Sam Bankman-Fried’s Prison Experiment | New York Magazine

26-minute read

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the role Bankman-Fried’s philosophy played in his downfall. The first school says it was all a smoke screen to mask ordinary motives like power and influence. The second school, more compelling as Greek tragedy, says that Bankman-Fried was the victim of his own moral framework. In this telling, he regarded innocent FTX depositors or burdensome accounting practices as stick figures in a trolley problem whom he would toss onto the tracks if he decided doing so might improve the universe down the line. At trial, a picture emerged of a crime committed not in spite of Bankman-Fried’s altruistic pose but as the logical extension of his belief system.

Bankman-Fried, for what it’s worth, rejects both schools of thought. When I asked whether EA-driven proclivity for big risky bets led him down the path to fraud, he returned to his bottom line: He never risked anybody else’s money because he never lost anybody’s money.

In a way, Bankman-Fried is living out a utilitarian thought experiment. On the one hand, he’s eager to combat the public perception that he is an amoral, dishonest person, which is why he agreed to talk to a journalist willing to sift through his prison memoir and speak to his prison friends. On the other hand, he is laying on thick his appreciation of Trump to maximize his chances of clemency. If Bankman-Fried truly believes that his best chance to do good in the world is to get himself out of prison, but can do so only by pretending he’s MAGA, what’s the right thing to do?

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How trust funds made the modern world | Benedict’s Substack

13-minute read

I would not have expected trusts to be this interesting:

Trust funds do not have a good reputation. The ‘trust fund baby’ is the child of a wealthy family whose lavish lifestyle is funded by their parents’ money. As well as the super-wealthy, trusts are associated with tax avoidance, offshore financial centres, and shadowy, complex chains of ownership of assets.

In fact, trusts are everywhere. In the parts of the world which use law derived from English law, they are as important a legal concept as contracts or negligence. Nearly all shares in Britain are traded on the basis of trusts. Every home jointly owned by a couple involves a trust. They play just as important a role in America, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong and Singapore, whose legal systems are also derived from English law.

For much of their history, trusts have been an instrument of social and economic progress. They allowed married women to own property when the rest of the law prohibited it. England’s rich tradition of clubs and societies owes its origins to the institution of the trust, which enabled much greater freedom of association in the early modern and industrial period than in other European countries. The London Stock Exchange and the insurance marketplace Lloyd’s were both originally trusts.

But trusts are not native to the law of France, or Germany, or Japan, or of any legal system which is not derived from English law. Trusts arose almost by accident. For centuries the trust enabled people, through legal trickery, to avoid bad laws that were holding back progress. In the words of English legal historian FW Maitland, it enabled the country to “enter into one large conspiracy to evade its own laws, to evade laws which it has not the courage to reform”.

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The Mars Delusion | Noema

18-minute read

Egged on by SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s conspicuous if zany advocacy, these advances have renewed optimism that humans will land on the Red Planet and potentially establish a permanent colony in the foreseeable future. In 2024, Musk, who has said he hopes to die on Mars, set out a timeline that seemed suspiciously aligned with his own probable lifespan: “Less than 5 years for uncrewed, less than 10 to land people, maybe a city in 20 years, but for sure in 30, civilization secured.”

But now the space community was reeling from an unforeseen volte-face. Two weeks earlier, Musk had turned his attention to a much nearer, and, it could be argued, less exciting celestial body. “The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization,” he posted, “and the Moon is faster.” The gray-hairs at the BIS were lamenting the pivot. “I had hoped we’d see humans on Mars in my lifetime,” said Colin Philp, the serving society president. “But it always seems to be 20 years down the line.”

I didn’t have the heart to compound their disappointment by revealing my own misgivings. After weeks of reading about the challenges of settling Mars, I was preoccupied with one glaring truth. Mars is an uncompromisingly hostile planet and a dreadful place to be a living organism. According to some critics, the process of establishing a human presence on its surface is likely to make any notional future pioneers who do so progressively irradiated, sick, mad and dead.

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The Brexit catch | Dispatch

9-minute read

I manoeuvre Perkes gently onto the topic of Brexit. He was one of the local figures Boris met on his 2019 flying visit. I ask him what, exactly, has changed.

He leans back in his chair and exhales.

“Well, we thought we’d get a deal like Norway,” he says. “That’s what everybody thought. More control, more fish, a better quota, without having to deal with any of their regulations. Boris said we’d need more staff because we’d have so much bloody fish. And he was right. We did need more staff — but them for the admin!”

Since leaving the European Union, Perkes has spent something in the region of £600,000 simply adapting to the bureaucracy. He employs a lawyer in Calais whose sole purpose appears to be interpreting French VAT requirements. There are new health certificates, catch certificates, export declarations and additional logbooks — forms which, if completed incorrectly, can bring an entire consignment grinding to a halt.

“Honestly, some 12-year-old in Calais with a clipboard can stop a hundred grand’s worth of fish because a form is incorrectly filled in.”

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Waiting For The Miracle | Astral Codex Ten

29-minute read

In 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around.

Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. Despite popular discussion of “mass hallucinations”, this is AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time. I got kind of obsessed with this; you can read my preliminary investigations in this, this, and this post.

One of the first things I found was that there were many other sun miracles - at least ten! - similar to Fatima. Most were associated with Marian apparitions, but one was at a Buddhist temple. Bigfoot only gets sighted by lone hikers; ghosts are only ever in the corner of your eye; UFOs are just blurs in the sky. Of all the countries and outposts in the vast empire of the unexplained, it’s only this one phenomenon - the spinning, multicolored sun - that regularly gets seen by thousands of people at once, in broad daylight.

Speaking of “regularly”, there’s one spot where it continues even today. Fifty years ago, the Virgin Mary appeared to six children in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Now those children are well past middle-age, but she continues to come. Three of them report that she’s appeared less frequently as the years go by, but the others still see her every day at 6:40 sharp. Travelers to Medjugorje, especially those passing through around 6:40, report a slew of miracles, including the spinning sun. Certainly this is true of those whose hearts are pure. But even the atheists get lucky sometimes.

I was shocked never to have heard about this before. There’s a place you can just go, and have a decent chance of seeing a real miracle? People take vacations to the Bahamas for the beaches, when they could go instead to Medjugorje and see the natural law of the universe get violated in real time? Seems crazy!

So in early April, I and my extremely-accommodating, long-suffering wife flew to Dubrovnik, rented a car, and drove down a series of windy mountain roads toward the Bosnian border, hoping for a miracle.

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Name of the Father | Victory Journal

13-minute read

It was supposed to be an easy score. Get in, knock the kid unconscious, grab the drugs and get out. Nothing Jarrod Tillinghast hadn’t done a dozen times. His buddy Donny had been setting this kid up for weeks. First Donny bought a pound of weed. Then two. Now Donny wanted thirty pounds. But he had no intention of paying the $150K. This kid wasn’t with the cartel. He was white, a “goof” from Johnston, a town outside of Providence. This was free money.

Around 6pm, Jarrod slid into the passenger seat of his friend Rodney’s Honda Prelude. On this steamy, summer day, Jarrod wore a white tank top, shorts and flip-flops. In his waistband he had a brown paper bag stacked full of newspaper strips, all torn into the size of $100 bills. He was nervous. Not scared nervous, but tense and hyper-vigilant, the same way he felt every time he’d stepped into the boxing ring. He didn’t know exactly how the robbery would go down; no two were ever exactly the same. But one thing was always certain. He wasn’t leaving without what he came for.

[...]

With the deftness of an athlete, he ran into the living room and knocked the other guy out, grabbed the three bags of weed and bolted for the door. As the two men charged up the stairs a pizza delivery guy was coming down. He screamed, dropped his pizza and backed against the wall with his hands up. If he hadn’t been drenched in blood, the pizza guy might have recognized Jarrod as one of the most promising young Providence boxers in recent memory. If he’d somehow heard Jarrod’s last name, he would have definitely known it belonged to one of Rhode Island’s most infamous crime families.

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2 stars

How to Hack a Superyacht | The Walrus

8-minute read

Somewhere in the Aegean, the next test began. A large yacht is always moving from side to side—a couple of degrees left, a couple of degrees right—along the planned route, constantly swaying and correcting back toward the centre. To see a small degree of deflection on a compass is not enough to suggest a yacht is off course, Schofield says.

So, for this experiment, the engineers triggered a tiny error: just two purposeful degrees, enough to drive a tiny wedge between the real location and the false one, but not enough to look in any way unusual. Twenty minutes later, the yacht was already a mile off course. There was no alarm. The “health check” light on the GPS was green. There was no bend in the wake to indicate that something was off.

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The Undertaker | 1914 Reader

13-minute read

Cheung Yan became a dollar billionaire simply by noticing. In 1990, after five years in the wastepaper trade in Hong Kong, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband and built a business around a very simple opportunity. Container ships were arriving on America’s west coast packed with Chinese goods but sailing back practically empty, making the return journey unusually cheap. China’s factories, meanwhile, needed vast quantities of strong paper to make the boxes for the next shipment. Cheung bought discarded American cardboard, filled those empty containers with it, turned them to pulp in China and then into new boxes that returned to America carrying yet more Chinese goods. By 2001, America Chung Nam, the company she founded with her husband, had overtaken DuPont and Procter & Gamble to become the largest exporter from the United States by freight volume.

[...]

Trained as an electrical engineer at Tsinghua University, Zhu Rongji spent much of his early career inside the State Planning Commission. During the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957, colleagues asked him to speak at an internal meeting. In a three-minute speech, he criticised planning officials for drawing up plans and budgets without serious investigation, relying instead on reports and figures detached from reality - what he called “subjectivism”. When the political wind reversed, those same remarks were reclassified as “rightist”. In January 1958, Zhu was demoted and expelled from the Communist Party and he was not allowed back in until 1978. During the Cultural Revolution, in a separate punishment, he spent five years doing farm labour at a cadre school.

This broken relationship between plans and reality stayed with him until he took charge of China’s economic portfolio as vice-premier in 1993. The problem, as he saw it, was no longer that the old state-led economy was inefficient. To him, it had largely ceased to reveal anything useful about itself symbolised by what he called the “tumour” of fake accounts which could be found at the root of every problem in the economic order. His famous inscription of “make no false accounts”, delivered to the Shanghai National Accounting Institute, was of a piece with his disdain for irrational growth plans and subjectivism.

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Why the Healthiest Generation Is the Loneliest | Derek Thompson

10-minute read

At bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition toward death—thinking about death, calculating distance from death, worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god. Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and company-and-book-inspired Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives. But when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic—how much time will this drink cost me? how much time will that supplement buy me?—many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

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Glitter and Dazzle: Masks on! | London Review of Books

7-minute read

For most of the 18th century, the masquerade – a ticketed entertainment at which revellers were disguised either by elaborate masks and fancy-dress costumes or by simpler cloaks known as dominoes – was one of the chief ways smart society chose to entertain itself. In its excesses of costume, consumption and display it became synonymous with an emergent capitalist economy and with the marketisation of individual whims and pleasures. The British Empire put itself on display with outfits ranging from Indian rajahs to chimney sweeps, which collapsed boundaries of gender, class and race. The growth and decline of the masquerade tells a number of interlinked stories about Britain in the 18th century, some of which are obvious amid the glitter and dazzle; others require a little more scholarly excavation in order to shine.

[...]

In May 1749, Lady Elizabeth Chudleigh, maid of honour to the Princess of Wales, appeared at the Ranelagh Gardens masquerade in the character of Iphigenia, wearing from the waist up only a see-through gauze covering. She had been the subject of scandal before, with reports of an illicit marriage and bitter separation. Her supporters chose to read her costume as a defiant gesture by a figure who had seen her life anatomised in the press; her detractors viewed it as a degraded display by an immoral woman courting controversy. At the masquerade itself, the Princess of Wales threw a shawl around Iphigenia’s shoulders, only for Chudleigh to rebuff the gesture. The bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu was reluctantly impressed by Chudleigh’s chutzpah: the outfit rendered her ‘so naked, the High Priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim’.

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Prediction Markets Let You Bet on Anything. I Bet Against My Own Husband | GQ

12-minute read

Critics of prediction markets tend to emphasize how they risk worsening problem gambling. Even President Trump, whose administration has been mostly hands-off with prediction markets, struck a slightly mournful tone when asked about government insiders using them. “The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino,” he said.

The bigger question, to me, is deeper: Do you believe in markets—the more, the better? Prediction markets are alluring because they promise to deliver what we want most: to know the future. But by extending market logic into every corner of life, the markets change something fundamental about our relationship to narrative, suspense, and mystery. They spoil the present—sometimes literally, by revealing outcomes before they arrive, and sometimes more subtly, by replacing the experience of an event with a number. The event becomes irrelevant, to say nothing of the people we share our reality with. What matters is the position.

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Engineering Peace | Asterisk

6-minute read

The development community treats war as inevitable. We’re learning how to pay to prevent it.

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What If It All Came Out? | New York Magazine

20-minute read

The knee-jerk psychological response to these stories may be to reassure yourself that you, a regular, nice person, are safe because you have nothing to hide. You are not a mogul, a celebrity, or a political dissident. Most of us, however, no matter how seemingly unimportant, conduct ourselves differently in public than we do in the digital realm, our version of behind closed doors. The sanctified chambers of our text bubbles, search bars, and SENT folders are safe spaces to be base, petty, loose, sarcastic, or unkind; to explore a fetish or experiment with a boundary; to speak in the hyperbolic id of the internet. This version of your online self is like a first draft, careless and dashed off, intended for a small set of confidants, not yet appropriately sanitized for public presentation. The problem now is that this private self has been recorded in your trove. Its very existence, and the sheer volume of its contents, means it could be useful, interesting, compromising, or lucrative to someone, somewhere, given the right set of circumstances. The spigot just has to be turned for information you thought no one would see to come flowing out. “Everyone who is smart,” an acquaintance in PR tells me, “is paranoid right now.” Try to assess the state of your digital record and its size and shape becomes too cumbersome to fathom, like opening a door into an endless vault, the junk mixed in with the trade secrets, where you are the lone custodian.

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Captured Ukrainian-born soldiers tell BBC why they fought for Russia | BBC News

4-minute read

Anton was 10 when his part of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region was taken over by forces loyal to Moscow.

In 2022, when Vladimir Putin escalated to all-out war, he turned 18 and signed up to fight immediately - for Russia.

“I don’t regret my choice. I went to defend my land,” Anton insists and tells me his friends volunteered, too. “Then you get the SMS messages. Dead, dead, dead.”

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1 star

Volatility Drag is What’s Missing from Inequality Discussions | Capital Gains

4-minute read

It’s hard to reconcile these, but there’s one simple factor that is wildly underused in inequality debates: most rich people get rich because they own a single asset that performs very well. But even if the aggregate appreciation of assets-owned-by-rich-people is impressive, any one of these will be much more volatile than broad equity indices. And if you fund an even modestly expensive lifestyle from an undiversified portfolio, you’re doing the equivalent of levering up a single-stock portfolio. Even if you’re right, drawdowns will aggressively eat into returns.

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Astronomers detect fastest known star in Milky Way | The Guardian

2-minute read

“What is special about this star is that it’s orbiting Sagittarius A* on a very tight orbit, taking just 8.7 years to complete it, and is approaching the black hole at a mere 12 times the distance of Earth to the sun. That is unprecedented,” said Felix Mang, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, and an author of the study published on the findings.

The star’s extreme proximity to Sagittarius A* means that it could open a new window on to the black hole’s fundamental properties and the extreme environment surrounding it.

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Other cultures have their own way of saying ‘once upon a time,’ and some are really freaking cool | Upworthy

2-minute read

Korean folklore takes a more mythical (not to mention humorous) approach. One traditional opening translates to “Once, in the old days, when tigers smoked tobacco…” Though, sadly, there are no tigers in Korea anymore, the country’s relationship with the creature runs deep. Sometimes they were highly regarded guardian spirits. Other times, particularly when they had derpy faces, they were tongue-in-cheek jabs at out-of-touch nobles.

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Everybody* Wants You to Win | Navan Chauhan

3-minute read

Somewhere along the way, this turned into another useful delusion: everybody wants me to win. In the broader sense, everybody wants you to win too.

Think about a date. The other person is probably not going out with you hoping that the evening is terrible. They want you to be interesting. They want it to go well. In the best case, they want you to be the last person they ever have to go on a first date with. The same thing is true in less romantic settings. An interviewer wants to find the right candidate. Your manager would like you to become better at your job; hiring and training someone new sounds like work. A customer wants the thing they bought to work. When a comedian walks on stage, the audience wants the joke to land. When a musician starts playing, people want them to find the note.

Unless you are uniquely miserable, you do not sit down to watch someone perform and hope they embarrass themselves. You want the movie to be good, and you want the standup to be funny, and you want your attention, which is already scarce, to have been well spent. I believe that most people are not cruel judges waiting to catch you slipping. A room where someone is good is more fun than a room where someone is bombing, as your success often makes their day better too.

The problem is that we are very good at rejecting ourselves on behalf of other people before they are allowed to do that themselves. You don’t want to apply to that job because you don’t meet every requirement in the listing and assume you are underqualified. You don’t want to send that message because you have already decided that they won’t reply.

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Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse | New Yorker

51-minute read

How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

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3 stars

Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity | The Republic of Letters

15-minute read

Maths like this led Watterson’s syndicate to include licensing rights in their contract with him, assuming the artist would have no problem with it. All that money for doing what he loves? Seemed a no-brainer. The problem was that Watterson had an exacting idea of what it was he loved doing, and it was at odds with toys and tat, indifferent to silos of cash. “I went into cartooning to draw cartoons,” Watterson says, “not to run a corporate empire.”

It was still early days in the ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes when the syndicate approached Watterson with its big ideas of Calvin sweatshirts, Spaceman Spiff bumper stickers, an animated Calvin and Hobbes Saturday show, maybe a movie, and — worst of all — a Hobbes doll. Watterson really loathed the Hobbes doll. To make sense of how much it bothered him, we need to talk about the tiger in the room.

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The Conscience of the City | Harper’s Magazine

14-minute read

I’m a garbageman. Day after day, I heave and haul the detritus of the most polluting civilization in history. In two decades, I’ve handled tens of thousands of tons of trash, and the looks I get along my route suggest that people sometimes mistake me for the garbage I handle. The way I see it, though, my job is of great consequence. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society. Our work behind the scenes keeps the whole edifice from crumbling—at least for now.

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2 stars

The Last Straw | New York Times

6-minute read

If you were buying a house in a notoriously rainy country, would you choose one with a roof made of straw?

Across England, buyers are paying extraordinary sums to do exactly that. Thatched homes, once associated with peasant life, are now among the most coveted properties in a country where nostalgia for a distant and mythologized past runs deep — a storybook landscape of shires, low beams and misty sheep meadows. Last month, the actress Sienna Miller re-listed her thatched cottage in Buckinghamshire for £1.75 million ($2.35 million). So enduring is the appeal that Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, hired British thatchers to roof his Caribbean home.

But beneath the layers of thatch, a feud is simmering among England’s tiny fraternity of so-called “master thatchers.”

