Favorites: Technology, Trust, and Transitions
I suspect most humans would not have been able to react in time to avoid an accident there. Waymo is already saving lives (cached) and it would be great if their rollout would go even faster. Here's a recent study by a third party insurance company that claims Waymo has a ~90% reduction in property damage and injuries (I’ll probably talk about this more tomorrow). One commenter (cached) said: “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of motor-vehicle related deaths in America.”
I'm so far behind that the Republican fight over the budget bill appears to have been resolved, and they’ve moved on to knifing each other about H1-B visas instead. But a takeaway for me was that once again Musk and Tesla's pledges to help China (cached) really cast a shadow over his heavy participation in US politics. In this case it makes the changes that resulted (cached) from his intervention in the recent budget reconciliation bill look suspect instead of just stupid.
Here's the data source. It really seems like something, cell phones, social networks, or perhaps better entertainment, is leading to fewer people forming lasting relationships. It's certainly possible that people are choosing not to officially get married because they don't have kids, but I'd think for most people the tax and legal challenges to not being married are enough to motivate even without kids. As much as some people find pro-natalism distasteful, surely many can see the value in helping people find partners.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Since Lula was elected president of Brazil, the rate of deforestation there has fallen by half. (src)(cached)
– Google ran a weird experiment where they had AI agents repeatedly play cooperation games and 'evolve' over time. They found that Claude agents became more cooperative, GPT4o stayed uncooperative, and Gemini stayed in the middle. Here's the paper. (src)(cached)
– Battery extender for Apple Airtag, interesting idea. (src)
– CEQA lawsuits are terrible, someone is using one to block resuming the lights on the bay bridge. (src)(cached)
– Interesting stats on how quickly various signin methods work. No surprise 'email me a code' is much slower than the other options. (src)
– Of all the bad things we are hearing about the time right before Biden dropped out of the race, one particularly bad item is that senior staff told everyone to avoid sharing any negative news stories with the president. (src)(cached)
– As much as people say the US is super consumerist and we make nothing to last, it's worth noting that our housing stock is quite old. Although the fact is, that's probably bad! (src)(cached)
– I didn't realize that by the time child labor laws were enacted, there was very little remaining child labor. There's a whole paper, but if you think about it, if a large number of kids were working, their parents would be the ones requiring it of them, and would not have voted for politicians promising to enact this reform. Some were pointing to child labor laws as evidence of the cruelty of capitalism, which is fair, but I think it's also an indictment of democracy that they couldn't be enacted as long as they'd make a big difference. To the extent we should credit something, it seems it's income growth and technology that gave us the excess capacity so that it wasn't worth making children work. (src)(cached)
– The menswear guy went on a tear about The Wirecutter's recommended jeans. Surprise, he recommends something expensive, made to last, and at least a mid-rise. But the background on modern jeans was still quite interesting. (src)(cached)
– a bit of good news, we’ve managed to wipe out the murder hornet in the US (src)(cached)
– There once existed a committee to approve which clothing was suitable to be sold in the USSR. It’s funny, but that’s how housing gets approved in the US today. (src)(cached)
– OpenAI announced their new model o3 (skipping o2 due to trademark concerns), it seems to be significantly better than o1, here’s a whole thread of graphs. (src)(cached)
– Musk is now supporting AfD in Germany, they’re pretty explicitly neonazis, so… not great. (src)(cached)
– More solar power was provided to the US grid than coal power in 2024 (src)(cached)
– Musk opposed a continuing resolution to keep the federal government open until it had a provision removed that would have prevented high tech investment in China. Seems to line up with the fact that he never criticizes China or the CCP but criticizes the US constantly. (src)(cached)
– 38 Republicans broke with Trump on the spending bill, seems to indicate that it will be hard for him to get anything past the legislature when he’s in office. (src)(cached)
– There’s an inconsistency between Republicans desire for short laws and their approval of the end of Chevron deference. If agencies can’t make judgment calls, then laws are gonna have to be really long to account for every possible situation. (src)(cached)
– Short thread about how Chinese debt has changed over the last 15 years. Sorta looks like they’re heading for some sort of crash (src)(cached)