Favorites: Translations, Transit, and Tribal Rights
April 6, 2026 — Gene therapy restores hearing in weeks, Outlook crashes in orbit, NYC fills potholes in 90 seconds.
Posts on Twitter are now being universally translated into the language of the current user, which is leading to a lot more visibility across divides. I'm not sure this is a great idea, but there are certainly some people who are excited (cached). Good cultural exchange in both directions.
The part where density drops at the center for Tokyo isn't an artifact, but I get the impression that Tokyo's public transit is good enough that the center of town actually has less residential than the area just outside the center of town.
It's actually better even than that, because the Ukrainian drone is reusable.
Looks ready to sprinkle on some frosting!
If there’s literally one thing I know about Gorsuch it’s that he cares a lot about the rights of Native Americans under US law. How were they not prepared for this?
Longer Reads
• Anthropic identified vectors in the state of the model that represented various emotions. Focusing in, they investigated ‘calm’ and ‘desperate’ emotions, found that when Claude is given a programming task that is impossible, the desperation emotion becomes stronger and calm weaker, especially if it decides to cheat. Similarly, they find that artificially increasing the desperation or decreasing calm causes the model to be more likely to cheat in tests. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Loophole, a system to help you figure out if a proposed code of laws has scenarios that break a given set of codified laws. It looks for both places where the law has unintended overreach or leaves bad actions in the clear. LLM Agents come up with scenarios and then a judge agent adjudicates them. (src)(cached)
– A gene therapy gives hearing back to people born deaf due to certain specific conditions. It required a single injection into the inner ear, worked for every patient in a matter of weeks. (src)(cached)
– Environmental review has caused direct environmental damage once again, DC’s sewage line has burst and spilled into the Potomac, repairs had been delayed because of studies of ‘environmental impact’ of the construction. This is one of the largest sewage leaks in US history (cached) (src)(cached)
– Astronauts on Artemis II were having a lot of trouble getting Microsoft Outlook to work. Space Force did a great bit about this a few years back. (src)(cached)
– NYC has started working really hard to close potholes. They have crews that can fill one in something like 90 seconds, so that they barely even impede traffic. (src)(cached)
– While some minimum wage laws had good effects on net, California’s fast food minimum wage appears to have actually been high enough to measurably increase prices. One obvious thing to note: lower income people buy more fast food (cached), so the distributional effects are also bad. (src)(cached)
– SFO’s landing capacity will drop from 54 to 36 per hour because the FAA has banned parallel landings. (src)(cached)
– Single stair passes unanimously in DC’s City Council. (src)(cached)
– An Anthropic employee made a mistake and leaked the source for the Claude Code harness. One of the people who managed to grab a copy worked overnight to rewrite the whole thing in python, to avoid getting a DMCA takedown. The theory is that as a derivative work, it’s protected. I’m not sure if that’s true, but if Anthropic tries to argue that AI generated code shouldn’t count, then Claude Code itself isn’t protected, as they’ve stated publicly multiple times that the vast majority of it is AI written. Their winning move is probably not to get into a legal fight on this (cached). Amusingly, someone sent a PR to Anthropic to add the source code back to the Claude Code repo. Amusingly, someone sent a PR to Anthropic (cached) to add the source code back to the Claude Code repo. (src)(cached)