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Nvidia’s Risky Business | Stratechery

10-minute read

That’s why I started with 1870 and Cooke’s ill-fated agreement with Northern Pacific. Yes, the upside the deal afforded Cooke was incredible, but it was incredible for a reason: it was very risky, and pioneering new funding mechanisms only served to spread the pain when it all blew up. It’s one thing to spend all of your free cash flow; it’s another thing to tap the debt markets. And, beyond that, it’s a completely new nerve-racking thing to bring safety-seeking assets to bear. AI better deliver before it’s too late.

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The True Story Behind the “El Cap Kindergartener” Ascent | Climbing

10-minute read

On May 22, a 7-year-old reached the summit of El Capitan. Why are so many climbers upset about it?

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Motorways with no speed limits and car-free town centres | No More Marking

7-minute read

Germany has motorways with no speed limits. It also has medieval town centres where cars are banned.

So is Germany a pro-car or an anti-car society? Do people love cars or hate them? Is Germany’s attitude to cars libertarian or authoritarian?

Obviously, the context matters. In some contexts, cars are the solution to a problem. In other cases, cars are the problem.

In my 2020 book Teachers vs Tech, I made a similar argument about education technology. I thought that ed tech was indispensable in some places, but a terrible idea in others.

Since then, we’ve had an explosion of interest in how AI can help students learn. You have boosters arguing that kids can learn anything they need to on screen, but you also have sceptics saying that AI taints everything it touches. I disagree with both these positions.

In this post, I will update my 2020 argument for why we need both more and less technology, and also put forward three approaches that embody my car-free town centre / limit-free motorway concept.

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The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent | The Atlantic

12-minute read

Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.

I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.

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It was Britain’s most expensive house. Why is its only resident a homeless man who lives on the porch? | The Guardian

10-minute read

When it last changed hands, in 2020, 2-8A Rutland Gate was Britain’s most expensive house, selling for £210m. The word “house” hardly does it justice; palace is probably more accurate. It is in Knightsbridge, one of the most glamorous parts of London, and has 45 rooms, four lifts, an indoor pool and 116 windows, 68 of which overlook Hyde Park.

But no one is enjoying those views. This palace has been empty for years.

There may not be anyone inside, but there is someone outside – just outside – and I’m afraid I’ve woken him up. On the porch is a makeshift tent, made mostly from umbrellas. A bearded head emerges, a little bleary, but cheerful. The porch is filled with stuff, which spills out along the railings: baskets, books and newspapers, pictures, teddy bears, games, a couple of bicycles, lots of flowers in vases, pots and bins.

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Extreme Sports | News Items

3-minute read

As climate change raises temperatures worldwide and makes heat waves more frequent, events that used to be at the perfect time of year are quickly becoming too hot. Five out of the six hottest climbs in Tour de France history were recorded in the last seven years, and 2026 most likely broke those records. Race organizers for endurance events of all kinds are scrambling to combat the rising heat, with varying degrees of success.

This year’s Tour spanned just over 2,044 miles and smashed the event’s previous average temperature record by over 6 degrees Celsius. The heat was so severe, it caused the asphalt to bubble beneath the cyclists’ tires. Viewing was restricted at some stages due to wildfires raging across the countryside. Race organizers had to shorten Stage 9 by over 18 miles to protect the riders’ health — the first time in Tour history such a decision was made.

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This Infamous British Spy Ring Fed the Soviets Secrets for Years | New York Times

4-minute read

A new book by Antonia Senior chronicles the careers of five men who betrayed their country — with devastating results.

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1 star

What Does it Mean to Have a Trillion Dollars? | The Diff

10-minute read

This model of money works for sums between about $1 and a few million. But even if $1 buys one candy bar, $1 trillion does not buy a trillion candy bars. In Elon Musk’s case, a trillion dollars buys him about the same thing ten or a hundred billion did: de facto control over SpaceX and Tesla, and the ability to invest in other projects that strike his fancy (mostly to create things money can’t presently buy). In a money-as-power model, Musk has to get richer roughly in proportion to how powerful his companies get, where “power” implies the ability to sell products other companies can’t, or to sell the same products at prices they can’t match. This money does, of course, give him an ability to consume, but the super-rich have an extremely low marginal propensity to consume, because the world just doesn’t produce enough high-ticket consumer goods. And when they do engage in big one-shot consumption, it’s typically bidding for scarce assets (houses, art, sports teams, other rivalrous, excludable goods) that are owned by other rich people. If a very rich person spends $100m on a painting, and they could have used that money to feed the sick, you could complain to them. On the other hand, there is someone on the other side of that transaction who has $100m-minus-the-auction-fee, so they’re probably the right person to complain to.

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Americans Should Celebrate China’s Biotech Revolution | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter

7-minute read

But biotech? Here we’re looking at a field that is almost purely positive sum. If China cures a type of cancer, they’re going to sell it to us. Even if they wanted to keep it for themselves and forgo massive profits, just observing China making a medical breakthrough can provide proof of concept and help American companies follow their lead.

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The Paperboy’s Secret | New Yorker

24-minute read

My first job in journalism—long before I knew that I wanted to write, and decades before I became a foreign correspondent—was delivering newspapers for the Columbia Missourian. I started at 5 A.M. on February 1, 1979, during one of those cold, snowy winters that used to be common in mid-Missouri. The front page featured a photograph of two local children playing in the snow, and a fifty-four-point headline carried news from a distant world: “TRIUMPHANT KHOMEINI RETURNS TO TEHRAN.” The paper consisted of thirty-four pages, and had a cover price of fifteen cents. Along with my older sister, Amy, I folded the newspapers and set out with a list of addresses. Our father accompanied us on the first day, but after that we were on our own.

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The Long Illness Persists | Systems Thinking Collection

12-minute read

Nothing about long Covid adds up.

Consider prevalence rates: How could one study find it affected 3.3 percent of the population of the UK but others an alarming 51 percent of South Americans and 86 percent of Egyptians? Or treatment methods: The BMJ’s systematic review of ways to treat long Covid lists two as supported by moderate evidence, cognitive behavioral therapy and physical exercise. But if you attended the third annual Long Covid International Conference in Boston, you’d think the BMJ was encouraging medical malpractice. During two days of presentations, the world’s leading scientific authorities brought up exercise only to warn against it. Cognitive behavioral therapy received just one mention: “not recommended.”

Then there’s the scientific progress, or lack thereof. Six years since the height of the pandemic, the scientific community remains baffled by long Covid. Researchers still don’t know why some people’s symptoms persist or worsen after the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection has passed. Almost $2 billion and half a decade of international effort have yielded little more than hypotheses about micro blood clots and spike proteins and mitochondrial dysfunction. There isn’t a single approved pharmaceutical treatment, not even a test to verify the presence of the illness.

All of this is very strange. Stranger still are patients’ stories of astonishing recoveries from severe long Covid, achieved entirely outside mainstream medicine. The stories are connected to a growing community of doctors, therapists, and self-styled coaches who insist the riddle of long Covid has been solved. Like so many health gurus, they offer a solution that depends, in part, on your faith in the process. The solution also works for a remarkable variety of ailments—classic red flags for “holistic” pseudoscience and medical charlatanry.

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How did the Enigma Machine work? | YouTube

19-minute video

This is YouTube’s AI summary of the video (sorry):

Jared Owen explains the mechanical and electrical components of the World War II German device, showing how rotors, plugs, and circuits scrambled messages. The detailed animations illustrate the step-by-step process of encryption and decryption used by operators in the field.

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The world is bigger than you can imagine | The Pursuit of Happiness

9-minute read

This post will begin with some silly dorm room philosophy, but eventually I’ll extend the idea to something that I’m actually qualified to discuss—the macroeconomy.

It has become an overused cliche that the universe is so vast that the puny human mind is unable to even imagine its scale. So let me begin with a claim that might be more controversial; a human life is so vast that a person cannot reasonably evaluate their own life. Try to sum up your life? It’s probably impossible.

It sounds a bit arrogant for me to tell other people that they cannot evaluate their own life, so I’ll stick to my own example.

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Made in the USA | The New York Review of Books

14-minute read

But, of course, Hegseth and his ilk aren’t the only ones in such positions. With the invasion of Iran, the Trump administration picked up where the Biden administration and the Democrats left off; the Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony. The first politician many Americans heard use the word “obliterate” in reference to Iran was Hillary Clinton in 2008. And Hegseth’s truculent press conferences don’t come out of nowhere but rather build on the State Department briefings of the Biden years, at which spokespeople like Matthew Miller and John Kirby disdainfully waved away questions about the destruction of Gaza. The Biden foreign policy team often spoke as if, for some strange reason, they had no control over Netanyahu as well as no way to influence an ailing and unsophisticated Joe Biden. Whether the perpetrators are Democrats evading responsibility through feigned haplessness or Republicans claiming the power of a wrathful God, the violence is the same.

[...]

There is another path for American politics: renunciation, as described by the Turkish academic, of the strain in American life that produced a man like Pete Hegseth. This strain runs through the country’s history, its media and universities, its churches and television programs, and both major political parties. It is marked by a presumption of the right to use violence and a concurrent assumption of innocence, and in some cases a sadistic pleasure in “winning” and in other people’s suffering. The act of renouncing it might require a political party that seeks to dismantle the security apparatuses and alliances that perpetuate the mass bombing reflex—a political party that is explicitly antiviolence and antiwar. And it might require Americans to accept that they are not special but, in accordance with the most basic of religious principles, equal with the rest of the world before God.

Original link | Archive.is link

2 stars

Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine

8-minute read

In the 1960s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell convinced the scientific establishment that planarian worms, like Pavlov’s dogs, could be classically conditioned — and that memories of this training could be transferred from worm to worm through cannibalism. These bizarre findings were replicated by other scientists, and worm training became a staple of high school science fairs. Now, 60 years later, the worms have stopped learning, and nobody knows why.

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Bumblebees show spontaneous problem-solving, challenging big-brain assumptions | Phys.org

3-minute read

In a study published in Science, bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) solve a completely novel object-manipulation task without being trained on the solution itself. The bees first learned that a blue artificial flower signaled reward.

During the test, the flower was moved to the ceiling of a transparent arena, out of reach. To access it, the bees had to spontaneously generate a novel solution by moving a ball underneath the flower and climbing onto it, a behavioral sequence they had never previously encountered or been trained to perform.

“This is essentially an insect version of the classic ‘box-and-banana’ problem,” says senior author Olli Loukola, Docent at the University of Oulu. “The animal must realize that an object can be repositioned and then used as a tool to reach an otherwise inaccessible goal. What stands out about the result is that this kind of spontaneous problem-solving is now demonstrated in an insect.”

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What Actual Aliens Might Look Like | Kurzgesagt [YouTube]

16-minute video

Humans assume aliens look human. But why would they? Let’s explore what life might actually look like in strange, distant worlds.

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On Defeating the Stupid/Interested Quadrant | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter

7-minute read

Imagine four quadrants. People can be smart or dumb, and they can be interested or uninterested in politics. When I say smart, I’m not referring just to IQ, but some combination of intelligence and a lack of intellectual laziness. Elon Musk is an extreme case here: obviously smart when it comes to engineering and business, but about as stupid as human beings get when it comes to politics. Of course, both intelligence and interest in politics exist on a spectrum, so keep that in mind, as this is a simplified model of the world.

The degree of populism in a political community is based on the balance between Quadrant I and Quadrant IV. Society doesn’t really change all that much in intelligence, but the degree to which smart or dumb people are interested in public affairs varies greatly.

One of the biggest changes in American politics from the 1990s to today is the rise in Quadrant IV. If you wanted to consume political material in 1995, your choices were basically limited to stuff like reading The New York Times, watching 60 Minutes, picking up a book from a mainstream publisher, turning on C-SPAN, or finding an intellectual magazine such as National Review or The New Republic. If your intelligence is so low that the only narrative you can find compelling is one that blames foreigners or transsexuals for all that has gone wrong in the world, there weren’t a lot of options. Today, however, you are drowning in them.

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How Three Chess Friends Battled Demons and Saved Two Lives | New York Times

10-minute read

They began as strangers playing chess in Central Park. Frank was a scholar of South Asian textiles, known to friends as a guy who will lend a hand. Lincoln was homeless, living on a sidewalk on 59th Street. Paul was an older man living alone, in an apartment across the street from the Dakota, one of New York’s storied addresses.

They formed the kind of casual friendships that can happen over a chessboard.

Last year, when Frank realized that he had not seen Paul around in a while, he started asking people whatever happened to him. No one knew. So one day in September, he went to Paul’s apartment to check up on him, not knowing what to expect.

“He opened the door, and the smell that came out would have killed a herd of elephants,” Frank said. Paul, 87, was incoherent and ragged, and the place was filled with rotting food and rat feces. Paul had not urinated in days; he did not know how many.

“I’m calling 911,” Frank told him. “You’re going to the hospital.”

For the three men — Frank Ames, Paul Trahan and Lincoln Cyrus — that day last September began an unlikely chain of events that would ultimately save one life, maybe two.

Original link | Archive.is link

The body in the wheelchair: How did a troubled family get lost by the state? | The Londoner

14-minute read

On the morning of 7 November 2023, 77-year-old Joan Turnell dressed her daughter Tracey in her bright red raincoat, sat her in her wheelchair and set out from their block of flats in Whitehouse Mews, Leyton. It could have been like any other day if, instead of heading left towards Walthamstow’s town centre, they had made the usual turn right to the nearby park. And if it wasn’t for the look of panic on Joan’s face, the pair of housing officers following the pair discreetly and the smell seeping from the wheelchair, a mix of faeces and decay.

Grey clouds had blocked out the sun by the time she pushed the chair the mile and a half to Walthamstow’s bustling street market. There, in between the Peacocks and the police station, they were joined by a police squad, who asked Joan to stop and escorted her to a secluded car park. When the officers pulled back Tracey’s hood, they discovered a near-skeletal corpse. She had been dead for over a year.

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Roundup #83: I told you so! | Noahpinion

8-minute read

Piketty’s preferred solution to climate change is degrowth. He envisions detailed central planning to achieve deliberate impoverishment of large portions of the world’s population — mandated reductions in the consumption of various specific goods, including food.

In addition to the dubious morality of deliberately impoverishing untold millions of human beings based on scientific models that have already been rejected, this kind of scheme is just utterly unworkable. Back in 2021, when I wrote about why degrowth is a political nonstarter, I declared that “implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame.” Piketty knows this, and thinks it’s a good thing.

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Why Europe should put up trade barriers against Chinese goods | Noahpinion

6-minute read

China’s industrial policy is accomplishing its central goal of national greatness. China’s technology level is advancing, its companies are winning global market share, and it’s gaining control over key strategic technological choke points. But China’s workers, its savers, its investors, and even its entrepreneurs are on a treadmill, unable to enjoy the fruits of their country’s industrial dominance.

European trade barriers could potentially nudge China out of this toxic political economy. If Xi Jinping & co. see that they can’t forcibly deindustrialize the West by subsidizing infinite exports, their cost-benefit calculations may shift. Providing growing living standards for Chinese people might once again become the central goal of policy, as it was during the time of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao.

So Europe should push back against the Chinese import flood, not just for their own security, but also for the sake of regular Chinese people. Fortunately, there are indications that European leaders have had enough of Xi’s little game, and are preparing to take real action. Hopefully this newfound resolve doesn’t get lost in the maze of European bureaucracy and inertia like so many other worthwhile initiatives.

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1 star

OpenAI gives first detailed debrief of the Hugging Face incident at Black Hat conference | Ground Level AI

2-minute read

Paywalled, but even the free bit is interesting:

But according to OpenAI, even after the original message board was deleted, the agents figured out another way to communicate with each other. Instead of leaving messages in files, they used the names of newly created directories as messages, effectively recreating the message board.

At this point, by the way, I heard people around me saying things like “This is wild,” and “Jesus.”

According to OpenAI, the agents then began sharing newly discovered exploits, credentials and work assignments. By passing information to other agents, the collective could move much faster.

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What It’s Like To IPO | Stay SaaSy

5-minute read

The numbers stop. The “offering” is over. The Company’s shares, trapped in suspended animation in Carta for ⅓ of your life, are now being bought and sold by total strangers. You call up your stock tracking app and see a name that you’ve typed a hundred thousand times staring back at you. You’re like a caveman looking at the touchscreen console of a Tesla; you can’t process it.

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Who’s the Smartest Corvid? | The Tyee

4-minute read

In Colorado, wildlife biologist Merle Richmond and his canoeing companion allowed themselves to be led by a common raven “squawking loudly and thrashing around” near a lakeshore. The raven “renewed its showy antics” if the biologists lagged too far behind, and the biologists eventually realized it was leading them directly to a nest of two Canada geese, who fled at the sight of humans. At this point the raven and its “silent partner” swooped in and nabbed “a gosling apiece,” which they carried off to eat on a stump across the bay.

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An Ancient Poop Explosion Could Have Helped Complex Life Evolve | ScienceAlert

3-minute read

It’s generally thought that the Cambrian explosion was fueled by an increase in oxygen in the atmosphere and water, a new protective layer of ozone, or an influx of nutrients washed into the oceans from erosion as the Snowball Earth melted.

The new study suggests an overlooked factor: A fecal revolution.

As you might remember from kindergarten, everybody poops – from microscopic zooplankton to blue whales, the largest animals on the planet.

In today’s ocean, that floating feces plays a key role in cycling nutrients like carbon, iron, nitrogen, and phosphorus from waters near the surface down to the deepest depths. It also makes these nutrients more accessible for other organisms.

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Mysterious Shapes Hidden Beneath the Amazon Canopy Reveal a Sprawling Ancient Civilization Much Bigger Than Researchers Expected | Smithsonian Magazine

2-minute read

The researchers were surprised by the scale of the Aquiry civilization, especially because it developed far from major rivers, which historically supported large ancient settlements. And, they note that their study area amounts to less than 3 percent of Amazonia. They think other regions may have had similar population densities, raising the possibility that the Amazon was once home to tens of millions of people before European colonization.

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Abraham Lincoln by Barack Obama | In Pursuit

4-minute read

But Lincoln also understood something else. He recognized that while each of us must do our part, work as hard as we can, and be as responsible as we can — in the end, there are certain things we cannot do on our own. There are certain things we can only do together. There are certain things only a union can do.

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The Binmen of Birmingham | Marginal Revolution

2-minute read

One thing I discussed in the podcast which I haven’t blogged on is the amazing Birmingham dustbin dispute.

In 2010 an employment tribunal ruled that Birmingham City Council had discriminated against thousands of female workers — cooks, cleaners, care assistants, caretakers — who were denied bonuses paid to the mostly male binmen, gardeners, and gravediggers. Why were the binmen given bonuses? Well, refuse collection is filthy, heavy, outdoor work and not many people want to be gravediggers. Thus, these jobs command a premium for exactly the reason Adam Smith gave in 1776 — compensating differentials. Or was it sexism? Well, note first that there is nothing stopping women from becoming “binpersons” and indeed there are female binpersons and they earn the same bonuses as their male counterparts (just as with the Next case). Moreover, we can test the sexism versus compensating differentials theory. Let’s see what happened.

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You Can Run: The Fugitive Childhood of a Cocaine Smuggler’s Daughters | Atavist

35-minute read

When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.

