Favorites: Senate Sabotage, Seaside Density, and Saturated Benchmarks
March 11, 2026 — GLP-1 patients keep weight off at lower doses, Ford's wiring harness weighs 70 pounds more than Tesla's, tech news sites lose up to 97% of their traffic.
There's nothing wrong with density next to the ocean. Next to the ocean is where people want to be, and by making some areas by the ocean dense, we have more space for true wilderness.
If you're wondering, yes, this was a real ad in the 1970s. I’m sorry I have such a weakness for this meme format. Here’s the original.
The Senate voted 89-9 to add an amendment to an otherwise amazing YIMBY bill that would make it basically illegal for a company to build rental apartments. Senator Schatz went on the floor and said that the amendment was basically a drafting error (cached), and then Warren immediately dug in and said it was 100% on purpose (cached). "make it illegal for chain restaurants to sell hamburgers, food is for people not corporations" would just obviously be stupid (cached), the biggest difference is that apartments are a much bigger part of the US economy than hamburgers.
Longer Reads
• Short thread about how Seattle implemented per-task minimum pay for drivers. This economist expected that while this might not help part-time drivers much, he thought that full time drivers would see some overall increase in pay from this. But no, pay stayed the same for pretty much all drivers, for a bunch of reasons. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– FBI is reporting that Iran was (is?) planning to attack California using drones launched off of boats in the Pacific. They’ve got a 1500 mile range, so those could be pretty far out. (src)(cached)
– Models are now more persuasive on political issues than campaign advertisements. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09884 (src)(cached)
– DC city council is waiting on a report from the DoT before allowing Waymo, but there’s a larger pattern: all Waymo’s recent expansion cities have been in red states. (src)(cached)
– new /btw feature in Claude code looks great (src)(cached)
– I had not previously seen how much downtown Brooklyn has changed in the last 20 years. It’s gotten a lot denser. (src)(cached)
– I was asked recently what I thought Claude’s secret sauce was, here’s an answer from Dean Ball I find compelling, it boils down to: “by being more virtuous, the model is more capable of self reflection, which improves results” (src)(cached)
– Andrej Karpathy wrote a long post about some experiments with using an LLM to train and optimize an LLM. He let an AI agent run experiments autonomously overnight, and it found ~20 improvements he’d missed after extensive manual tuning. This is like a baby version of what the full labs are doing, but he’s demonstrating it in public (src)(cached)
– Ukraine found a new way to take out fiber optic connected Russian drones. They sweep large areas with a high-powered laser, since the fiber optic cables are unshielded, the laser light enters into the cable and fries the transceivers. It possibly is also frying the image sensors. (src)(cached)
– Possible Trump will ease the Jones act in response to high oil prices. Unfortunately he probably won’t do anything about the part blocking offshore wind. (src)(cached)
– It appears that patients who lose weight successfully with GLP-1s manage to keep the weight off using a much lower dosage. (src)(cached)
– After having already released the Mustang Mach-e, Ford tore down a Tesla was surprised by what they found. But like, why the hell didn’t they do that before they released their own EV? (src)(cached)
– Traffic at all the tech news websites is absolutely tanking, because AI tools are replacing them. But where do the AIs get their data from? How is anything going to work? Noah Smith quips that “The Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox comes for the World Wide Web” (src)(cached)
– The ARC-AGI-2 Prize went from single digit percent success rate to saturated in less than a year. (Gemini-3 Deep Think just scored 84% on it.) (src)(cached)
– In response to arguments that AI is unusual as a technology that people have to be ‘talked into’ trying, Derek Thompson pointed out that while the Telephone was invented in the 1870s, three decades later there were still basically no telephones in use. But AI has been around for three years and a majority of Americans say they use it at least weekly. (src)(cached)
– The CA single stair report was turned in months late and basically recommended the bare minimum. But the good news is that legislators can just ignore the report and move forward with reforms. (src)(cached)