Favorites: Solar Super-Cycle, SCOTUS Jazz Hands, and AI Tutoring Triumph
CRISPR edits a teen’s stem cells, AI discovers a new drug in a closed loop and fiscal models crash
Sorry I’ve gotten a bit behind. Honestly a lot of my free time for projects has gone to generating games with Gemini. I made a Spider Solitaire implementation, a Where’s Waldo-style game, spot-the-differences, and a math racing game. I’ve also tried out some of the other new AI products.
Gotta check in on those Solar panel forecasts from time to time.
Part of why this is taking off like crazy is that modern batteries make the same amount of lithium go way way further than ones made 10 years ago. As one commenter said (cached) “1 kWh of old lithium ion batteries can be recycled to make more than 1 kWh of new lithium ion batteries.” While we're at it, next time you show someone that graph of solar panel production and they ask “what about at night”. A battery that can store all the power a modern panel produces weighs less than the panel (cached). I'm on a roll, so one more: you can also recycle solar panels (cached)! And again, you can make more than 1 watt of panel with 1 watt of recycled old panels.
This is totally inconsistent with their position on all other federal agencies. Sure looks like the conservative justices decided Constitutional law is just making things up (cached). Joe Weisenthal jokes (cached) that The Supreme Court’s “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States." t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by its shirt. Astoundingly, at least one person predicted this exact outcome a month ago. Amanda Fischer suspected SCOTUS would carve out the Fed, “Citing jazz hands” (cached).
I really like Journey of the Sorcerer
Flotsam and Jetsam
– California Assembly voted Unanimously to advance clean CEQA exemption for infill housing. What complete 180 from a decade ago, YIMBY really is getting things accomplished. (src)(cached)
– CRISPR used to edit stem cells of a teen with an autoimmune disease, it’ll take six months to be sure that it worked, but initial indications are positive. (src)(cached)
– So much of science depends on people not fabricating data, but the guy who made a fake paper about materials science and AI was wildly brazen. (src)(cached)
– Levitz argues that a core thing that the recent Biden tell-all books get wrong is arguing that democrats could have done better if Biden had officially dropped out after the midterms instead. No. He made a horrible mistake, but it was even earlier: he should have consolidated support behind someone else in 2020, or picked a different VP. (src)(cached)
– One guy asked Veo 3 to generate a stand up comic delivering a joke, and... it's pretty much flawless? It even came up with the joke itself, and the audience laughing. I generated one myself, took four tries, not because the first three looked bad, but because the jokes weren’t good enough. (src)(cached).
– At the same time that AI is totally throwing homework assignments into chaos, a new working paper found that AI chatbots were ridiculously effective as tutors in a trial in Nigeria, the students improved on standardized tests the equivalent of 3.2 years of schooling for every $100 invested. (src)(cached)
– Solar Panels are now so cheap that it’s better to just plop them on the ground than to put them on a rotating axis to track the sun, which had previously been the standard. (src)(cached)
– For the first time an AI with access to a wet lab in a closed loop found a novel treatment for a disease. It would still need trials, so it’s not cured, but it’s an impressive step. (src)(cached)
– Senate passed a ‘no tax on tips’ bill unanimously. What a dumb policy, time to go convert part of every eligible job’s pay to tips. Here come more tip screens (cached) (src)(cached)
– FDA may restrict access to COVID vaccines. Seems pretty annoying! I wonder if doctors will be willing to prescribe doses outside of normal FDA guidelines (something I believe they’ve always been allowed to do legally) (src)(cached)
– Our current fiscal policy trajectory is so bad that the systems for modeling it crash when you try to project it forward. (src)(cached)
– In June 2024 Trump went on the Tech Right podcast “All In”, and talked about how sad it is that foreign students who. Graduate from Harvard have to leave the country. He said in his administration we’d give foreign university students green cards on graduation. The hosts loved that proposal, and generally endorsed Trump. Today he banned Harvard from accepting any foreign students. The hosts of the All In podcast are morons. The ban on foreign Harvard students has been blocked by a federal judge already, but the Trump admin gets what they want just by creating uncertainty (cached). (src)(cached)
– One negative review of Abundance argues that regulation isn’t blocking Nuclear power. Their citation for the claim? The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (src)(cached)
– Ethan Mollick has a great example of the main advantage o3 has over Gemini 2.5. Despite perhaps not being quite as ‘smart’, it’s able to natively make a sequence of calling many different tools while working on answering a question. Here it uses search, python, image generation and many many thinking tokens. Theoretically you could set up Gemini in a workflow to do this, but it doesn’t yet happen in the Gemini app. Claude 4 can do it too (cached). (src)(cached)