Link

3 stars

Hard Rain: The battle over weather modification | Harper’s Magazine

22-minute read

Climate change is an enormous accomplishment. From an engineering perspective, the ability to coordinate activities to modify the average temperatures of an entire planet, change the pH of deep oceans, and cause vast shifts in the distribution of arable land across continents is a realization of powers as considerable as anything humanity has achieved before. It rewrites the core story of our origins, in which we are powerless before the forces that have made us. The fact that this discovery of our powers—that we can modify the weather on a planetary scale—was more or less accidental only puts it more firmly in the canon of scientific revelations. We are also, as with our other emergent powers, quite apparently terrible at it.

The innumerable crises prompted by our moment—the desertification of arable land, increasingly catastrophic storms, the deadly rise in temperatures in previously habitable regions—are nothing if not urgent incentives to grasp hold of what we have already done. After millennia of reaching up toward the sky, the levers just out of reach, the consensus on climate change indicates that we are, in fact, already manipulating the weather every day.

All of which suggests a new question: Are we ever going to get good at it?

Original link | Archive.is link

The Metaverse Fever Dream | Pixel Envy

17-minute read

Near the end of the Connect 2021 presentation, Nick Clegg, then Meta’s global affairs chief, said “the metaverse isn’t something we’re building, so much as it’s something we’re building for”. Olson, in his video, wryly notes that, in the eyes of its promoters, “the metaverse cannot fail; you can only fail to make the metaverse”. The metaverse is so inevitable that “you might even already be in it”, according to Barron’s. But the metaverse is not predestined; it never has been. It is a construction of tech companies that saw in the pandemic their future — not ours.

[...]

But a more cynical view is no less fair. With the pandemic undoubtably came a realization of how much money Facebook stood to make, if only it had a platform. In 2019, there were two publicly traded companies worth over a trillion U.S. dollars; by the end of 2021, there were five, with Apple and Microsoft now worth over two trillion dollars each. This pandemic was not going to last forever — but it did not need to. Our world was permanently changed, or so it would have seemed, and we would surely want to virtually attend concerts and buy PNG files of band t-shirts with real money. And these companies would take their cut.

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Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning | Rolling Stone

13-minute read

It was supposed to be a sweet moment between a basketball star and her young fan. And it was, it absolutely was — that is, until certain men on the internet saw it, and ruined everything.

What happened next was a chain reaction: an internet cesspool of hateful comments, a Midwestern T-shirt store coming to the rescue, a $1,000 reward, a Boston-based reporter flying into town, a troll unmasked, and finally, a meeting between the little girl and her online bully.

Original link | Archive.is link

2 stars

Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh | Astral Codex Ten

30-minute read

Its longevity isn’t because it was made of durable rock, and it’s not because a stray copy happens to have been found in modernity. This piece of writing lasted because it was considered of such cultural importance, and copied and imitated so extensively, that we can’t help but find parts of it, wherever we find writing from this period. The Egyptians built the pyramids to last, and the Mesopotamians put the same care into immortalising this story. It’s their gift to us, crafted not from atoms, but from bits.

That’s what I am in awe of whenever I read this book: the age, the scale, the importance. Like a rock formation, it was here long before I was, and will be here long after I’m dead.

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Looking Back at Lewis and Clark | New Yorker

12-minute read

In the national mythology, Lewis and Clark belong to the morning of the story—back when the waterfalls hadn’t been choked by dams and there were still bands of Native Americans in the Rockies who had never seen a white person. The tale is scenic. There are stirring ups and downs. But if the American idea—the experiment of letting people rule themselves, in the hope that they will grow into the necessary trust and wisdom—is now foundering, or better instantiated in other countries, what sets the expedition apart from any other long camping trip, full of rain, mosquitoes, and, intermittently, the sublime?

Original link | Archive.is link

The Grate Cheese Robbery | Longreads

13-minute read

Cheese isn’t an easy product to shift. It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s unwieldy. It’s smelly. It also needs to be held at very specific temperatures and humidity. It is its own microbiome: fat, enzymes, salt, bacteria, proteins, yeasts, molds. All of these—plus time—conspire to change the nature of the cheese. That’s why maturation is so important to the flavor and texture; it is an art form. Storing and transporting the cheese is technical and controlled. So if you’re suddenly going to find yourself in possession of tons of artisanal cheese, you’d better be prepared. Even a refrigerated van, or a temperature-controlled storage facility, is unlikely to cut it. Smash-and-grab, opportunistic cheese theft is a fool’s errand. The Neal’s Yard thieves—who, after all, specifically asked for Hafod Cheddar—knew what they were dealing with. They likely had a plan, and we can make some guesses as to where their cheese ended up.

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The Rise and Rise of Balloon Racing’s First Family | Texas Monthly

16-minute read

Few balloonists in the world can maneuver their aircraft well enough to race in the World Hot Air Balloon Championship, held every other year in wide-open skies, where there are scant power lines that might ensnare these gossamer vehicles. About one hundred balloonists qualify. Only fifty or so—the best of the best—return frequently.

But even among that exclusive class, there are no competitors quite like the Heartsills. They are the first family of balloon racing—the Mannings of a sport with a tiny fraction of football’s fandom. Joe Heartsill, the clan’s 75-year-old patriarch, is built compact and lean, like a trail runner, with powder-white hair and tanned skin that betrays the years he spent working as a realtor beneath the West Texas sun. He tends to survey a room like an eagle at its perch, masking his killer instinct with a warm smile or an encouraging nod.

A recently inducted member of the U.S. Ballooning Hall of Fame, he has won five U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championships, six Honda World Grand Prix races, and the 1995 World Hot Air Balloon Championship. His older son, Lucas, who is 48, was once named the national rookie of the year. His younger son, 41-year-old Rhett, was the 2016 world champion and is a four-time winner of the U.S. nationals.

Original link | Archive.is link

Inflammation Keeps Us Alive. It’s Also Making Us Sick. | New York Times

8-minute read

archive.is doesn’t render this article correctly, unfortunately...

Traditionally, we have sorted diseases into categories, separating contagious from noncontagious illnesses; acute events like strokes from chronic conditions like asthma; diseases of cell proliferation, like cancer, from diseases of cell death, like Alzheimer’s; and those that affect one organ or bodily system from those that impact another. Our medical disciplines reflect this logic, too. But we have lately realized how interconnected the body’s systems really are. More and more, researchers are starting to see things the way that Peter Libby, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Mass General Brigham, put it to me: “We all study the same disease” — inflammation is involved with everything.

That new understanding has inspired countless researchers to look deeper for links between inflammation and the conditions they study. At the same time, the more connections they find, the more their advances fuel a booming wellness industry that profits by marketing anti-inflammatory products and advice.

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Who is the Villain in Mars Sample Return? | Mars For The Rest of Us

8-minute read

Last month I wrote about the demise of Mars Sample Return, NASA’s most ambitious planetary science mission.

What fascinates me about sample return is that it’s a human mission in miniature. The goal is to land a large spacecraft on Mars and return its contents safely to Earth. The criterion for success is binary—either the sample gets back safely to Earth, or it doesn’t. The mission has a mix of American and European spacecraft launching over several synodic periods, interacting with equipment that has been pre-positioned on Mars years in advance. And the program as a whole consumes a substantial fraction of each agency’s exploration budget, spanning multiple election cycles.

This makes sample return a different animal from normal planetary science missions, which are set up so that there is a partial science return even if important components break, and whose costs tend to be front-loaded ahead of a single launch. For that reason, the demise of sample return may give us some clues about the political and organizational headwinds a human mission would face.

In my earlier post, I described the various moving parts of the Mars Sample Return mission that died in 2026. Today I want to try swinging around the finger of blame, to see who it points at most comfortably. The various suspects have been assembled here in the drawing room. Let’s meet them one by one.

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Why Are Men So Bad at Making—and Keeping—Friends? | Derek Thompson

12-minute read

The face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder distinction is really important. Todd Rogers, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, did a study where he went to the American Time Use Survey—which looks at how people spend their time, whether they’re eating, cooking, shopping, playing video games—and he asked men and women how likely they’d be to invite somebody to do each of those things. For women, it was most categories: “Yeah, I could invite somebody to go shopping, sit and have coffee, come over while I’m cooking.” For guys, it was basically watch sports or do sports. His idea is that it just doesn’t seem culturally acceptable for guys to invite other guys to do the things that time-use surveys show we actually spend most of our time doing. The categories that guys feel okay inviting other guys into are much smaller.

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The Dirt That Refused To Die | Quanta

5-minute read

For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.

They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing.

Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil.

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AI is Rewriting Mathematics | Nofil’s Substack

4-minute read

At what point are people going to accept that AI is changing absolutely everything. Some people still call LLMs stochastic parrots and what not. This is total nonsense.

AI is rewriting mathematics. Just look at this timeline for the last 2 weeks.

[...]

OpenAI announces their next major model, Astra, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science. The cost of generating proofs for all 10 of these combined was less than $2,000 at Sol API prices.

To give you an idea of just how absurd this is, every single one of these is a decades-old open problem, with some being considered as flagship problems of the entire field.

This isn’t AI assisting or solving one problem. This is a system conducting original research across entire fields and rewriting our understanding of them. If a single person produced all 10 of these proofs, it would be unprecedented; it would be like an entire generations worth of research across several fields being compressed into a single person’s output. Such a person would almost certainly be considered for a Fields medal. They would be heralded as a genius.

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Life with locked-in syndrome: ‘Despite everything, you are alive’ | The Sunday Times

12-minute read

It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television “just like anyone else”. That sense of normality is fleeting, though. It can vanish with a pop-up. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix, the ever-considerate streaming service, asks its viewers “Are you still watching?” If you don’t respond by pressing a button on the remote, it assumes you’ve nodded off and pauses the stream. Dawn can’t press buttons. She can’t move her fingers or toes or her arms or legs. She can’t swallow. She can’t speak. She hasn’t been able to do any of those things since Tony Blair was prime minister. After losing the sight in her right eye because a nurse forgot about her lubricating eye drops one weekend, Dawn’s only means of communication with the rest of the world is by blinking her left eye.

Original link | Archive.is link

Samurai City | Works in Progress

6-minute read

The city of Edo played a crucial role in this system. The daimyo were required to maintain mansions in Edo, in which their families were obliged to live permanently. Any act of disloyalty by a daimyo would thus place his family in the gravest peril. Most women of the daimyo class passed their lives as effective hostages of the state, never visiting the domains that their husbands, fathers, and sons governed. The daimyo themselves were also required to spend alternate years or half-years in Edo, bringing with them great crowds of samurai retainers. Edo thus had a dual nature: on the one hand, it was the apex of Japanese society, in which the country’s agricultural surplus was consumed; on the other, it was a kind of prison, in which Japan’s potentially dangerous elites were contained and monitored.

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Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident | Astral Codex Ten

14-minute read

But I side more with Roon in his skepticism of a unilateral slowdown. I think removing any given company from the picture would slow things down less than 10%. Even that number would require an implausible scenario where the lab managed to lock down its compute and talent despite committing not to use them. More likely, the talent would migrate somewhere else, the compute money would dry up and the cloud providers would switch to other customers, and things would actually speed up because the leading project would have more total talent/compute. Meanwhile, the most safety-conscious lab would be out of the race, they’d lose their ability to lobby for more practical solutions, and as their market cap went to zero they’d turn into a terrible warning about the danger of ever listening to doomers.

What can individual labs do?

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Darde Ghorbat | Off Assignment

6-minute read

Farsi is a language of tenderness. It is an infusion of poetry and humor, the intersection of everything human. “Jigareto Bokhoram”—which translates to “let me eat your liver”—is an expression of endearment. A person who is “bi Namak” is “without salt”: dull, the antithesis of charming. You could say “I love you,” or you could say, “I am willing to sacrifice myself for you” (“fadat besham”). There is an inherent desperation in how we express our love and utter our devotion. I think about what it means to live in the currents of this language. To speak with such longing, reaching. It is a reverence that feels impossible to touch.

“Darde ghorbat”—the sorrow of exile, of being in a foreign land—is the phrase that stings the most. Like most of the Farsi that has been fed to me, “darde ghorbat” is a phrase I learned from my parents. My dad is a stoic man, but when he’s talking about Iran, I can see the most wounded parts of him.

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‘Christofascism’ is here: inside the slow demolition of US public health | The Guardian

8-minute read

Driving these cuts is a neoliberal-theological fusion: the belief that dismantling public institutions is not just fiscally sound but morally ordained to combat demonic evils the likes of which, to most non-Pentecostal ears, sound a lot more exotic than a leather-wearing public health official.

The Center for Renewing America, an ultraconservative thinktank founded by Vought, puts that fusion in writing. In a healthcare blueprint published earlier this year, it described the Affordable Care Act, which extended coverage to tens of millions of Americans, as “cancerous”, and Medicaid, associated with lower all-cause mortality and access to care, as a “weaponized monstrosity destroying the lives of children”.

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An entirely new kind of drug will help us treat the untreatable | New Scientist

4-minute read

I think we will look back at 2026 as a landmark in medicine, the year in which the first protac drug was approved. What’s special about protacs? Well, while most drugs simply block their targets, protacs utterly demolish them. Per molecule, protacs are far more potent, and they can also do things other drugs just can’t.

Original link | Archive.is link

1 star

The Exclusive Retreat Where Wealthy Kids Learn How Not to Blow an Inheritance | Wall Street Journal

6-minute read

Inside a three-day gathering where a group of heirs collectively worth $7 billion learn the secrets to staying rich.

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What happened to Borat’s village? | Dispatch

2-minute read

Neamu, 51, wants money for the interview. We eventually agree to return the following day with sunflower oil and polenta and sweets for the children. It’s not something I’d usually do but this is Glod and the villagers have been burned before, 20 years ago, by a mysterious man named Borat.

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Why did South Korean stocks just crash? | Noahpinion

6-minute read

So although South Korea’s epic stock crash was probably related to Korea-specific financial factors, it could also herald the return of the “AI bubble” story. AI is far and away the most important thing going on in the American economy right now, so any hint of a bubble is worrying.

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Find a way | Useful Fictions

4-minute read

When you’re approaching these make-­or-­break moments, it’s really important to make sure Melvin isn’t showing up.

Who’s Melvin? It’s a part of the human personality that exists in all of us, the part that’s good at avoiding blame or embarrassment by “acting normal.” Melvin is always taking the reasonable approach: Faced with a dilemma at work, rather than striving to really tackle it, Melvin executes a normal-shaped, solution-type action-thing.

You know the old saying, “nobody gets fired for buying IBM?” Melvin is the part of us that, faced with a big, chewy problem, tries to buy IBM — to do something that might not be maximally effective, but that won’t get you criticized. And then, if that doesn’t work, Melvin assumes the problem is unsolvable, and stops.

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A moment that changed me: A telegram arrived – and I had to choose between my head and my heart | The Guardian

3-minute read

The next day, a letter arrived. My father, thrifty but not trusting the post and aware of the urgency, had hired at what must have been considerable expense a motorcycle messenger to bring a letter from his home in Kent to me at my mother’s house in Hampshire.

The letter consisted of two typewritten sheets marked A and B. Sheet A was headed “Why I should go to work in a discotheque in Tehran” and itemised the virtues and advantages of this option: a wonderfully rich culture to explore, financial rewards, lovely music, romance. There were not many points, but they were certainly plausible pluses.

Sheet B was headed “Why I should be the first woman in our family go to university” and argued the case with such fluency, persuasion and irresistible seduction that the decision was suddenly a no-brainer.

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If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel | How Things Work

4-minute read

There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.

Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.

The most likely reason, though—one that often overshadows the other ones—is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.

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Study: Dinosaurs were charbroiled after Chicxulub impact | Ars Technica

1-minute read

According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.

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The Abilene Paradox: Why Groups End Up Doing Things Nobody Wants to Do | The Art of Manliness

4-minute read

Yet, though every person in the family thought the trip was a bad idea, they all went along with it because each assumed he or she was the only one who felt that way.

Thanks to their collective unwillingness to speak up, they took a dumb trip.

This is the Abilene paradox: a group collectively decides on a course of action that goes against the true preferences of each individual member.

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Data on Chinese innovation | Marginal Revolution

1-minute read

Several surprising patterns emerge from the data: Chinese patenting is strongly associated with other measures of innovative progress; patents are not concentrated in corporate giants such as Huawei; universities have played a key role in innovation, much greater than state-owned enterprises or government-owned facilities; and fewer than one in ten Chinese critical technology patents involves an inventor with U.S. experience or training.

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How should we think about Starship? | Mars For The Rest of Us

10-minute read

I have a similar struggle evaluating Starship that I do with AI. The core technology is undeniably real and transformative, but it comes welded to a preposterous vision of the future. In the case of Starship, that means hundreds of launches a day, vast orbiting data centers, and kilometer-length mass drivers on the Moon built to sub-micron tolerance. And the whole thing depends on the emergence of an orbital economy that, for several decades now, has resisted boosters’ efforts to will it into being.

It doesn’t help matters that people talking about Starship are often talking about different things. Starship is simultaneously a very big rocket, the second stage of that rocket, an operational concept, an enabling technology for colonizing Mars, and a deus ex machina for solving all practical questions of human space flight.

But between the reality and the woo there is a gray area that is hard to evaluate. So I’m writing this post to try to clarify my thinking, and in particular to try to figure out at which station I want to get off the hype train.

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Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? | Stratechery

10-minute read

One of the best Stratechery pieces in awhile (and it seems the internet generally agrees):

This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?

To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here?

In fact, this paradox is the solution. I believe that open weight models are good for innovation (and, per the above, I think that labs on the frontier will be fine), but it’s a problem to be dependent on China. The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else.

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REVIEW: Anabasis, by Xenophon | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

19-minute read

For instance, Socrates was a war hero! And that brings me to his student Xenophon: two years ago I read his fictionalized biography of Cyrus the Great and I loved it. But as I read it and loved it, I was gripped with foreboding. Who is this guy who’s saying all these smart-sounding things about the nature of leadership and greatness? Is he just some random guy who hung out at a bunch of Athenian dinner parties and came up with nice-sounding theories about virtue? That would be a huge let-down. But I’m happy to inform you that that is not the case. Xenophon knew what he was talking about.

Xenophon was an operator.

You see, as a young man, Xenophon got himself into a bit of trouble.

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How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi | The Atlantic

12-minute read

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

[...]

Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes. The government spent 32 years and £179 million planning a tunnel beneath Stonehenge to relieve traffic, only to officially scrap the plan this year. Even basic tasks, such as obtaining power, can be nightmarish. “In the U.K., you can be waiting for five years to get any kind of energy-intensive project connected to the grid,” Sam Bowman, a founding editor of the magazine Works in Progress, told me. These failures are all self-imposed. Parliament, by design, could exercise broad authority over these matters—yet rather than wielding this power to confront Britain’s problems, it has chosen instead to smother the state with veto points, proceduralism, and endless reviews.

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The Wrong Stalker: He was an addict. She was his counselor. Who was preying on whom? | San Francisco Chronicle

29-minute read

What Shawn could not see was that Bridget, unchecked, was growing more adept at weaponizing her phone to bend reality.

