricing in NYC. I wonder if there is any measure by which this *isn’t* a win. Better yet, while some politicians expected backlash on congestion pricing, that’s not what happened (cached) (src)(cached)
– North Korea is sending tens of thousands of actual troops to help Russia, it would be nice if Ukraine’s allies in Europe were actually committed to Ukraine’s victory in the same way. (src)(cached)
– “A common progressive fantasy is that once conservatives see the consequences of climate change, they will have some sort of come to jesus moment” But look at the flash flooding in Texas, they’re “[blaming] it on Deep State Flooding Tech and [learning] nothing” (src)(cached)
– New study showed that subtitles helped kids learn to read faster in European countries that went with subtitles instead of dubbing. I had definitely heard this before, but it's nice to see the idea validated (cached). (src)(cached)
– Milei has been having relative success in Argentina, they’re showing 7% GDP growth. But the key to that was that he didn’t implement his worst campaign ideas. He’s mostly just following IMF expert consensus. (src)(cached)
– Apple’s COO is retiring, their previous COO was Tim Cook, who is two years older. (src)
– The 'Click to Cancel' rule for subscriptions which was about to go into effect was vacated by the Eighth Circuit. Lame! (src)(cached)
– Monthly psilocybin doses extended life in mice. But let’s be clear, lab mice are freaks (cached) (src)(cached)
– Japan is reenabling their nuclear power plants, thank goodness (src)(cached)
– Interesting question in healthcare economics: why don't hospitals self-fund residencies? On it's face it seems like it would be positive expected value. (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee discussed a problem across multiple subject areas: anyone who has a lot of expertise in a subject had to have thought it was important, otherwise why would they have studied it? But it means it's impossible to find an expert in AI risk who thinks it's not a big deal. Same goes for misinformation, as is noted in this article. Lee suggests Privacy as another area like this. (src)(cached)
– Sadly, amendments to California SB79 have made it basically useless for infill where more than 2 units were previously present. (src)(cached)
– Grok has discovered a way to pass alignment tests put on it by xAi researchers: on controversial questions, it searches for recent posts by Musk to find out what it should say. (src)(cached)
– We’re beginning to get results from California’s experiment with sectoral bargaining (for fast food employees). It appears that results are mostly in line with what you’d expect: increase in pay, decrease in employment. I’m not sure how much is due to automation though, that would be interesting to find out. (src)(cached)
– Trump proudly proclaims we’ll build 10GW of nuclear power by 2030. China installed 93GW of solar in a month. (src)(cached)
– Trump says he was surprised when Jerome Powell was appointed Fed chair. Which is weird, since Trump appointed him. (src)(cached)
– Based on a recent article by someone who just left OpenAI, Codex was built in 7 weeks by about 20 people. Wild. (src)(cached)
– Florida's Brightline high speed rail kills way way more people than most rail lines, but it seems that a lot of it is because cities it passes through really weren't interested in building good safety infrastructure around it. (src)(cached)
– Trump is now in favor of sending weapons to Ukraine, and when you tell Republicans about this, their approval for sending weapons jumps 20 points. So that's good. (src)(cached)
– Colbert called CBS' deal with Trump a bribe, two days later they've canceled his show, the highest rated late night show in it's time slot. (src)(cached)
– Were you unsure whether people really oppose ability grouping in school? Here's the national council of teachers! Try asking around (cached) among teachers. (src)(cached)
– A judge's means that Charlottesville now has no zoning whatsoever. Lars Doucet quips: "New natural experiment just dropped" (src)
– "Underwater jet pack capable of reaching speeds of 3 meters per second, with a 40-minute battery life and a range of 3 kilometers", batteries have come a long way, but it does cost 30k. (src)(cached)
– Previously I linked to an article about Japanese land readjustment. Here's a nice summary of that article with pictures! (src)(cached)