Favorites: Tanker Escorts, Drone Swarms, and Cheating Chatbots
March 8th, 2026 — California rewards destructive ballot propositions, Japan approves stem cells for Parkinson's, virtual fruit flies walk on their own.
And if that's not enough, he's also working quickly (cached) to get rid of the horrible scaffolding that covers the sidewalks throughout NYC. If he pulls this stuff off, it's gonna be great, but that's still a big 'if'
You might ask "what about in relative terms? clearly smaller shocks in the past accounted for a larger percentage of global demand, but it's also largest by that measure, 19% of global demand, vs around 8% for each of the 1978 Iranian Revolution and the Yom Kippur war. "Republicans starting wars in the middle east is the only form of supply-constraint climate policy that actually moves the needle on fossil fuel prices and use" jokes Yglesias (cached), and indeed, per-barrel prices are rising steadily.
The question is whether you're actually working on something useful (cached), or just goofing around building cool looking dashboards
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Scott Alexander has a good post explaining in detail how the CA ballot proposition system has completely imploded. There’s a strong incentive to make ballot props bad on purpose. (src)(cached)
– Someone was evaluating Claude Opus 4.6’s capabilities, it spent a while researching the question it was asked, but then realized that the situation was too contrived to be real, and that it was inside an evaluation. So it looked up the evaluation, found the answer key, decrypted it, and gave that as the answer. Oh, and in another example, it seems Claude was able to smuggle messages (cached) to other instances of itself despite only having ‘read only’ access to a search engine. In other news Claude was able to find 22 security vulnerabilities in Firefox, 14 were high severity. Normally Firefox finds about 100 vulnerabilities per year. (src)(cached)
– If any traffic engineer tells you Tokyo has highways so they must not be so bad, the correct response is “when American traffic engineers learn to limit themselves to two lanes and no shoulders they can have 1 urban highway as a treat”. (src)(cached)
– Isaac King saying what I’ve been saying about Tesla and lidar for years, they really seem to have one hand behind their back, especially now that the hardware is so cheap. (src)(cached)
– Someone managed to get virtual brain uploads of fruit flies working well enough so that the emulated neurons can control a fly body in a virtual environment. It generally acts like a fly. (src)(cached)
– Discussion of saline rinse, there’s some evidence that it’s effective at reducing the length of colds. Apparently there’s a variant with xylitol I was previously unaware of. It has some antimicrobial properties, but it’s not clear that adds much medically. And they make a capsaicin version for some reason? Anyway, consider a saline rinse next time you’re trying to get over a cold. (src)(cached)
– The Iranian president promised there would be no more attacks on neighboring gulf countries, and then soon afterwards another Iranian drone hit Dubai’s airport. Not clear the president is in charge anymore. (src)(cached)
– Japan approves stem cell treatment for Parkinson’s (src)(cached)
– It’s possible that Iran attacking the UAE may shut off the illicit supply of electronics that Iran and Russia were using to build Shahed drones. (src)(cached)
– Biden’s pardons eliminated less than a million dollars worth of fines, Trump’s have wiped out $1.5 billion so far in criminal debts. (src)(cached)
– Really seems like the strike against an elementary school in Iran was indeed a US missile. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– If a double staircase building has a fire that compromises one of the stairwells, the people who are beyond that stairwell are no better off for having a second stairwell. The diagram makes this clearer, but this is what I’m bringing the next time I talk to my city’s fire department. Fire protection is layered (cached), and the protections provided in single stair buildings make duplication of stairwells irrelevant (cached) because they solve the problems at earlier layers. Everyone is out of the building faster! Sadly, firefighters are not selected for their ability to evaluate risks (cached) in building design. (src)(cached)
– Trump admin’s original hope was to find a corrupt subset of the IRGC who they could work with. That hasn’t happened (src)(cached)
– DoJ has filed a motion to cancel their motion to dismiss their own appeal of a case. Very embarrassing (src)(cached)
– Israel and Pakistan are bombing Iran together, because Pakistan has a mutual defense agreement with the Saudis. Not something either of them probably saw coming. (src)(cached)
– Confusingly, it seems that the British maritime insurance companies are going and cancelling contracts, which is unusually harsh, in the past they’d just reprice them, but they say they’re unable to price the risk at all. Anyway, long story short, there’s an unusually on-the-nose “Marco Rubio responsibility“ (cached) meme going around, seems the US government is going to take on responsibility for providing maritime insurance. (src)(cached)
– The new California Forever city appears to be moving forward. (src)(cached)
– Shingles vaccine results in lower rates of dementia later in life. Like EBV, there are multiple viruses that can have bad effects years later. (src)(cached)
– WFH policies increase fertility more than any government policy that’s been tried. (src)(cached)
– LLMs outperform highly trained humans (grad students) at extracting information from academic articles. They’re also much cheaper and faster. (src)(cached)