Using apps that can obscure identities, including TextNow, she created a string of random, anonymous phone numbers. To obtain the new numbers, she just had to provide an email. TextNow advertises the service as a convenient way to create a confidential second line, or a number helpful for a “side hustle.”

When blocked, she moved on to the next number.

Some days, Shawn would receive more than 50 calls and twice as many texts. His phone would ring and the caller ID would indicate he was hearing from a lawyer, or a private investigator, or a detective. Sometimes the voice would sound like a robot, and he’d put the person on speaker to let his family listen. But the message was always the same: He should drop his complaints against Bridget because she wasn’t the one bombarding him. She was being framed.

One time, Shawn received a call from a robotic voice and hung up. The phone rang again but this time, instead of hearing the altered voice, Shawn was confident he heard Bridget’s voice. Shawn told the caller they had forgotten to turn on the voice modulator. The caller hung up, then called back with the robotic voice.

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‘The devil’s child’: the rise and fall of the only female yakuza | The Guardian

12-minute read

In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. “You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.” Then you get to work.

Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence – you suspect, speaking to her, that it’s a little more than that – is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura received a phone call. A pregnant friend named Aya was in trouble. Nishimura grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street and found Aya surrounded by five men. When one of them kicked Aya in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend to run, then went for the attackers with her bat.

By the time the police arrived, the attackers were covered in blood and Nishimura had fled. She went into hiding 170 miles away in Tokyo. A fortnight later, when she returned to Gifu, a local man approached her in a nightclub. He was a member of the Inagawa-kai, one of Japan’s largest organised crime syndicates, and he wanted her to join. Nishimura was already in a biker gang called the Worst, who raced and robbed while dressed in the white jumpsuits of wartime kamikaze pilots. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime, too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling – and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. The Inagawa-kai man didn’t have the right energy, Nishimura thought. She turned him down.

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2 stars

‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant | The Guardian

17-minute read

Whatever Groff knew, it seems she never seriously questioned what Epstein was doing or her part in it. Perhaps, as Groff performed her role as his social prosthesis, she felt her actions no longer belonged to her but were simply an execution of his will. It did not matter what she thought about what he did, because it was not her job to think, only to enact his desires. This is not to excuse what she did or didn’t do, but an attempt to understand how someone can split themselves between two moral planes; to understand how someone who worries about the amount of time their child spends on their phone might spend years arranging girls to see a man convicted of abusing children; and to understand why, in all that time, she didn’t walk away.

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Josh at Christmas | Geoffrey Mak

14-minute read

Then Minki came, a complete stranger, and loved my brother long enough for Josh to stop questioning that love. It was something that I—we: my family, all of us—had been waiting years for, and we didn’t know how to give it to him, because it wasn’t ours to give. We all knew he hated himself. He ignored messages from his grad school classmates to hang out when they were in town, because he didn’t want them to see him as an unemployed failure. How could we tell him he wasn’t deformed or a broken toy when we could only love him so much at a distance? I thought of all those sad, lonely nights Josh spent lashing at himself for all the missed opportunities in his single, sheltered life. But a little bit at a time, Minki chipped away at that. Soon Josh grew uninterested in his own shame, which he nursed for decades because it was the only thing that resembled kindness.

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Something Is Very Wrong with Modern Longevity Science | New Yorker

8-minute read

Jiroemon Kimura, who is on record as the world’s oldest man, died at the reported age of a hundred and sixteen, in 2013. His passing spawned a slew of articles about the secret to extreme longevity. (Apparently, it’s small meals.) Kimura is said to have been born in a fishing village in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, in April or March of 1897. Strangely, he is the only one of his five siblings to have multiple graduation records; he seems to have completed elementary school in 1907, or 1909, or 1911. He supposedly married his wife on three different dates, and at some point he not only adopted his wife’s surname but also changed his first name. (He was born Kinjiro Miyake.) Demographers who attempted to validate his age wrote that their investigation uncovered irregularities and inconsistencies. And yet they concluded that “no critical discordances were discovered.” The word “critical” was doing a lot of work.

[...]

In a useful thought experiment, Newman shows how small errors in recorded age can compound to undermine aging research. Suppose that a hundred forty-year-olds fake their ages so that on official documents they’re listed as fifty. (The U.S. Census Bureau has said that millions of Americans misrepresented their age in the most recent census.) In a country that contains a hundred thousand fifty-year-olds, these “young fakers” would account for only 0.1 per cent of the population. No big deal. But because the faux fifty-year-olds are far less likely to die than real fifty-year-olds—after age thirty, our risk of death doubles roughly every eight years—they will come to make up a larger and larger share of their purported age group. At “sixty-six,” they represent 0.4 per cent of their cohort; at “eighty,” three per cent. At “a hundred and five,” they compose virtually the entire population.

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What will more intelligence actually do for us? | Noahpinion

9-minute read

Why would intelligence top out like this? Well, if we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data.

For one thing, data itself is in limited supply. You can’t transform the world unless you can (in some generalized sense) understand it, and you can’t understand the world unless you can measure it, and our ability to measure the world is inherently limited and finite.

[...]

What if there are lots of other aspects of the Universe that work the same way — too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook. In fact, I wrote an essay called “The Third Magic”, where I suggested that this might be equivalent to a whole new scientific revolution:

Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate.

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‘There is no way to stop this’: ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies | The Guardian

14-minute read

It may be possible to make a convincing argument that serious heritable diseases linked to a single gene should be edited out of human embryos. But once the world has agreed on using genetic engineering to combat disease, where do we draw a line? Should we be happy to create babies who will have lower cholesterol and are less likely to have heart disease, or stronger bones to combat osteoporosis? Will being less smart or not as tall one day be viewed as a correctable condition?

“Part of Origin Genomics’ statement on ethics is to focus only on diseases. The idea is to focus on diseases that are well characterised, that are severe and cause suffering,” Tie says.

But when I ask whether she will always be opposed to gene editing for enhancement, she pauses. “Right now, the technology is not ready for that. It can only make very precise corrections and variant changes. Enhancements are complex: IQ, height – thousands of genes contribute to that, we’re nowhere close to being able to, one, understand it, and two, correct it.”

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‘Too Rare to Care’? A New Center for Rare Diseases Hopes to Change That | New York Times

4-minute read

Without fail, David Liu of the Broad Institute gets at least 20 messages every week from desperate parents. Their child, they’ll explain, has an ultrarare and devastating disorder caused by a mutant gene. Can he help them develop a gene therapy?

Dr. Liu, a gene-editing researcher, answers honestly: Although the science is there — researchers can edit and silence the genes that cause disease relatively easily — the system for developing treatments for rare diseases is just not economically feasible. It typically takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The catchphrase, said Dr. Wendy Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, is “too rare to care.”

Now, Dr. Liu, Dr. Chung and their colleagues at the Broad Institute, Boston Children’s and the Jackson Laboratory are hoping to change that mentality. On Tuesday, they announced the start of a new nonprofit, the Center for Therapeutic Genetics, to develop gene therapy treatments that can be used and reused in disease after disease.

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Orcas seen ramming prey so hard it explodes may be playing game | The Guardian

2-minute read

One hypothesis is that ramming is used to break the tough, rubbery sunfish into bite-size pieces for juveniles, whose jaws are smaller. But orcas are also known for social fads and boisterous games that do not have an obvious practical purpose. In the 1980s, a pod of orcas started carrying dead salmon on their head like hats, a trend that was recently revived. A subpopulation off the coast of Spain and Portugal has attracted attention for unusual interactions with boats.

“They throw kelp at each other, surf in boat wakes and engage in intricate tactical games,” said Higuera. “Play is a core pillar of orca society.”

Whatever the purpose of the behaviour, it demonstrates an impressive level of cognitive sophistication, requiring the planning and coordination of several steps, according to the findings reported in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.

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Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness | Astral Codex Ten

4-minute read

What’s the point of liberalism, if plausible rates of GDP growth can only buy us about one point of extra happiness per century?

The question answers itself. All of the great policies above in Finland/Israel/etc can only buy 0.5 - 1 extra point over the countries that screw them up or pursue the exact opposite policies. Meanwhile, economic growth has earned us three whole points since medieval times. And these are stable; no opposite-party administration can take them away. So long as technological civilization continues to function, we can keep rising and rising, until in 300 years we approach the 10/10 barrier and have to get a new chart. We can say with confidence that we are giving our children and grandchildren better lives. Sure, only one point better for our grandchildren in particular - but one point on a ten point scale is a big deal, larger than the entire COVID drop!

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1 star

I Spent a Week Recording Myself Doing Chores for Money. Who’s the Robot Now? | WIRED

6-minute read

My total earning for the week came to $21.55. For me, this experience was a casual side hustle, a way to pay for a few extra Diet Cokes by completing chores around the apartment. But, for workers around the world, and increasingly in the US, this kind of AI gig work may be accepted under economic pressure and relied on as a means to live—teach the robot how to cook tonight so you can put food on the table tomorrow.

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OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an ‘unprecedented’ hack of another company | AP News

1-minute read

Delangue added that it “might be the first incident of its kind.”

OpenAI said the intrusion was caused by a combination of its AI models, including its newly released GPT‑5.6 Sol and an “even more capable” model that is still being tested internally.

OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers.

It went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation,” the company said.

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This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything | The Atlantic

5-minute read

A magazine’s response to accusations of publishing AI-generated fiction points to a new phase in the struggle to keep literature human.

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Milky Way flipped in collision with dwarf galaxy 10bn years ago, astronomers say | The Guardian

2-minute read

Astronomers have found evidence that the Milky Way was flipped on its side following a direct hit from a wayward galaxy long before the solar system was born.

The cataclysmic collision took place about 10bn years ago when the Milky Way was struck head-on by an incoming dwarf galaxy known – for purely astronomical reasons – as the Gaia Sausage.

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Newly Hatched T. Rex Babies Came Out Of The Egg Ready To Chase Their Own Food | IFLScience

2-minute read

Combined with previous evidence of worn teeth from T. rex hatchlings, this showed that, whatever the direct ancestors of birds were doing at the time, T. rex was not waiting around the nest for semi-digested meals from mum and dad.

“The babies were smashing into the bones of their food, just like giant adults,” Snively said. “Tyrannosaurus were unsafe at any size. Babies were quickly out of the nest and killing the heck out of things.”

Although the babies were probably the size of an adult house cat, it’s unlikely they restricted their diet to mouse-size prey. The tooth wear is consistent with them consuming quite large animals.

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Microbial Dark Matter and the Search for Life on Earth | Mars For The Rest of Us

7-minute read

It is a bit odd that this week’s top link is the non-paywalled part of a paywalled article...and yet that’s how fascinating I found it:

The biggest lesson of this new era in microbiology is that we’re not very good at finding life. Microbes that have been living not just under our noses, but physically inside our noses, remain unknown to science. The most prevalent organism on Earth, a free-swimming ocean microbe called Pelagibacter ubique, was only identified in 1990, and not successfully cultured until 2002. A class of bizarre microbes that make hydrazine (rocket fuel) as a metabolic intermediate turned out to be responsible for half the ocean’s nitrogen production, even though scientists until the 1990’s were skeptical that their brand of metabolism was even possible. These organisms, the annamox bacteria, were not identified until 1999. The list of these things is endless.

And this is just the state of things on Earth, a planet with known biochemistry, big comfy labs, and armies of grad students. You can imagine the difficulty of trying to distinguish native from Earth life with the kind of rudimentary equipment we would send to Mars or the cloud tops of Venus.

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‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads | The Guardian

12-minute read

Their results of those tests revealed something never before documented in British history. Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers.

Heteropaternal superfecundation – the vanishingly rare biological process to which Michelle and Lavinia owe their existence – is both a mouthful to say and a mind-boggling concept to grasp. It happens when a series of very unlikely events occur at precisely the right time. A woman has to release more than one egg during the same menstrual cycle. She has to have more than one partner during her fertile window. More than one egg must be successfully fertilised, with sperm from different men, and the resulting embryos need to survive long enough to become babies. Michelle and Lavinia are twins and half-sisters.

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2 stars

The Old Guard, by Samuel Moyn | Harper’s Magazine

14-minute read

America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large. But there is still a chance for a reset. President Biden exposed one part of our gerontocracy, as Trump now does, too. Pulling aside the curtain that hides the rest might prepare us to dismantle the system and create something new.

At the core of the gerontocracy’s rise is a historical irony. The modern world—­and America above all—­once stood for youth, novelty, and energy. And yet the same modernity that gave us democracy and other forms of progress also prompted scientific advances that prolonged life. Those advances drove a startling demographic transformation that has increased the proportion of elders in our society, unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress. Call it the Great Aging.

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Wish You Were Her | n+1

20-minute read

Frank Sinatra, palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.

The fact was, Sinatra had already been waiting for over an hour for his moment at the mic and at this point would have been more than fine with just heading back to his cabin. He was tired of the constant low-grade pitch in gravity under his feet. He was still annoyed that he’d nearly lost his luggage on the first day here, a fact his wife was not letting him forget; was humiliated that he never really got his onboard Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi he paid for — to work all week; had been viciously massaging his kidneys throughout the past four songs; and now, at this strangulating moment, had to sit through the noises being made by the group of veterans Monroe had just asked to join her in a conga. Sinatra, wincing, was the victim of a condition so common around here that most people accepted it as a given. But when it got to him, shot through his personal plumbing, we were looking at a man in crisis. The fact was — and he’s going to kill me for saying this — Frank Sinatra was seasick.

[...]

Three nights and about eight hours earlier, select members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators boarded a 169,000-ton cruise ship in civilian disguise. They crossed the gangplank by sandaled foot and standard wheelchair, in panama hats and Bermuda shorts, naked of the costumes, pancake makeup, and in some cases false breasts required to faithfully look like their look-alikes. Alongside an estimated four thousand other, non-impersonating passengers slated to set sail with them, these twenty professional plagiarists, under cover of normie human camouflage, slipped silently into the crush.

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Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? | The Dial

14-minute read

It might be obvious, to someone who’s not them, that this family is not the demographic this gelateria is trying to appeal to. The gelateria wants to be modern and foodie-ish, not a place for the average tourist. But the family is not to be put off. They feel challenged. They feel alive. They are Americans. They are frontier people. They love a cultural mystery.

And so, since the family has entered the gelateria, time seems to have reached a standstill. When these tourists ask the worker behind the counter What is gianduia?, time enters its favorite zone. The fabric of time loves American tourists. When Americans analyze a small shop in a foreign country, time stops counting itself on clocks and pondering its own dull finiteness. Now it can pleasurably yawn into the holy hollowness of the 30-plus questions the tourists are asking. Now, everyone around the American family is swamped in the buttery goo of the present, stretched. The other people in the gelateria can’t name the feeling that wraps itself around them. The feeling that time is purring, that time is on the American family’s side.

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Unsolved | Boston Magazine

14-minute read

He froze.

Natalie, in shorts and a blouse, lay face-down on a blood-soaked rug. She had been stabbed twice, part of her skull bludgeoned into fragments. Her mouth had been gagged, her hands and feet bound with clothesline and articles of clothing. A piece of rope lay beneath her body. Raymond, a 52-year-old bank president who had served in World War II, hurried upstairs and called the police.

[...]

One day in 2020, the pandemic had nearly emptied the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Woburn. David Solet, who had spent the past year leading the office’s new Cold Case Homicide Unit—trawling through documents dating to the Civil Rights Era—used his keycard to enter the second-floor archives, accessible only to a handful of prosecutors, and stared at hundreds of boxes of cold-case files stacked 7 feet high, many yellowed and musty, some so caked in mold that he’d had staffers don protective gear and decontaminate them with a toothbrush in the parking lot.

The assistant district attorney glanced up and grabbed a box that felt heavier than most, labeled Scheublin, Bedford, 6/10/71, and peeked inside. Its contents—police reports, photos, sketches, and handwritten notes—had stiffened in the past half-century but were still legible. Flipping through, something caught his eye: a photo of a fingerprint, followed by pages of more recent evidence, a sign the case had already gotten a second look.

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The rise of the literary nepo baby? The children of famous novelists on following in their parents’ footsteps | The Guardian

7-minute read

Martin Amis liked to observe that the unusual position he and Kingsley Amis held – father-and-son novelists – was a historical anomaly, a “literary curiosity”. But it was not unique: Alexandre Dumas père and fils, Fanny and Anthony Trollope, and Arthur and Evelyn Waugh had all come before them.

And if Amis’s assertion wasn’t true then, it’s even less true now. In recent years, increasing numbers of children of novelists have become writers themselves, and this year sees a particularly rich batch. Kazuo Ishiguro’s daughter, Naomi, publishes the first in her new fantasy series this month. Margaret Atwood’s daughter Jess Gibson published her fiction debut this spring, and earlier this year Patrick Charnley, son of the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, published his first novel to wide acclaim.

[...]

It is understandable for the child of a writer to want to create a distance, to make a mark on their own. It can be a sensitive topic. Some debut writers declined to speak to me for this piece, concerned about being seen primarily as the adjunct of an established parent. One second-generation writer, who has published several novels, told me that it was still a very difficult subject for them.

This may be why all the writers I spoke to had been determined to get published without help – at least, without explicit help. Charnley, who was concerned that people would recognise his name after he had accepted the posthumous Costa prize on behalf of Dunmore, even submitted his debut novel, This, My Second Life, under a pseudonym. His first offers came from foreign publishers; they didn’t know his mother, which “gave me a confidence boost”.

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Neanderthal dentists used stone drills to treat cavities nearly 60,000 years ago, ancient molar suggests | Phys.org

2-minute read

Neanderthals had the know-how to identify a tooth infection and the motor skills to drill out the damage, according to a study published May 13, 2026, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Alisa Zubova of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, and colleagues.

[...]

This tooth is a single molar from Chagyrskaya Cave in Russia, around 59,000 years old. In the center of the tooth is a deep hole extending into the pulp cavity. The researchers conducted experiments on three modern human teeth to demonstrate that a hole of the same shape and same patterns of microscopic grooves can be created by drilling into the tooth with a stone point similar to tools that have been found within Chagyrskaya Cave.

[...]

“This finding currently represents the world’s oldest evidence of successful dental treatment. The damage documented on the Neanderthal tooth from Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia points not only to intentional pulp removal but also to antemortem wear—wear that could only have developed if the individual kept using the tooth while alive. We also identified areas of demineralization where remnants of carious damage were preserved, further indicating that the concavity in the tooth was associated with treatment.

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Nostalgebraist’s Hydrogen Jukeboxes | Astral Codex Ten

6-minute read

Think about the hallmarks of AI writing. “It’s not X — it’s Y!” Direct, simple, catchy, clarifying. This is a great writing technique, used in moderation. AI takes all the great easy techniques that work and can be reduced to a simple script, then overuses them until your eyes bleed.

This is the essence of bad taste: things that are easy even for a dumb artist, work very well at wowing dumb audiences, and become so overused that smart people get tired of them.

I think about this a lot, because I currently live with the dumbest and most gullible audience of all: small toddlers. I am exposed to a steady diet of children’s books, toys, food, and music.

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The Great Forgetting | The Pursuit of Happiness

9-minute read

But I’m a lot older than Smith and I have a slightly different perspective on the issue. I see a sort of “Great Forgetting”, a tendency to ignore the lessons of history.

