Gemini Gains, Factories and Getting to One Stair
September 4, 2025 — Solar keeps winning in Africa, a vaccine-efficacy tweak fixes the math, and Newsom looks weak for a national run.
Gemini 2.5’s image editing capabilities are now top notch. Although I still am not impressed with its Ghiblification capabilities, it’s probably now the best image editing AI out there. Here’s some colorization I did:
I tend to get the best results when I don’t ask for colorization. There’s too many examples out there of that not looking very good. While it can’t intuit hair color from a B/W photo, it’s simple enough to fix it if you know the correct color.
We need to get rid of double staircase! It's ugly, it wastes space, and it doesn't seem to do anything to improve fire safety!
I really appreciate that Nate Silver handled the math of whether an all-out war in Gerrymandering between red and blue states would advantage Republicans or Democrats. Seems likely to be either a wash or a slight Dem edge.
It’s not like every Eastern European country had this kind of growth after the Cold War. Some didn’t do these kinds of reforms, but mostly the others were just extremely corrupt. There’s really no substitute for low levels of public corruption the core thing (cached) Russia was lacking. On the other hand, the UK's lack of progress is impressive in a sort of grotesque way (cached), how do they stay as prosperous as they have with such a horrible degrowth electrical policy. Part of the answer is that this is measuring income, not wealth (cached), the UK is still very wealthy.
In case it’s not clear, that’s an assembly line for SpaceX Starship, a Saturn V class heavy-lift rocket, except each one is reusable. We really should be finding a way to incentivize creation of new large-scale factories in the US. In recent years it seems like it's just Musk and Hyundai (cached). but the current administration’s tariffs in input materials are going to hobble new factories. Even Mike Pence knows that the structure of Trump’s tariffs hurts American manufacturing instead of helping, and he's out there posting about it (cached).
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Some Vaccine efficacy measurements were undercounting effectiveness because they weren’t correctly accounting for the benefit of converting symptomatic infections into asymptomatic infections. (src)(cached)
– Another, clearer note on why Newsom is probably not a good national candidate, this time by analogy: In the NBA, the tournament structure means that if you’re in the Finals, it means you beat a lot of other very good teams. But in Politics there’s no such structure. Newsom has never beaten a Republican in a close race. Yglesias goes further and argues that the skills you need to win a Democratic primary are probably *anti-correlated* with the skills you need to win a national general election. (src)(cached)
– From an opinion in the SF Chronicle: "[W]hen I hear leaders I respect hesitating, quibbling over whether SB79 is 100% perfect, I have to ask: What world are you living in?" (src)(cached)
– Solar power is taking off in Africa because it’s cheaper than anything else. (src)(cached)
– 74% of California voters say the proposed CEQA reform would be a positive. Another 14% say it doesn’t go far enough. (src)(cached)
– A city councilmember in Orange County is approving new homes near transit because of SB 79, even though it’s not even passed yet. They know that such a project will inevitably get built so they’re moving forward now so that they have more control. Here's the article if you want details. (src)(cached)
– John Gruber recommends this great video explaining the design of AirPods, great graphics from the high res CT scan of the device. (src)
– I'm a bit late to the party, but it's impressive that Mamdani cooked up a citywide scavenger hunt based on an Eric Adams scandal in just a few days. (src)(cached)