Favorites: Vintage Jets, Tax Brackets, and Building Permits
March 2, 2026 — BullshitBench v2 tests 70 models on hallucination, secretarial work disappeared across two decades, and Seedance 2.0 generates cinematic video from prompts
Kuwait accidentally shot down three US F-15s, the pilots all survived, and she wasn't the only one in good spirits minutes later.
Impressive that "they are keeping legitimate museum pieces in relatively good condition and flying". I wasn't aiming for all fighter planes today, but there's a mostly-air-based war going on right now, so I'm working with what I've got.
So no one is really sure what's going to happen next with Iranian leadership. If you think you know, feel free to go make some predictions. The IRGC commanders seem to have no idea themselves, and are apparently operating on their own.
If you had asked me what these lines would look like, this is not what I would have predicted this. I was thinking maybe it was more progressive during WWII, and indeed, the top income tax rate during the war was over 90%, but at the same time, the tax code had more loopholes then, so the actual amount paid still maxed out in the 40% range for the top 1% of earners.
Longer Reads
• The state of California knows that individual cities absolutely know what to do in order to get homes built, and so they’re moving the “pro-housing” designation to be outcome-based, and adding real benefits that accrue to cities that have it. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Having sex regularly associated with lower risk of cardiovascular diseases. But of course it’s observational, so don’t take it too seriously. (src)(cached)
– Zvi is significantly mollified by Sam Altman’s statement late today about updates to their contract with the DoD, but notes that the most important thing that we’re still waiting on is a walk back from the supply chain risk designation on Anthropic from the government.1 (src)(cached)
– A second version of the bullshit benchmark is already out, you can see the data here. (src)(cached)
– Anti retaliation bill from Liccardo, in response to the punitive supply chain risk designation. (src)(cached)
– The F35 was mocked by many for being a massive waste of money, but so far they seem to be performing pretty well. I only first learned that the F35 hate is foolish a few years back, but it’s nice to see that it’s still true. (src)(cached)
– I already had heard the stat that in the majority of US states, the single most common job is truck driver. But I didn’t realize that as of 1980 there were over a dozen states where secretary was a more common profession. And not only that, the number didn’t drop much till 2006. This has a bit of a lesson about how AI may affect the job landscape in the coming years, check out this short thread for more. (src)(cached)
– There has been some revisionist forgiveness of Robert Moses, but it really only forgives his beliefs about transportation and highways (arguments that he was merely a product of his times) but his beliefs about housing were insane. (src)(cached)
– We’re running out of non-biological explanations for the organic compounds Curiosity has found on Mars (src)(cached)
– New dataset of hard mathematics questions that are going to be used as a benchmark for AI systems. They asked researchers for hard questions that came up naturally in their own work and that only they knew the answers to. (src)(cached)
– One of the questions of public transit is in how much benefit it provides to other drivers by getting the riders off the road. Someone found a natural experiment, a monthlong transitworker strike in LA in 2003. The LA public transit system is not exactly a model of high usage or good value, but despite that, it seems to be providing over a billion dollars in value to the people who aren’t even riding it. (src)(cached)
– “Using the Jones Act to protect US shipbuilding capacity is like using the Endangered Species Act to protect the dodo bird.” (src)(cached)
– Anthropic studied how AI affected people’s ability to learn coding, the question of whether students learned wasn’t exactly about whether they used AI, it was more important how they use it. (src)(cached)
– Long thread of Seedance AI generated video examples. (src)(cached)
– YIMBY has succeeded not through a grassroots movement, but through elite persuasion. (src)(cached)
Others are less impressed