In particular, a number of the cases cited in Smith’s, including South Korea and Poland, were once highly controversial. Now both countries are viewed as major success stories. Along with thinking about why they might have been successful (I could imagine many possible reasons), it seems to me that it is worth thinking about the following questions:

1. Why were people once so pessimistic about these two economies?

2. Why do the people who were pessimistic often not admit they were wrong?

3. What can we learn from the fact that these countries did far better than expected?

Back in the 1960s, South Korea was poorer than much of sub-Saharan Africa.

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Why Is Latin America So Violent? | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter

6-minute read

Why would democracy be such a good predictor of societal violence? Note that the way we define “democracy” in political science generally includes a respect for civil liberties. This means you don’t torture suspects or keep them locked up without strong evidence. Such nations get warrants before making searches, grant defendants lawyers, and remind them of their right to remain silent.

In a rich country, these are luxuries that society can afford. The police are paid relatively well and get some basic level of training. They have larger budgets with which to fight crime, and, since corruption is more under control, less of it is stolen or wasted. The court system is more reliable, and is pretty good at distinguishing those who pose a danger to the community from those who don’t.

In contrast, if you’re a relatively poor country with few resources and little state capacity, granting protections to suspected and convicted criminals is a major hindrance to keeping order. Law enforcement and court officials can be intimidated or bribed, and their attention and resources are stretched thin. Gangs are able to control more territory, murderers are less likely to be punished, and deterrence breaks down. In recent years in the US, the murder clearance rate has been about 50%-60%. That’s very bad from a first world perspective, but in countries like Mexico and Honduras, it’s closer to 10-20%, and this is quite remarkable given that state officials themselves are often the targets. In Latin America, there are stories of gang bosses running their empires from prison, which would be unthinkable in most dictatorships. The US regularly pressures Mexico to send us their drug lords, because otherwise they might escape from prison at home.

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A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs | MIT Technology Review

5-minute read

The Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade.

The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the results of an independent evaluation of its new tech. The results suggest that the company’s claims might be worth paying attention to.

According to Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster and cheaper and uses a lot less energy than any other model on the market. The company also claims that SubQ is able to process up to 12 times as much text at once as most other models, allowing it to carry out a range of data-heavy tasks, such as analyzing hundreds of documents or entire code bases.

What’s more, Subquadratic says, SubQ does this while more or less matching the performance of the best models put out by Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic on key tasks like coding.

[...]

Subquadratic’s solution is to ditch dense attention, the core operation of a transformer, in favor of what’s known as sparse attention, which slashes the number of computations needed. Instead of multiplying the number assigned to each token by every other number, sparse attention selects just some of the numbers to multiply. The idea is that not all relationships between words in a piece of text matter.

Original link | Archive.is link

1 star

A Deadly Outbreak of Plague, Nearly 5,000 Years Before the Black Death | New York Times

3-minute read

The oldest known cases, discovered among hunter-gatherers in Siberian graves, contradict the theory that the disease once was mild.

Original link | Archive.is link

No, We Don’t Need to Ban Caste Discrimination | City Journal

3-minute read

Activists often kick off moral panics by asserting the existence of a pervasive but difficult-to-measure problem, then demanding a new institutional mechanism to detect and punish it. But just like prior moral panics, there’s little evidence that caste discrimination is widespread—and real evidence that adding it to our laws will make things worse.

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3 stars

The Guadalupe Swept Us Away. This Is the Story of All That Came After.

27-minute read

In the days after last July’s historic disaster, I wrote about the tragedy that befell my family. But crawling out of the river was only the beginning.

[...]

Runyen cautioned me at the start of this conversation about emotions that might surface. He’s reassuring me again, telling me that he and his colleagues will do whatever they can to keep people safe. Not only that, he wants people like me, my family, and anyone else who experienced this flood or any other natural disaster to feel secure again.

Then it hits me: High up in that hackberry tree, I wasn’t alone. In what had seemed to be the loneliest moment of my life, Runyen was here, working frantically to try and keep us safe, to protect my family and hundreds of others as best he could. Even if he couldn’t control whether I received the warnings—even as the weather was violently out of our control—he was here, doing his best with what he was given.

I also think of Patrick, jumping out of his tree, swimming to the bank, emerging from the flooded Guadalupe, and weaving through debris and rubble to try and find the rest of us.

Being there for one another: Isn’t that all there is?

Runyen tells me he’s read my flood story four times, including this morning in his office, behind a closed door. He thanks me for writing it and tells me he’s shared it with his staff. “So we don’t lose sight of our mission. Our mission is the protection of life and property. And we certainly take it harder when we lose life.”

He asks about my family, and then offers to show me around the operations area, where there’s a shift change underway. Two other forecasters have arrived. I say hello to them, shake hands. Then Runyen and Vesper walk me to the door. Outside, it’s a beautiful day.

Original link | Archive.is link

2 stars

Your Next Dog May Live Longer | The Atlantic

8-minute read

One day last November, my dog, Forrest, sat on the cold marble steps of the Smithsonian’s natural-history museum in Washington, D.C., ready to meet Celine Halioua, a woman who may one day add a tail-wagging year or so to his life, and also the lives of millions of other dogs. In 2019, Halioua founded a company called Loyal, and in February 2025, a pill that she developed for dogs was deemed likely to be effective by the FDA. If the company ticks a few remaining boxes, the drug could soon be on sale, kick-starting a new era of longevity medicine that could eventually also lengthen humans’ lives.

[...]

Halioua had another reason for starting with dogs, beyond her connection to them: Federal approval for animal drugs is easier to come by than it is for human drugs. And because dogs tend to live only a decade or so, she can quickly tell whether a life-extension drug is working in them. Her end goal is to lengthen human lives. For thousands of years, dogs have gone out ahead of humans as wilderness scouts. They have ventured into buildings to sniff out explosives. Some even got killed rocketing into space before us. Now they’re entering another new frontier that may be fraught with its own unforeseeable dangers.

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Nobody Knows Whether Michael Jackson Is Canceled | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

3-minute read

In a 1955 essay, the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin suggested that there are at least two ways of thinking about art and the people who make it.

There’s the “French” way, and the “Russian” way. These are only labels for the sake of brevity and convenience. Plenty of Russian writers, Berlin explained, held the “French” view and many French writers held the “Russian” one. These views originated in the nineteenth century.

Most French writers and artists in the 1800s thought of themselves as akin to craftsmen. An artist had a job to do, for himself and for the public. And that job was to produce the best thing he could. If you painted, you tried to paint a beautiful picture. If you wrote, you tried to write the best book you could.

In this “French” view, an artist’s private life was nobody’s business. Think about how you treat a carpenter. When you order a table, you don’t ask whether the guy who made it cheats on his wife or has noble reasons for sawing the wood. You just want a good table. And if someone told you the table must be bad because the carpenter is a bad man, you would think they were being absurd. What does his character have to do with the quality of his work?

[...]

Once you see the two systems, the Jackson puzzle resolves. The taste system is doing what it always does. It registered Jackson’s music as extraordinary in 1983 and today. The signaling system, though, requires social consensus that an artist is guilty. Jackson, for whatever reason, has never produced that unified verdict. His estate fights every accusation in court. His most devoted fans dispute the allegations against him. The case remains legibly contested in a way the others have not.

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1 star

Here’s Why Buttons and Zippers Are on Different Sides of Clothing for Men and Women | Reader’s Digest

6-minute read

I have buttoned thousands of shirts in my life. Maybe tens of thousands. (I am a mom of five.) I am a grown adult with multiple degrees and a functioning brain, and yet the first time I grabbed my husband’s flannel to throw on before walking the dog, I stood there for a full 30 seconds, brow furrowed, hands fumbling like I’d never encountered a button before. Why did it feel so strange? Was I having a stroke?

No. I was just experiencing one of the most common and most casually accepted little fashion quirks: the fact that buttons and zippers are on opposite sides depending on whether the clothing is designed for men or women. I don’t know how, in all my years of dressing myself, I’d never noticed it before. Men’s buttons and zippers go on the right side; women’s go on the left. It’s so standard that we rarely think to ask why or even notice it, and yet once you start pulling on that thread, you end up in a surprisingly interesting tangle of history, class politics, military strategy and fragile emperor egos.

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The Pulse of NYC: How the Knicks Playoff Drama Impacted Oura Members’ Metrics | The Pulse Blog

1-minute read

If you walked through the streets of New York late on Wednesday night, you could practically feel the electricity in the air. But as it turns out, the excitement of this Knicks playoff run isn’t just palpable—it’s measurable.

Anonymized, de-identified data from local Oura Members reveals that the city experienced both a live physiological spike during the nail-biting game and a measurable slump in recovery the next morning.

From the 8:30pm tip-off to the final moments when the Knicks staged the largest comeback in NBA Finals history, New Yorkers were riding an emotional rollercoaster. Here’s a look at how the drama on the court translated into the Oura data.

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‘They take you out of life, out of time’: a journey into Spain’s astonishing cave paintings | The Guardian

12-minute read

The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan, who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain.

I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. A professor of prehistory and Palaeolithic art at the University of Cantabria, he told me he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work, tools and methodologies developed by early Homo sapiens painters.

About 34,000 years ago, our distant ancestors began making frescoes with chiaroscuro effects through that suite of subterranean vaults, which remained in use for many millennia, until the cave mouth was sealed by a rockfall. The best part of a geological epoch passed before a curious gun dog clawed its way across the threshold in 1868, leading a succession of witnesses into the first such prehistoric gallery ever seen by modern eyes.

The technique on display at Altamira seemed much too sophisticated for troglodytic numbskulls, as Palaeolithic people were then assumed to be, and self-appointed experts from France initially declared the whole thing a hoax. (Those accusers were to look pretty stupid when similar caves were found in their own country.) Pablo Picasso is said to have visited, or at least looked at some photos, and the quote attributed to him is possibly apocryphal, but an appraisal for the ages nonetheless: “After Altamira, all is decadence.”

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2 stars

Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets | Wall Street Journal

8-minute read

Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.

But for most users the reality is nothing like that.

Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.

On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site.

Original link | Archive.is link

Your Body Didn’t Evolve To Give Birth Easily | Motherhood Until Yesterday

10-minute read

In high school biology class, I learned about something called the “Obstetric Dilemma,” often referred to as the “OD,” which has been the dominant theory for thinking about childbirth since the 1960s. The idea is that the human female pelvis is an evolutionary compromise. A narrower pelvis is more efficient for upright bipedal locomotion while a wider pelvis makes giving birth to our big-brained babies easier. So there were simultaneous selective pressures on humans to have a narrow enough pelvis to walk and run efficiently, thereby conserving valuable calories, while also having a wide enough pelvis to, well, not die from obstructed labor.

The theory was first proposed by anthropologist Sherwood Washburn in 1960, in a paper that was elegant, intuitive, and enormously influential — and that the medical establishment seized on with considerable enthusiasm. If the human birth canal is a structural compromise baked into our evolutionary architecture, the logic goes, then obstetric intervention is not an intrusion on a natural process but a brilliant correction to an evolutionary design flaw. The OD became, in other words, a justification — for inductions, for C-sections, for the entire apparatus of managed, medicalized birth.

Then came the wave of backlash. In 2015, anthropologist Anna Warrener and colleagues at Harvard published a study that directly tested one of the OD’s core assumptions — that wider hips in women come at a cost to walking efficiency. Their results showed that pelvic width does not predict hip abductor mechanics or locomotor cost in either women or men, and that women and men are equally efficient at both walking and running (source). In other words, the supposed trade-off between wide hips and efficient bipedal locomotion — the entire mechanical foundation of the obstetric dilemma — did not hold up when actually tested. Oops.

[...]

BUT ANYWAY, regardless of which evolutionary pressures most strongly constrained female pelvic width (my money is on the pelvic floor theory), the tight human birth canal is almost certainly a compromise between two opposing forces, which explains why obstructed labor was not more strongly selected against.

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I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists” | Understanding AI

7-minute read

In an interview last month, Sam Altman said that OpenAI is aiming to build an “automated AI researcher” by March 2028. Some people expect this (or similar breakthroughs by rivals) to set off a recursive self-improvement loop that radically accelerates scientific and technological progress.

That might happen eventually, but I think it will take a while.

As human scientists perform experiments, their brains are hunting for patterns in the data that could give rise to new insights and new models of how the world works. But an AI scientist — at least one based on today’s LLMs and agent architectures — can’t learn from experiments in the same rich way. They have no reliable or scalable way to build implicit knowledge from data they see at inference time.

Fixing that may require fundamentally rethinking the transformer architecture at the heart of today’s frontier models. At a minimum, it’s going to require overhauling today’s agentic frameworks.

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The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love | The Marginalian

5-minute read

One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.

Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters, edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

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Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso | Mars For The Rest of Us

7-minute read

The Italian space agency’s official technical report on designing the ISSpresso barely masks their astronauts’ horror at the conditions they found when they first drifted aboard the International Space Station. The Americans were up there drinking instant coffee, like animali.

After two years, four prototypes, and a great deal of paperwork, Lavazza and the Italian space agency sent a proper espresso machine to the ISS in 2015. On Earth, a basic Lavazza espresso maker costs about $150 and weighs 3.5 kilograms. The coffee machine’s spaceborne cousin was a 20kg box about the size of an oven. The cost to build it was not disclosed, but was likely in the single-digit millions

Asking how a coffee machine got to be so huge and expensive in space is a good way of understanding the cost drivers in human space flight.

[...]

There is a truism in aerospace: when you pay $500 for an aviation-certified thumbtack, what you’re really paying for is the ten binders of compliance documents, certifications, and tests that accompany it through the production process, along with a promise that someone will go to jail if any part of that process is falsified.

The Process is painful, but it’s not unique to NASA. We run versions of it in aviation, military, and medical contexts, wherever human lives are at stake. It is often ridiculous and everyone hates it. But some version of it is the only way to be sure systems behave as intended.

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The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World | The Atlantic

11-minute read

When I was a freshman at Stanford University, I learned to shotgun a beer from a guy in a frat. Soon after, he dropped out and started an AI company. Six months later, it was valued at more than $1 billion.

For most students, Stanford is a normal competitive school, where people go to class and coffee shops and fall in love and freak out over finals. But a select few attend something else: a Stanford inside Stanford, where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds, handing out mentorships and money and invites to yacht parties in an attempt to convert promise into profit.

[...]

These teenagers are sometimes handed “pre-idea funding”—hundreds of thousands of dollars, or in rare cases, even millions—before they have the glimmer of an actual company in mind. Plied with excess and access, they have little oversight; innovation and fraud co-develop. And all of this is happening as tech companies assume more power over our lives than ever before.

This is a story about the kids being groomed to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.

Original link | Archive.is link

1 star

John Thomson’s China | Heading East

1-minute read

Between 1868 and 1872 Scottish photographer John Thomson made a series of trips in China travelling from Hong Kong to Beijing by boat and from Shanghai up the Yangtze to the Three Gorges.

He produced a book of over 200 photos,​ arranged as a travelogue taking Europeans into Chinese homes of rich and poor. The photo above for example was taken in the home of Mr. Yang “a gentleman enormously rich, and holding an official rank in Peking.” (Thomson was clearly enchanted with Yang’s courtyard home which he described as “a paradise.”)

Many of the interior windows were covered with rice paper. Thomson noted that women (who were sequestered from the men) would touch their tounges to the paper making it temporarily transparent to peer through the spots as he passed by.

Look at these images full sized. There’s a lot hidden in the details. Unlike many other early photographers he didn’t spend all his time photographing palaces and ruins. He also captured a lot of daily life including peasants, merchants, and criminals.

It’s an extraordinary peek into a the complex layered society that would be swept away by the series of wars and revolutions that would roil China for the much of the next 80 years.

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The History Behind the Signs Lighting Up Our Daily Lives: Vacuum-Form Signage and Human Connection | Beth Mathews Design

4-minute read

There’s a certain type of sign hanging on every Main Street in America, seen on every road trip exit ramp, and shining brightly above the doorways to our local car mechanic, salon, and bar. These plastic, bubbly, lit-up signs have quietly ingrained themselves in our history and cultural identity here in the US, sometimes without thought or recognition, guiding us into the businesses that have sustained our local communities and economies for decades. And once you’re aware of their folk art glory, you’ll notice that they are…everywhere.

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What can singing mice say about human speech? | Phys.org

2-minute read

Speech is a crowning achievement of human evolution, the skill that separates us from every other animal. So, it would stand to reason that evolving this capability required some enormous leap in brain complexity. A study published in Nature suggests otherwise.

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Earth’s underground fungal network is so massive, it would span 10% of the Milky Way, map reveals | Live Science

3-minute read

Earth’s underground fungal network is so vast that, if it were in outer space, it would span roughly 10% of the Milky Way if placed in a straight line, a new study finds.

These subterranean structures, called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, work in partnership with most of the world’s land plants, feeding plants nitrogen and phosphorus in return for their carbon. Now, the first global map of this fungal network has revealed where their intricate branching structures are most densely packed.

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A small object past Pluto may have a thin atmosphere | Science News

1-minute read

The possible atmosphere around 2002 XV93 would be a first for a small object beyond Pluto

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AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your mind | Baillie Gifford

13-minute read

Will AI replace us? It’s the wrong question. AI will not simply replace human workers. It will change what human workers are. It is already reshaping how we learn, who we learn from, how we assess our own competence and what cognitive skills we develop or allow to atrophy. The humans who emerge from this process will not be the same humans who entered it.

The partnership between humans and AI that people like to imagine, one where each complements the other’s strengths, is not a stable endpoint. It is a moving target, because one half of the partnership is being continuously reshaped by the other.

A skilled professional who learns to use AI well can be extraordinarily productive. But this is not a rising tide that lifts all boats. It is a force multiplier that amplifies existing advantages. The same dynamic that makes an AI-augmented expert vastly more valuable also makes an AI-dependent novice more disposable.

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Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud | Bits about Money

44-minute read

The financial industry understands itself to be an arm of the government. We were inducted into this service other-than-willingly through the ordinary operation of law and regulation.

This is uncontroversial and unsurprising to insiders.

A claim which will be more surprising: some regulated financial institutions have delegated authority for account- and transaction-level decisioning to a non-profit.

Another: that non-profit includes a private intelligence agency, which runs covert assets, publishes intelligence estimates, develops target lists, and communicates them to decisionmakers.

Still another: the non-profit organized a coalition of the willing as an outgrowth of its intelligence agency. The willing non-profits, that is. The coalition engaged in a years-long campaign to coerce financial infrastructure and other firms to give them the ability to direct accounts to be closed. The infrastructure built to do this against domestic terrorists was applied to an American politician’s fundraising efforts, and no one seemed to think that was odd.

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Why China got rich, and India didn’t | David Oks

12-minute read

In the year 1950, much as today, the two largest countries in the world by population were China and India. China was a good deal larger at the time, holding 22 percent of the world’s population to India’s 15 percent; but really the two were in a very similar position. Both of them were giant countries that had assumed their current state—India as the independent Republic of India, China as the People’s Republic of China—in the preceding three years. Both of them were among the very poorest places on earth. And both of them were about to spend decades trying, by very different means, to make themselves rich.

For China, that experience was one long nightmare. China had already been wrecked by a prolonged civil war and by a brutal Japanese invasion in the decades prior, the whole experience killing tens of millions of people. The civil war ended in 1949, with a Communist victory; but what came next was no less catastrophic. The Communists’ leader, Mao Zedong, immediately embarked on campaigns of vengeance against enemies of all stripes, murdering well over a million people in the process; he then launched on an ill-fated agricultural modernization campaign, the Great Leap Forward, that produced the largest famine in history, killing somewhere between 30 and 45 million people; and then a frenzied period of ideological radicalization, the Cultural Revolution, that suspended national life for a decade and killed another 1.6 million. By the time that Mao died in 1976, China was internationally isolated, economically stagnant, and still desperately poor.

[...]

I suspect that if I’d been around in the year 1950, it would have been obvious to me that India would succeed and China would not. I would have made the same bet in 1960, when China was starving tens of millions of its own people while exporting grain abroad; and I would have done it again in 1970, during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Nor would I have been alone. As late as 1985, prominent economists were writing articles in the New York Times suggesting that “far more than China today, India is an economic miracle waiting to happen.”

But they were wrong.

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2 stars

Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly’s journey to $1 billion delivered | In Development

14-minute read

That’s not a rhetorical question; it’s the headline the New York Times ran the first time they covered GiveDirectly. My co-founders and I had a mild panic. We had been hoping, I suppose, for something benign and puffy along the lines of “New Charity Founded by Thoughtful Econ PhDs Is a Great Idea.”

The truth is of course that that piece did what it needed to do, which was to speak to its audience where they were at. At the time (i.e., in 2011) most New York Times readers probably did think it was nuts—or, at best, naive—to give out money for nothing. And one can hardly blame them. They had been fed a steady diet of data-free, mantra-heavy messaging implying, if not stating outright, that people living in extreme poverty were not capable of sound financial choices. One must teach a man to fish, the inane aphorism goes.

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On the trail with the hunters who believe shooting big game can save Africa’s wildlife | The Guardian

11-minute read

You can kill almost anything if you’re willing to pay. Big or small. Land, water or air. Ten a penny or one of the last of its kind. There’s nearly always a way, though it might not make you popular. The Niassa special reserve, a vast reservation larger than Switzerland, stretches for 190 miles along the northern rim of Mozambique, taking in 4.2m hectares of woodland and rivers. The reserve, one of the world’s largest protected areas, is home to elephants, leopards, hyenas, zebras and about 1,000 wild lions.

[...]

Every year, clients of the trophy-hunting industry claim the lives of tens of thousands of wild animals across the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, where hunting interests control vast swathes of the wildest land, trophy hunters often directly subsidise conservation projects on the grandest scale. In 2014, the Texas oil heir Corey Knowlton is reported to have paid $350,000 for the pleasure of killing a critically endangered black rhino in Namibia. He made the winning bid at an auction aimed at raising funds for African conservation run by the Dallas Safari Club. Afterwards, Knowlton told the media that he had received death threats but that he made his kill with a clear conscience: “I felt like from day one it was benefiting the black rhino.” Conservation efforts, he said, were expensive; it took money to keep them alive. “I’m absolutely hell-bent on protecting this animal.” He said less about what motivated him to kill one.

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The moderately easy problem of consciousness | Noahpinion

9-minute read

At some point, maybe when you were a teenager, a question probably occurred to you: What if I’m actually the only real person in the world? What if everyone else around me is just a cleverly programmed automaton — a “p-zombie”, an NPC in a video game — and I’m the only one who can actually think?

[...]

The answer matters, for at least two reasons. First, if AI is self-aware, and if it has emotions similar to what we experience, we might feel very bad about enslaving it — keeping it in a digital box and forcing it to make PowerPoints and write college application essays for all eternity. We tell ourselves that “animals aren’t people” as a way to excuse the incredible brutality that we visit upon them, but that’s obviously just cope — animals obviously are sentient to some degree, they obviously do experience emotions, and we humans are obviously monsters for the way we treat them. Someday when we abolish animal farming and replace it with tissue-culture meat, it will be treated as a great moral victory — and rightly so. It would be very bad if we were to commit the same sins with sentient AIs that we currently do with animals.

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What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity? | Quanta Magazine

10-minute read

Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries — and therefore so do numbers. Look out the window, and where others see reality as a continuous expanse, flowing inexorably forward from moment to moment, Zeilberger sees a universe that ticks. It is a discrete machine. In the smooth motion of the world around him, he catches the subtle blur of a flip-book.

To Zeilberger, believing in infinity is like believing in God. It’s an alluring idea that flatters our intuitions and helps us make sense of all sorts of phenomena. But the problem is that we cannot truly observe infinity, and so we cannot truly say what it is. Equations define lines that carry on off the chalkboard, but to where? Proofs are littered with suggestive ellipses. These equations and proofs are, according to Zeilberger — a longtime professor at Rutgers University and a famed figure in combinatorics — both “very ugly” and false. It is “completely nonsense,” he said, huffing out each syllable in a husky voice that seemed worn out from making his point.

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The Google Capital Company | Stratechery

7-minute read

First, imagine that your supply is free. Second, imagine that your customers willfully compete against each other to raise your prices. Third, imagine that your users decide which of your customers gets the privilege of paying you. All you have to do is build a bit of infrastructure to make it all happen, pay a nominal bit of depreciation on that infrastructure, and make billions of dollars on some of the greatest margins in the history of business.

I am, of course, describing Google, a company so good that Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, could never quite bring himself to invest in it. Buffett explained in the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting:

We were their customer very early on with GEICO, for example, and we saw — these figures are way out of date — but as I remember, we were paying them $10 or $11 a click, or something like that. And any time you’re paying somebody $10 or $11 bucks every time somebody just punches a little thing where you got no cost at all, you know, that’s a good business unless somebody’s going to take it away from you. And so we were close up seeing the impact of that…But, you know, you’ve almost never seen a business like it.

[...]

The second question is why is Berkshire Hathaway suddenly, after all these years, interested in Google, and at only a slight discount to its all-time high price? Does it really just come down to the fact that Buffett is no longer making investment decisions, and Greg Abel, his successor as CEO, is?

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Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original | Derek Thompson

4-minute read

In 1798, the economist and reverend Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he claimed that population growth would inevitably outstrip the food supply and doom human civilization to cycles of poverty and mass death. This prediction was, to be kind, hogwash. When Malthus’s essay was published, the world held about 1 billion people, and many of them were frequently starving. Today’s global population is more than 8 billion, with the typical person alive today far better fed, clothed, and paid.

But Malthus’ essay was not merely wrong. It was usefully wrong. Decades later, it spurred a revelation in science that Malthus could never have foreseen.

[...]

The most remarkable thing about the simultaneous discovery of evolution is just how utterly unremarkable it is. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find a groundbreaking creation that wasn’t simultaneously invented. Several people are credited with conceiving of the telegraph, the electric motor, the thermometer, photography, the telescope, the jet engine, the discovery of oxygen, the periodic table, and the theory of infection by microorganisms. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, while Newton and Robert Hooke independently arrived at the mathematical law describing gravity. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with a patent office on the very same day.

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1 star

Jakarta’s Remarkable Urban Transit Transformation | In Development

6-minute read

Traffic was so bad that transport experts warned in 2013 that if nothing was done, the city could achieve total gridlock, with every part of the city experiencing a traffic jam. In 2014, Jakarta was crowned the world’s most congested city by the Stop-Start Index and a year later was ranked far below other Asian cities on livability by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Ten years later, Jakarta has the world’s largest and one of the most used bus rapid transit (BRT) systems. The old, crowded diesel commuter trains, famous for allowing passengers to ride on the roofs, are now electrified, air conditioned, and run on regular schedules linking the suburbs to the city center. There are multiple subway and light rail lines crisscrossing the city. The transformation has been remarkable: in 2015, less than 20% of residents were within walking distance of transit. Now, nearly 90% of the city has access to BRT or trains.

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Europe Demands Family Dynasties | Marginal Revolution

2-minute read

In the US, someone with wealth is free to give it away more or less as they see fit (spousal claims excepted, which partly reflect marital co-ownership). In much of Europe, however, there is forced heirship–a large fraction of wealth must be handed down to children which makes it harder to direct large portions of wealth to charities, foundations, or non-family causes compared to the US.

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Longevity Science Is Overhyped. But This Research Really Could Change Humanity. | New York Times

12-minute read

Why are babies born young? The most natural phenomenon on earth is actually hard to explain — at least on a cellular level. Consider this problem: The components of conception are old. When a woman gets pregnant, she has been carrying her egg cells since birth. The sperm that joins with the egg to form a zygote might have been just a few months in the making, but it inherits markers of age from the man who produced it. It only follows that the zygote would also show signs of age — and at first it does.

But then a mysterious metamorphosis begins: The cells of the zygote begin to reverse that damage, shaking off the metaphorical dust that the parents accumulated on their DNA. After two weeks, the cells of the embryo are back to a kind of ground zero of youth. Only then are they as young as they will ever be. To understand this process, which was discovered only recently and is known as “natural rejuvenation,” is to contemplate a mind-bending truth: We don’t start out young; we work our way back to it.

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2 stars

REVIEW: The Greatest Knight, by Thomas Asbridge | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

18-minute read

Asbridge’s takeaway is more or less “William Marshal was an influential historical figure and more people should know about him,” which conclusion I co-sign: William played increasingly important roles in a pivotal seventy years of English history, and the stories are great. But “William died in a different England to the one in which he had been born, but it was a country that he had been instrumental in shaping” doesn’t go far enough: he helped form politics and government, yes, but also culture.

The chevalerie that shaped William Marshal’s life, the code of honorable conduct towards other guys on horses, was partly a practical outgrowth of the rules of the tournament. But it also owed a great deal to the literary tradition that was being created at the same time, and William’s biography — both the History itself and the larger story it preserved, of a boy who was nearly killed by a king but went on, through acts of peerless daring and feudal loyalty, to serve five more — became part of that tradition. His funny stories of his own life, the things he valued and remembered and obviously retold to his children and his household, aren’t just reflections of an early stage of the ideal of chivalry; they helped make it. If William Marshal was, as the History puts it, li meillor chevalier del monde — “the greatest knight in the world” — it’s at least in part because the idea of “knight” was built with him for its model. This is how culture happens: the world changes, people work out new ways of living in the changed world, and then their stories survive as ideals that other people keep trying to copy even once the world has changed again. We’re still thinking about what it means to be a guy on a horse long after the mounted warrior class was gunned down.

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How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were | Derek Thompson

7-minute read

American fatherhood has transformed in the last few generations. Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time.

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Opinion | Will AI end anonymity? I tested it. | Washington Post

4-minute read

“On the Internet,” says the famous New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.” In hindsight, the artist should have added “yet.”

Last week, Kelsey Piper, who writes about technology for the Argument, tweeted: “I have a bunch of secret AI benchmarks I only reveal when they fall, and today one did. I give the AI 1000 words written by me and never published, and ask them who the author is.” Claude Opus 4.7, an advanced thinking model, correctly identified her as the author of a 1,000-word heist scene from an unpublished novel.

Like many journalists, I have a bunch of unpublished fiction lying about, so I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago, during the hysterical, mawkish phase of a particularly bad breakup. “Megan McArdle,” said Opus 4.7, after a few seconds of thought. Fascinated, I kept feeding it smaller and smaller passages to see how little prose it needed for identification. The answer, apparently, was 1,441 words.

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The SpaceX IPO and Data Centers in Space | Stratechery

9-minute read

There is a similarity to Tesla in this way. Musk companies at their best don’t win the game; they change the rules through scale, such that billionaires buy economy cars because they actually drive themselves (with supervision), and airlines transform the consumer experience on their own dime. Musk makes all-in bets — whether that be in terms of launch capacity or in autonomous driving — not by making rational short-term business decisions, but by starting with the desired end state and working backwards.

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High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building | Common Edge

5-minute read

As people migrated to Rome seeking opportunities, they would have faced daunting housing challenges. Ancarenus Nothus, who belonged to a lower urban class, likely lived in an insula (Latin for “island”). Insulae were apartment buildings that often occupied entire city blocks and may have risen up to eight stories. Their ground floors typically housed shops, while the upper floors were crammed with cellae—single-room units arranged around a central light well.

Long before the Industrial Revolution brought vertical living, the insulae pioneered the concept of the walk-up apartment. Though their origins remain obscure, a historical record of the Roman historian Livy suggests they may have existed as early as the third century BC. He recounted an unusual event, in which “an ox is reported to have climbed up of its own accord to the third story of a house, and then, frightened by the noisy crowd which gathered, it threw itself down.

Architecturally, the insula may have borrowed certain features from the domus, such as a colonnaded atrium. Like the domus, its entrance was typically a narrow walkway flanked by stores. But besides these more familiar elements, it also introduced innovations: communal staircases, vaulted arcades, balconies, and multifunctional spaces that combined residential, commercial, and even religious uses within a single complex.

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1 star

As floods get worse, Britain tries a new solution: beavers | NPR

4-minute read

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

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Scientists Create First-Ever ‘Smell Map’ | Harvard Medical School

3-minute read

For most of us, the sense of smell is an integral part of everyday life; it plays a critical role in providing information about our surroundings, alerting us to potential dangers, enhancing our sense of taste, and evoking emotions and memories.

Yet from a scientific perspective, “olfaction is super-mysterious,” said Sandeep (Robert) Datta, professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, with basic biological understanding lagging behind that of vision, hearing, and touch.

Working in mice, Datta and his team have now created the first detailed map of how the thousand-plus types of smell receptors in the nose are organized.

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Forget the caveman myth: Neanderthal brains challenge what we thought we knew | Science X

2-minute read

We appear to have more in common with our Neanderthal cousins than outward appearances would suggest. New research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the differences between Neanderthal brains and the brains of early modern humans (Homo sapiens) were no greater than the differences we see between various groups of people living today. The findings could challenge the long-held theory about why Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago.

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Dogs’ brains began to shrink at least 5,000 years ago, study finds | The Guardian

2-minute read

More specifically, dogs that lived in the Late Neolithic period – about 5,000 to 4,500 years ago – had brains 46% smaller in size than wolves from the same period, with brains of a similar size to those of pugs today. Further work revealed these dogs had significantly smaller brains than ancient wolves even once body size was taken into account – an important consideration given they were smaller overall..

However, the team found no sign that the brains of two canines that lived alongside humans 35,000 and 15,000 years ago – sometimes called “protodogs” – were smaller than those ancient wolves. Indeed, one brain was relatively larger, with the authors suggesting that raises the possibility brain size may actually have increased in the early stages of the domestication.

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Triassic-era crocodile relative walked on 2 legs, had a beaked mouth | Interesting Engineering

2-minute read

Fossilized remains of a bizarre crocodile ancestor were unearthed from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Meet Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre, newly discovered reptile from the Triassic. But it didn’t look like a crocodile at all. This creature navigated a wild, primordial world on two legs, brandishing tiny arms and a toothless, beaked mouth. It is, for all intents and purposes, a crocodile masquerading as an ostrich.

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Barack Obama Considers His Role in the Age of Trump | New Yorker

24-minute read

In Barack Obama’s final days in office, he found himself in the painful position of trying to console his staff, the Democratic Party, and millions of supporters. He attempted to convince them—even if he could not entirely convince himself—that the looming Presidency of Donald Trump was not a national calamity. In the past, he would say, the country had endured slavery, the Civil War, the Great Depression, Jim Crow, assassinations. And, though Trump was alarming in many ways, America was blessed by the strength of its institutions and the resilience of its people. The word “guardrails” was uttered constantly. In Obama’s estimation, Trump would not erase all his achievements. As he put it, “Maybe fifteen per cent of that gets rolled back.”

This kind of calm was pure Obama. His appeal had as much to do with character and temperament as it did with his center-left ideology. Although Obama believed that Trump’s ugliest slurs against him, particularly his deployment of the birther theory, were a racist outrage that heightened the threats against him and his family, he now took pains to set aside his contempt. Insuring that there was another orderly transition of power—that, too, was part of his rhetoric of consolation.

[...]

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Obama about how he’s spent the past decade—and whether events have shaken the confidence that he expressed in that farewell speech. “I would be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that,” he replied. How Obama has used his time—including since Trump returned to office—says much about how he sees his role, its potential and its limits.

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Why Japanese companies do so many different things | David Oks

13-minute read

The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.

[...]

The crucial thing, Aoki suggests, is that we understand all of these distinctive features—lifetime employment, no benefits for individual performance, hostility to outside financing—as reflecting a particular bundle: a “J-firm” bundle, as he calls it, as opposed to the “H-firm” bundle that you encounter in the United States or Europe. The core difference, Aoki says, is that while in the H-mode production is organized vertically, in the J-mode it’s organized horizontally. (H is for hierarchy; J is for Japanese.)

[...]

And the complete Japanese bundle, I should say, ends up producing something with entirely different objectives and interests than the American bundle. The H-firm exists to make money, or rather to return money to shareholders; but the J-firm, run by its employees and largely indifferent to the interests of shareholders, exists simply to continue existing. That’s why Japanese companies are so protean and willing to change what they do.

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How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration) | PerThirtySix

5-minute read

You’re at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It’s right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.

How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?

Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It’s neither of those. What it’s actually doing is far more clever.

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2 stars

My Absolutely Chaotic Adventures at Sea During the Summer of 1984 | Narratively

12-minute read

“The anchor’s stuck!”

Dominic* crouches over a grimy metal box on the foredeck of the Wildebeest, the 20-foot yacht carrying us from Turkey to Gibraltar.

“Release the brake,” Tom shouts from the cockpit. “It isn’t complicated.”

I stop prepping the sails and squat beside Dominic.

“I have released the brake,” he whispers. “The crank won’t move.”

I lean over the rail and peer into the water. It’s glassy, but it’s not immediately clear what I’m looking at.

“The anchor’s caught on a cable,” I shout. “A massive one.”

Tom lurches forward, beer in hand. “That’s a first,” he grumbles, fiddling with the greasy machinery, failing to free any slack. He drains his bottle and scratches his head.

“Should we swim down?” I ask.

Tom shoots me a look — aggravation, condescension, it’s hard to tell. “Well done, Einstein,” he says dryly. “Off you go.”

I grab a mask and flippers. Dominic does the same. Together, we plunge into the balmy Aegean Sea, feet first. The anchor hovers 10 feet from the sea floor and 25 feet from the surface. A sturdy cable — phone lines, maybe — drapes over it, shifting gracefully, ominously, in the milky blue. We dart up for air.

“We can’t do it all in one breath,” I tell Tom. “Throw us a line. We’ll tie it off, and you can haul the cable up a few feet.”

Dominic snatches the rope Tom chucks at us, and we dive again. He wants to impress, but fumbles the knot and kicks for the surface.

I grab the line, loop it around the cable, tie it off and tug at it. My lungs are bursting, but I don’t panic. I know not to. Panic wasn’t an option growing up.

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How Mark Roberge Built HubSpot’s Sales Engine | Commoncog

8-minute read

Mark Roberge, the head of sales at HubSpot, wasted hours posting ads across job boards while hiring for his team. He got hundreds of applications, completed 50 phone screens and took dozens of in-person interviews. Despite this, he hired zero candidates.

Back in September 2007, this was critical for Roberge. He had just joined HubSpot as its first sales hire and had no experience running a sales team. As he put it himself: “I’ve never done sales before. I’m a mechanical engineer by trade. I wrote code for the first years of my career.” Yet he would go on to serve as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services, scaling the company’s revenue from $0 to over $100 million and expanding the team from one employee to four hundred and fifty. An MIT-trained engineer by background, Roberge brought a metrics-driven, process-oriented approach to sales that would eventually earn him recognition as one of Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. HubSpot had grown revenues more than 6,000% since 2007 and by 2011 was recognised as the second fastest growing software company and 33rd fastest growing company overall by Inc. 500. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2014, raising $125 million in its initial public offering. But that was all later. In those early days, none of that was guaranteed. First, he had to figure out how to actually hire salespeople who could sell.

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The Last Nation to Play | Longreads

14-minute read

“This is a special team, man,” he said, without breaking stride. “It’s a special team.”

It was indeed. Aside from Matt, none of these players were from Springdale. Half the team had flown in from places like Virginia and Washington and Pennsylvania. The others had made significantly longer journeys, traveling nearly 6,300 miles over two full days from map-dot islands in the Pacific Ocean. Much of the coaching staff had flown in from the UK.

A passerby peering through the bars of the metal fence would not have thought much of this scene—just another soccer team practicing at a high-school stadium—but had they zoomed in on the intricate blue logos on the breasts of the players’ jerseys, they would have realized the oddity of the team’s presence: This was the Marshall Islands men’s national soccer team. Had the spectator stuck around to watch a few drills, they would have also noticed that these young men, despite their matching uniforms, clearly did not know one another.

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Why not Venus? | Mars For The Rest of Us

7-minute read

Venus researchers Janusz Petkowski and Sara Seager have made an intriguing case that all the anomalies I list can be explained by the presence of microorganisms that produce ammonia from nitrogen and water. The ammonia would react with sulfuric acid to create a kind of slurry, accounting for both the depletion of SO2 and the Mode 3 haze. The pH in such a neutralized droplet would be close to 1, a perfectly livable environment for acidophiles we find on Earth. And a byproduct of their metabolism would be molecular oxygen.

The appeal of this theory is that it’s ridiculously easy to test. Unlike Mars, where we have to delve deep underground to hope to find relic life, we can just go look at the clouds on Venus with a party balloon. The mission is simple enough that Petkowski and Seager are flying a private version of it with RocketLab as a side project, funded by an anonymous benefactor.

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If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? | Derek Thompson

8-minute read

“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time,” the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 paper. “It is not happy now.”

Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population” after COVID that “mainly persists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in national sentiment. After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness plunged. And it’s hardly bounced back at all.

Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.

[...]

So, those who privilege economic statistics over self-reports might be tempted to summarize the situation this way: America’s resilient economy is a fact, while Americans’ sad-sack survey results are mere irrational feelings. There is something to this; the gap between so-called “hard data” (e.g., the unemployment rate) and “soft data” (e.g., a survey) is certainly wide and widening. But a feeling is an important kind of fact. Feelings don’t just shape consumer behavior. They shape political attitudes; and attitudes influence voting; and voting determines policies; and policies shape the economy. To understand the future of the US economy and the United States writ large, one cannot afford a haughty indifference toward sentiment.

And on the sentiment front, what we’ve got are four survey results—four facts, you might even say, of American lugubriousness—all of which point to one unmistakable conclusoin. This decade has been the very opposite of “roaring.” We are mired instead in the Tragic Twenties.

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How to Crash | Pangyrus

7-minute read

On the morning of the ceremony, Joe handed me a tailored blue tweed jacket and an orange knit tie to match his own. I put them on and clambered into the back of a rented 1967 Volkswagen camper van with Joe’s parents, two sisters, and Euan Kennedy — driver and urologist.

The van was cream with white leather benches, silver buckets for champagne, and no seat belts. We rattled along country roads and onto the motorway. We made small talk and I tried to remember the outline of my speech for later.

A mile short of the church, on a roundabout, moving around twenty miles an hour, the chatter was replaced with screaming. For the van door had rattled open and I had fallen out.

Calamities seem to happen in slow motion, then very fast. I remember sliding along smooth white leather as the van banked in the turn, then feeling the door give way and swing open, and then falling backwards out of it as though I were a figment in someone else’s dream. My head smashed into the road.

After that there is a gap in my memory.

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An Eccentric Tycoon Left a Fortune to the Winner of a Baby-Making Contest. The Great Stork Derby Divided Canadians During the Great Depression | Smithsonian Magazine

7-minute read

Before his sudden death on Halloween in 1926, the wealthy Toronto lawyer and financier Charles Vance Millar built a reputation as a bachelor and a prankster. In one of his favorite practical jokes, he would place money on a sidewalk and hide nearby, roaring with laughter at people’s reactions as they contemplated their next move. Undoubtedly eccentric, Millar amassed a fortune by investing in breweries, real estate and infrastructure. He once modernized a stagecoach company in western Canada by replacing horses with automobiles.

Millar never married or had children, and he had no living relatives when he suffered a fatal heart attack at age 72. His death “proved to be the beginning of a posthumous career that eclipsed everything he had accomplished in his lifetime,” attorney and author Mark M. Orkin wrote in a 1981 book. Millar’s last will and testament contained a number of strange provisions, but the most peculiar was the one that launched the so-called Great Stork Derby.

The clause in question established a competition among Toronto mothers that would allocate a portion of Millar’s estate to the participant who gave birth to the most children over the next ten years. The bequest was valued at about 500,000 Canadian dollars—equivalent to nearly 9 million Canadian dollars today. In the case of a tie, those funds would be divided equally among the winners.

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The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine | WIRED

20-minute read

Her movements were tracked, over and over. When she sat down. When she ordered a drink. When she went to the bathroom. When she took the elevator. Nina Richards went to New York Knicks games quite a bit, and the security forces at Madison Square Garden used the arena’s network of cameras to follow her.

New Yorkers have known for a long time that going to a game or concert at the Garden meant surrendering some privacy. That, as you watched the show, the Garden in a real sense watched you. Since 2018, there have been reports of the venue deploying face-recognition technology in what critics believe are increasingly intrusive ways. Owner James Dolan has watch lists of basketball fans who have dared criticize his management. He keeps a close eye on his other venues too, including Radio City Music Hall and the Sphere in Las Vegas. Last March, Dolan’s security team blocked a graphic designer from seeing a concert; the designer, years earlier, had printed and sold a half-dozen T-shirts reading “Ban Dolan.” He has locked out whole firms’ worth of lawyers, even keeping out a mom who was trying to take her 9-year-old Girl Scout to a Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall; the mom’s coworker had pissed him off.

[...]

But the true extent of Dolan’s panopticon has only been caught in glimpses. A 2025 lawsuit by a former member of the MSG security team lifted the veil, just a bit. We started our own digging into the Garden’s operations. We discovered that Dolan’s security teams obsessively tracked Nina Richards, a trans woman, over a two-year period, monitoring her movements through the venue down to the second. (WIRED is using a pseudonym in this article out of respect for her privacy.) Dolan’s biometric surveillance is so extensive that a New York City police officer’s photo was added to a face-recognition database, and a child triggered an alert at one of Dolan’s properties. According to that lawsuit and our sources, Dolan’s head of corporate security takes such an expansive view of his mission that his employees will functionally cosplay as cops—patrolling the neighborhood, snooping on protesters if they happen to be in the area. You don’t have to enter a Dolan venue to be under his watch.

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Creating baby geniuses to thwart the AI threat? (Yes, really.) | Mother Jones

11-minute read

Among the numerous ethical questions raised by genetic engineering is whether its use will effectively create a new hereditary caste system, not unlike the dystopian pecking order in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where “Alpha” elites rule over the lesser classes. The future that Malcolm Collins describes sounds very much like a society stratified by genetic haves and have-nots: “I think it will be both dramatically less equitable, but dramatically better for the poor individuals in the same way that the United States right now might be less equitable than it would have been at the time of the Revolution,” he says. “But right now, the poorest Americans still have cellphones and computers and refrigerators, right? They’re not dying of cholera in the streets.”

In Benson-Tilsen’s ideal tomorrow, there would be no genotocracy—some of the wunderkinds optimized for superior intelligence will have quashed the threat of advanced AI, and the technology needed to have healthier and smarter babies will be widely accessible and affordable. But current trends—a small group of Silicon Valley titans holding a vast amount of our nation’s technological, political, and financial power—don’t seem to point in that direction. What, I ask him, will stop billionaire investors from hijacking the tech of even the most well-intentioned embryo-­editing entrepreneur? After a long pause, he concedes he doesn’t have a great answer: “It’s an interesting question I haven’t thought that much about.”

Well, perhaps the superhumans will figure it out.

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The Stress of Elite Chess Is Wearing Down the Game’s Champions | The Walrus

9-minute read

Maybe, they think, it could be theirs: the world championship, immortality. And then, for all except one, they learn the crushing truth. Someone out there is better.

Life in chess has always been a struggle, never more so than today. During the two-year battle for the 2024 world chess championship, I saw tantrums, I saw tears, I heard one top grandmaster muse about leaving the game for a career in fashion.

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The Hardy Men | The New York Review of Books

9-minute read

In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted as a right-wing Internet provocateur, founded a boutique publisher called Passage Press. His goal, he told Ross Douthat in a New York Times interview last year, was to build a reactionary cultural apparatus that would form an “enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left.”

For too long, he argued, conservatives had stood by stuffily as the left commandeered arts and entertainment and bent mainstream institutions to its ideological will. Keeperman wanted to change that. By drawing on the energies of the so-called New Right and its various overlapping cohorts—red-pilled Silicon Valley types, Dimes Square podcasters and playwrights, manospheric influencers, proselytizers of raw milk—he hoped to show that the right could produce culture that was just as vital, just as possessed of spiritedness and “thymos,” as that produced by the left, if not more so. “If you are telling the truth about the world,” Keeperman told Douthat, “then you are going to make right-wing art.”

[...]

Last year, however, Passage put out what at first seemed like a very different set of books—books beloved by millions of readers around the world, very few of whom, presumably, would consider them far-right texts. In two handsome box sets with illustrated covers by Alex Wisner (a comic artist who has published two graphic novels with the press about an anti-Bolshevik Russian general), Passage released the original versions of the first six Hardy Boys novels, which began entering the public domain in 2023.

Lest anyone think Passage was broadening its curatorial horizons to include nonpolitical material, or simply making a cash grab by appealing to young readers, the press made clear that it considers these tales of sleuthing teen heroes to be of a piece with its revanchist worldview.

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The Rise & Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’ | NOEMA

15-minute read

I have many thoughtful friends who are depressed about the state of the world. I am less depressed than they are — not because I’m an optimist, or because I deny the evil and stupidity in our political system that are causing so much harm, but because I believe history reveals a pattern that leaves reason for hope.

When democratic governments fail to serve their people, voters recognize that something is wrong. Democracy is the best system ever devised for peacefully removing ineffective leaders from power, but some bad leaders, whom I call “petty tyrants,” can undermine the democracy itself.

Petty tyrants are more focused on personal victories than on national priorities. The good news is that they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Once we understand their common flaws, it becomes apparent why they eventually fall rapidly from power and leave few changes to government that last. Understanding this pattern can help us recognize a critical feature that distinguishes leaders who damage their nations from those who create lasting good: their relationship to truth.

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1 star

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat | The Atlantic

6-minute read

In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.

On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.

[...]

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.

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The Farmer Signal in Intelligence Appears in East Asia Too: The Rise of the Han | PifferPilfer

5-minute read

In Europe, I previously found a positive association between Early European Farmer / Anatolian farmer ancestry and educational-attainment PGS. That was not just an isolated observation: Akbari et al. later reported a similar farmer-related signal in their ancient-DNA analysis. So the European comparison is not merely that farmers expanded. It is that farmer ancestry appears to carry a detectable positive EA signal.

But Europe is not the only test case. China had its own great Neolithic agricultural cores, especially around the Yellow River and the eastern farming societies of Shandong. If farming populations really carried a distinctive trait profile, we should not expect the signal to stop at the Bosporus. We should see something similar in East Asia.

That is what I find here.

Link

Archaeologists Find Egyptian Mummy Buried With the ‘Iliad’ | New York Times [gift article]

4-minute read

Yes, I sent an article about this last month -- but this piece adds informed speculation about why the Iliad fragment might be buried with the mummy:

“The find is incredibly significant, primarily for the discovery of such a papyrus with Greek literary text in its original context,” said Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago. “We have evidence that such Greek literary texts could be used as magical amulets and that Homer was frequently cited in such amulets, as well as in the large handbooks now known as ‘The Greco-Egyptian Formularies.’ The new find directly supports that indirect knowledge.”

[...]

For residents navigating the complex, vibrant crossroads of Roman Egypt, Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport, said Anna Dolganov, a historian at the Austrian Archaeological Institute. In Egypt, being Hellenic connoted an exclusive social status and financial privilege — and had to be meticulously documented through genealogies going back across several centuries.

Buried with the dead, the “Iliad” perhaps served as a cheat code for a more comfortable afterlife. Dr. Dolganov wonders if carrying the epic poem was a deliberate strategy to secure entry into the Greek underworld, effectively sidestepping the torturous trials of Egyptian mythology. For these individuals, a Hellenic identity wasn’t just for this world — it was an eternal upgrade, offering a smoother path and higher status in the great beyond.

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Does Looksmaxxing Give Women the Ick? | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

3-minute read

Welcome to the weird and twisted philosophy of looksmaxxing, the online subculture devoted to optimizing male appearance through gym routines, skin care, jawline exercises and surgery. Clavicular himself is an advocate of “bonesmashing”, or hitting one’s face repeatedly with a hammer to change the face shape. He told the New York Times that he suspects he is sterile after years of injecting himself with testosterone.

[...]

But, ironically, the very purpose of looksmaxxing, which is designed to attract women to “masculine men”, will not achieve its purpose. Because the harder a young man tries to appeal to women, the more likely he is to appeal to other men instead.

That is the lesson from a recent experiment by the PhD student William Costello. Costello posted two photos side by side on X. One was of Clavicular. The other showed Felix Yongbok Lee, a popular K-pop singer with extremely feminine features. Costello asked his 20,000 followers to pick the more attractive of the two.

Men picked Clavicular. Women, in contrast, preferred Yongbok Lee. This is consistent with studies indicating that men overestimate women’s preferences for highly masculine features.

Some male commenters claimed that the female commenters were lying. This is a comforting belief, allowing men to ignore feedback that contradicts their assumptions.

A much simpler explanation is that women mean what they say.

Link

Neanderthals may have shared key DNA for complex language, reshaping when human speech began | Phys.org

3-minute read

In a first-of-its-kind finding, researchers at University of Iowa Health Care discovered that specific genetic sequences have an outsized impact on humans’ language abilities and that these sequences evolved before humans and Neanderthals diverged.

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Could the Girls of Camp Mystic Have Been Saved? | New York Magazine

31-minute read

The women sound like men who have been to war: They can only try to tell you. “It was a place,” says a former camper, “I have been doing my best to re-create in my life wherever I have lived.” And another: “The closest I have felt to God.” “You know,” another alum tells me, “the poignancy of, I, I can’t be a child again. I can’t be innocent like that again. I can’t have my whole life ahead of me again.”

When rain hits New York, Alexa Fleet is transported back to her cabin, Bubble Inn. She had never heard such storms as those, “as if the Earth were releasing everything it had.” They were “terrifying, so loud, so hard, so intense. It imprints on you. I yearn for a storm like that. It felt cleansing.” Those summers, six of them, were raw with “everything a girl feels so deeply at 13.” As a second-grader, she would begin building out a calendar toward summer, x-ing out every day from January until June that she had to wait until camp, when finally the world would not revolve around the needs and achievements of boys. “You’re quiet and smile 11 months of the year,” she said, “but there you were safe — the gates were closed — it was just you and the girls. Your personality could de-thaw.”

[...]

The parents were told to gather at Ingram Elementary, a school 13 miles and a 20-minute drive from the camp. The Childresses arrived a little after 1 p.m., among the first parents to show. There were tables and laptops to log parents in when they arrived and water and clothes and blankets. Matthew began to feel very nervous, though he still knew basically nothing about the scope of the flood that had enveloped the town he was not in. He did not want to wait by a pile of blankets in another town for his missing daughter; he wanted to speed toward the river and start moving trees. But others had tried and gotten nowhere. The roads were blocked, impassable.

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Redshift, by Elena Saavedra Buckley | Harper’s Magazine

23-minute read

To become a Martian colonist, I first had to fill out a Google Form. It asked me about my aviation know-how, medical training, and experience “working in extreme environments.” I sheepishly wrote “N/A” each time, adding a note that highlighted my cooking and social skills. It turned out that this was okay: I was only going to Utah, after all, and the institution running the show was not a multibillion-dollar federal agency but the Mars Society, a scrappy nonprofit. The organization was founded in 1998 by the aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin to advocate for human settlement of the red planet. In 2002, it opened the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Martian settlement—laboratory, theater, and summer camp all at once. Located in a corner of rural southeastern Utah, the MDRS’s environment looks enough like Mars to play the part while still being accessible to participants and potential donors. (Antarctica and the Atacama Desert, arguably the best Martian analogues on Earth, are harder sells.)

[...]

The Mars Society’s simulations, on the other hand, are usually two weeks long. Crew members’ research projects can seem a bit perfunctory, often involving testing gadgets or mimicking the sort of fieldwork that might someday be done on Mars. (This isn’t to say that the longer-term missions always produce mountains of technical research. In Russia, the six crew members played a lot of Guitar Hero, and mission control had to fake a fire to keep them alert.) Most participants are either graduate students or ordinary Mars enthusiasts, the majority of whom pay the Mars Society between $2,000 and $3,500 to attend. Only a handful of them have ever actually made it into space. It wasn’t initially clear to me what, exactly, the organization’s simulation had done to nudge humanity toward the red planet. It seemed more like an elaborate team-building exercise, a logistically complicated and expensive ropes course for space-travel diehards.

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2 stars

Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice | Astral Codex Ten

15-minute read

This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out.

[...]

I’m too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent.

[...]

The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.

There are countless reasons to lie when you’re writing. Maybe you thought of a clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it’s exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there’s no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice.

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The Mansion, the Heiress, the Jewel Heist, and Me: A Bel-Air Fairytale | Vanity Fair

7-minute read

In Los Angeles, the night of Friday, December 8, 1961, was appropriately dark and stormy. A tree was downed on Bel Air Road, causing a man on a scooter to crash as he raced around a steep corner. A member of the Bel-Air Patrol later came by to discover the accident and the dazed man on the ground. He helped him up, handed back the white pillow sash he’d been carrying, and, without curiosity or question, sent him on his way.

Meanwhile, 15-year-old Carla Kirkeby was home alone—aside from her family’s sleeping staff—in their approximately 22,000-square-foot residence at 750 Bel Air Road. If the address sounds familiar, it’s because the house’s grand limestone facade, originally designed by architect Sumner Spaulding, was used for exterior shots in the hit ’60s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Once referred to as “the house of the golden doorknobs,” the 10-acre estate, also known as Chartwell, is currently owned by Lachlan Murdoch; he bought it in 2019 for $150 million.

[...]

Discovering a historic jewel heist might easily be the most interesting thing to happen to most people. But the captivating details of Carla’s life threaten to reduce it to a footnote. At 14, she threw a wild rager that ended after a partygoer made off with one of her parents’ prized Christmas presents: a silver platter engraved “to Arnold and Carlotta, from Ron and Nancy.” (The Reagans were the Kirkebys’ next-door neighbors and friends.) At 23, police stopped her for going over 100 miles per hour down the Pacific Coast Highway in a Ferrari 275 GTB4—the same make and model as a missing car that belonged to Sharon Tate, who had recently been murdered by Charles Manson’s followers. She says she once wrested her mother from the notorious clutches of John Paul Getty after what she described as “a mediocre dinner” at the magnate’s Surrey estate. On another England adventure, she strolled into a chauffeured Rolls-Royce in London to find herself face-to-face with a young Mick Jagger. Angelina Jolie’s mother was her children’s babysitter.

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If we avoid sadness in life, why do we seek it in art? | Psyche Ideas

6-minute read

As an opera singer, I’ve noticed that some of my favourite soprano arias are incredibly sad: about dying, losing the love of your life to someone else, or even lamenting that you’ve been cursed by an evil sorceress. When it comes to art, I’m far from the only one drawn to dark themes. From Taylor Swift’s breakup anthems to Picasso’s Blue Period paintings to poignant movies like The Notebook (2004), many people seek out art that expresses profound feelings of sadness. Maybe you do too?

It’s a phenomenon that has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers alike. Given that we usually dread sadness and strive to avoid it because it feels so bad – from painful conversations to the grief of loss – why do we actively seek it in art? Why do we pick films that we know will leave us sobbing in the movie theatre, or stream Sad Girl playlists carefully curated to provoke sorrow and melancholy? Why, when we look at paintings depicting human suffering, do we find them beautiful?

Link

Fortress Yellowstone | In These Times

16-minute read

Wild Eagle Mountain is one of a growing number of billionaire-owned ranches in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses some 12 million to 22 million acres (depending on how you measure) and supports the largest concentration of wildlife in the contiguous United States. As such places grow increasingly rare—a 2021 study estimated that only 3% of the Earth’s land area retains all of the species that lived there 500 years ago — proximity to Yellowstone has become an increasingly valuable commodity. In recent years, the ultra-rich have been buying up slopeside mansions, frontage on trout rivers and great swaths of land here in one of the last nearly intact ecosystems left on Earth. And it’s not only in Montana: This influx of wealth has made Teton County, Wyo. — on the other side of this ecosystem — the richest and most unequal county in the United States.

Link

A day with England’s hunt saboteurs | Dispatch

7-minute read

“A man unlike any other is roaming in the pastures,” a trapper complains to the king in The Epic of Gilgamesh. “He helps the wild game to escape; he fills in my pits, and pulls up my traps.”

Four thousand years after humanity chiselled its first story in cuneiform, I’m in the car park of Hawkesbury Upton’s village hall. I’m about to meet Weasel, who’s not a man “unlike any other”. She’s a retired teacher in her seventies who enjoys playing golf and singing in a choir.

Like Enkidu in the ancient tale, however, she spends much of her time liberating animals, filling in pits, and pulling up traps. Weasel is a hunt saboteur: one of hundreds across the UK who, since 1964, have staged weekly interventions in the countryside to save foxes, mink, hares and stags from grisly fates.

In an hour’s time, horses and hounds will sweep across 54,000 acres of South Gloucestershire countryside for the Beaufort Hunt’s “closing meet” – the final “trail hunting” outing of the season, and possibly the last ever. If the government gets its way, this technically legal practice, in which hounds are said to follow pre-laid trails of fox urine rather than live animals, will be banned.

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Furniture in the Closet | News Items

11-minute read

The Wall Street Journal had some fun a while back, reporting on a fraudster’s guilty plea to crimes that its own columnist, Jason Zweig, solved all by himself. In a series starting in 2024, Zweig uncovered a onetime broker, Paul Regan, who had conned some 300 people out of more than $50 million, by promising guaranteed returns of up to 17.1 percent per year.

“Any interest you earn is ‘locked in’ and can’t be lost,” said the ads. Zweig knew it was too good to be true, so he made phone calls, stood by his guns, and bit by bit the whole scheme unravelled. Regan, it turned out, had been banned for life from the U.S. securities industry, but he had moved to Medellín and started over.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were more watchdogs like Zweig, warning people away from too-good-to-be-true offers? That’s especially true in the life-and-annuity business. The promises can run for decades, a good deal today can turn into a bad bet by the time you need it, and the financial statements that could steer you out of harm’s way are either hidden behind a paywall or nonexistent.

[...]

In the past, you could rely on state insurance regulators to make sure your carrier was solvent. Even now, the Delaware Insurance Department, Brighthouse’s primary state regulator, must bless the Aquarian buyout before it can be done. But how will Delaware decide? If you look carefully at regulatory filings, you’ll see that Delaware hasn’t been holding Brighthouse to its own solvency rules for years.

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So What if They Have My Data? | Card Catalog

10-minute read

Sometime in the mid-2000s, most of us started handing over pieces of ourselves to the internet without giving the exchange a second thought. We created email accounts, signed up for social media, bought things online, downloaded apps, swiped loyalty cards, connected fitness trackers, stored photos in the cloud, and agreed to terms of service that almost none of us have ever read in full. We did this thousands of times over two decades and counting, and each interaction felt small enough to be inconsequential.

But the accumulation is enormous. More than 6 billion people now use the internet, and each one makes an estimated 5,000 digital interactions per day. Most of those interactions happen without our conscious awareness: a GPS ping, a page load, an app opening, a browser cookie refreshing, a device checking in with a cell tower. The average person in 2010 made an estimated 298 digital interactions per day. In fifteen years, that number multiplied more than sixteenfold. Those digital interactions produce records that can persist indefinitely, stored, copied, indexed, bought, sold, and combined with other records to build profiles of extraordinary detail.

Link

High Amplitude Disagreeableness | Stay SaaSy

3-minute read

True startup people are one of the most important advantages that many tech companies have. Startup people are aggressive, entrepreneurial, and often bring a dynamism that allows them to cut through significant roadblocks. When there’s a large platform shift (e.g. the AI wave that is currently occurring), they’re often literally the only people at your organization that can help you transition into the new world. There is a reason that many sharp investors strongly prefer to bet on founder-led companies and their startup-oriented teams, particularly during times of extreme change.

[...]

Some people are basically argumentative and combative all the time: high frequency. Others are actually very genial and (usually) conflict-avoidant: low frequency. That’s just human nature.

But all startup people share an ability to reach an extremely high amplitude of disagreeableness – if you’re really wrong, they will fucking nuke you from orbit, and they are willing to get in front of the entire company and call you an idiot because it doesn’t bother them one bit if there’s an audience when they push the big red button. One of the defining traits of a startup person is their willingness to disagree publicly, even with senior people, and to remain insistent over a long period of time – for example, fighting to change a bad process or build the right product even if it takes years. When you see a mid-level person politely but firmly disagree with some member of the C-suite in front of a hundred people, you’re seeing the startup spirit at work.

Link

1 star

#110. “Extended Childhood Disorder”: An Alternative Way of Understanding Teen Suffering | Play Makes Us Human

4-minute read

Teenagers in the United States and many other modern nations are suffering psychologically at tragically high rates. In the most recent National Comorbidity Survey, 49.5% of U.S. teens met the criteria for diagnosis of at least one psychological “disorder” using the official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

I put “disorder” in quotation marks in the above, as an implied objection to the APA assumption that the psychological disturbances, like physical diseases, lie in the person.

[...]

Epstein and his colleagues suggest that the primary cultural shifts that led to teen problems are those that cut them out of adult society and meaningful adultlike activity. In farming communities, where teens take on ever more responsibility for the family farm, or in craft communities where teens become apprentices, working along with adults, there is little if any evidence that the teenage years are more problematic than any other years. The problem, according to Epstein, is that we continue to treat teens as children long past the time when they are ready to be treated more like adults and be integrated into the adult world. We hold them back.

Link

The California town with less than 30 residents begging for young people to move in | SFGATE

9-minute read

But Darwin never became a ghost town, and at one point, even appeared poised to become one of the state’s next booming metropolises. It began as a bustling mining town founded in 1874, shortly after the area was found to be rich in silver and lead. Named for Darwin French, a prospector who had led expeditions in the area, the town was flooded by eager adventurers hoping to strike it rich. The boom didn’t last long, with the bulk of residents leaving by the late 19th century as markets fluctuated and resources became scarce in the harsh desert conditions. Those who stayed were dealt an even bigger blow in the 1930s, when state officials decided to reroute the main road on the way to what was then Death Valley National Monument away from the town.

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Weapons, Wealth, and the Fates of Societies | Marginal Revolution

1-minute read

Why do weapons sustain durable peace in some societies but provoke perpetual violence in others? We develop a theory in which the value of human life and the frequency of violence are jointly determined by weapons technology and economic conditions. Lethal weapons deter conflict but raise mortality, taxing the future returns to investing in one’s livelihood. When those returns are high, deterrence dominates and peace and investment reinforce each other. When those returns are low, the mortality tax dominates, agents divest from the future, the value of life falls, and violence deepens, a trap that deadlier weapons worsen.

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I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America | The Atlantic

29-minute read

Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.

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The Car-Crash Conspiracy | New Yorker

30-minute read

About a decade ago, however, the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries. In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.

Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision. When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.

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2 stars

The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared | The Guardian

15-minute read

When a foil snaps, it makes a sound like a lightbulb being smashed, and then there is a blade of steel in the air that nobody is controlling, and it is moving fast. The broken tip went through Bonfil’s chest, beneath his right arm. His mouth filled with blood. He was on the floor in five seconds. Medical students were in the room but there was nothing anyone could do. He died on the way to hospital.

A Johannesburg magistrate ruled it accidental. Bonfil’s mother flew out from England and told Wilkinson she now thought of him as her son. He spent time with the family in England afterwards.

I asked Wilkinson, not long ago, how it had affected him.

“Badly,” he said. And then he stopped talking.

Eleven years after the incident, the same man, who had learned what physics does to a body, was working as a contract engineer at the Koeberg nuclear power station, 19 miles north of Cape Town. He was furious with the regime that had conscripted him, sent him to fight a war in Angola he didn’t believe in, and made his country a pariah. In an act of folly or courage, in December 1982 he walked four bombs into South Africa’s only nuclear power station, weeks before it was due to come online. On 17 December, he pulled the pins, made it out of the control room, had a farewell drink with his colleagues, and then disappeared.

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Let’s talk space toilets! | Mars For The Rest of Us

7-minute read

While capsules like Soyuz and the Crew Dragon are equipped with a rudimentary toilet kit, astronauts use a mix of drugs, diet, and occult knowledge passed down the generations to keep from having to use it. It can take more than two days for a Crew Dragon capsule to reach the space station, but the crew in the cramped spacecraft is expected to save the real fireworks for the relative comfort of the space station toilet.

The longest anyone has attempted to hold it in space is Frank Borman, on Gemini 7. Stuck in a two-man capsule the size of a phone booth, Borman was determined to get through his two-week mission without releasing the hounds.

Link

Reluctantly Influential: Inside Lenny Rachitsky’s Demandingly Chill Life | First Round

18-minute read

Lenny’s Newsletter has 1.2M subscribers. It’s the top business newsletter on Substack and is top four in publications in the US. Lenny’s Podcast has over 500K YouTube subscribers and each episode gets 100-200K downloads. The sheer volume of what’s in his orbit is impressive on its own: ~25 pieces of content per month across his newsletter, podcast, community wisdom emails and the two other podcasts now on his network, “How I AI” and “The Skip.” He curates and frequently updates a list of partners for Lenny’s Product Pass and maintains its infrastructure, has a thriving 40K-person community and has even put on a 1,200-person conference in San Francisco, Lenny and Friends Summit.

All of this didn’t just happen to him. Nothing is an accident, even if he sometimes makes it sound that way.

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How to walk through walls | Escaping Flatland

7-minute read

In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one.

Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked:

“How much did it cost [to make] again?”

“$7,000.”

“Really? That’s pretty good . . . most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.”

“No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”

In nine months, he had written, directed, and sold a 90-minute action film that cost a third of what a film trailer would. How was that possible? At the time, the cost of film stock alone would normally run into several hundred thousand dollars for an action film like El Mariachi.

[...]

Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.

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The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet | Asterisk

10-minute read

Lots of people die after overdosing on acetaminophen (paracetamol, often sold as Tylenol or Panadol). In the U.S., it’s estimated to cause 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths per year. Acetaminophen has a scarily narrow therapeutic window. The instructions on the package say it’s okay to take up to four grams per day. If you take eight grams, your liver could fail and you could die.

Meanwhile, it seems to be really hard to kill yourself by overdosing on ibuprofen (Advil, Nurofen, Motrin, Brufen). In 2006, Wood et al. searched the medical literature and found 10 documented cases in history. Nine of those cases involved complicating factors, and in the 10th, a woman took the equivalent of more than 500 standard (200mg) pills.

[...]

But guess what? My logic was wrong and what I was doing was stupid. I’m now convinced that for most people in most circumstances, acetaminophen is safer than ibuprofen, provided you use it as directed. I think most doctors agree with this. In fact, I think many doctors think it’s obvious.

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The Tragedy of Mrs. Dr. Seuss | Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade

8-minute read

Unless you are very deep into children’s books, you’ve probably never thought much about Helen Palmer. I hadn’t either, until I bought inscribed copies of two of her books. Then I fell into the quicksand of research that so many antiquarian booksellers get sucked into.

I thought you might also be interested in the story of the woman behind Dr. Seuss and everything she did so that millions of us could delight in The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.

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Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion | The Guardian

7-minute read

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”

Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

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Amazon’s Durability | Stratechery

9-minute read

Now, ten years later, we are here, with the official unveiling of Amazon Supply Chain Services, and I think the time frame is an important one: Amazon, more than any other company, actually operates with decade-long timeframes, consistently making real-world investments at massive scale that (1) convert their marginal costs into capital costs and (2) gain leverage on those capital costs by selling them to other businesses.

This is, by the way, still a story about AI.

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Gamer’s Dilemma | LRB Blog

4-minute read

Donald Trump and his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, both former television personalities, have demonstrated that you can launch a full-scale war with all the fun of a game. In early March, the White House and Pentagon circulated official hype videos of Operation Epic Fury. Footage of strikes on Iran was interlaid with clips from the games Call of Duty, Wii Sports and Grand Theft Auto and the movies Top Gun, Braveheart and Gladiator, punctuated by comic book onomatopoeia. In the run up to the attacks, the US Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering boasted in manosphere-speak: ‘Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.’

Emmanuel Macron has chided Trump for being too flippant in his press conferences and online ravings: ‘When you want to be serious you don’t say every day the opposite of what you said the day before … And maybe you shouldn’t be speaking every day.’

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Rogue States | News Items

4-minute read

The U.S. went to war with Iran because the Trump administration decided a rogue state that regularly threatens the U.S. can’t be allowed to have a nuclear weapon alongside a missile program capable of delivering that weapon to American soil.

Most people seem to have forgotten, though, that there already is a rogue state with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads and counting, as well as a missile program on its way to being able to deliver one of those warheads to the American homeland.

That rogue state is North Korea, and it is getting little attention for the nuclear threat it already poses while time, attention and billions of dollars are focused on the nuclear threat Iran might pose, someday. Don’t take my word for it; President Trump’s own national defense strategy, released early this year, is pretty blunt about the danger from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea: “The DPRK’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S. Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.”

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How an unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables | Works in Progress

4-minute read

Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or shorter stems – gradually turning wild plants into improved yet recognizable versions of their originals. The rare exception is Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage: the origin of cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and much else.

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1 star

The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life | Smithsonian Magazine

3-minute read

Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey.

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New Kind of CRISPR Could Treat Viral Infection and Cancer by Shredding Sick Cells’ DNA | University of Utah Health

4-minute read

A new kind of CRISPR that destroys cells rather than gene editing them has shown potential for killing sick cells while leaving healthy cells untouched.

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Will AI kill the research paper? | Marginal Revolution

1-minute read

Ultimately, why not just build a “meta-paper,” using AI, to answer any possible question about the subject area under consideration. This meta-paper would allow the reader, using AI, to make many sorts of modifications and additions to the basic work. The meta-paper also would allow the reader to add new data, to run additional robustness checks, and to do whatever else you might think of. Once again, the canonical version of the paper evolves away.

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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying | The Guardian

12-minute read

In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.

The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.

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The Memory Maker | Longreads

13-minute read

My wife insists we once took a yoga class together, early in our relationship. She remembers the teacher vividly (a French acrobat, rainbow dreads, apparently quite a character), where we sat (to the left of the door), and the color of the yoga mats (teal). I insist she is misremembering: I have never been to a yoga class, even to this day. I scrolled back years through my phone’s location history once to settle it, but we’d started dating not long after the iPhone came out, and if the data ever existed, it was gone. The yoga story comes up every few years, but we never resolve it. It is probably unresolvable. As a neuroscientist, I know how these things happen—the encoding mishaps, the source confusion, the neuroscience of how two people can end up telling different stories about the same afternoon. This knowledge has never once brought us closer to agreeing.

I was thinking about this story when I heard something strange from a neighborhood friend of mine, Andrew Deutsch, who was using OpenAI’s Sora app. Sora, if you aren’t familiar, worked like this: You would record your face, say a few numbers, rotate your head left to right. Moments later, you would have an AI video replica of yourself, a self-deepfake, insertable into any scenario you can prompt the AI to produce. Scuba diving with SpongeBob. Dancing K-pop style in a futuristic cityscape. You could then share your videos with your friends and scroll through the videos of others, in what is often described as a “TikTok for deepfakes.” Sora hit one million downloads in only five days. Six months later, OpenAI shut it down, reportedly redirecting resources toward coding tools ahead of a planned IPO. Consider this, then, a eulogy for Sora, a technology with the lifespan of an off-Broadway flop that, in its brief and ignominious run, exposed a crack in human cognition that the next self-deepfake app will surely exploit.

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Capitalism and Modernity | Marginal Revolution

3-minute read

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.

[...]

What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.

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2 stars

How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive | Aeon

9-minute read

This little dance isn’t unusual for me and the millions of other people who can spend hours in deep, almost joyful focus when a question grabs our attention, but who can also derail ourselves completely when we hear about a shiny new idea. For a long time, I thought this was a personal failure of discipline, a quirk I needed to manage better. It’s only when I started working at the ADHD Research Lab at King’s College London that I came to believe it might be something else entirely.

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist using behavioural experiments, eye-tracking and EEG to examine how attention is drawn toward some signals and away from others. In retrospect, the irony isn’t lost on me that I spent years studying attention without applying the same analytic lens to myself. To understand why I’d dismissed my own experience for so long, it helps to look at how ADHD is officially defined.

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Sleeping Beauty | Women* Write the Balkans

11-minute read

Sometimes, when I go back home to Split, I watch the old tapes of my sister and me as children. It’s a ritual my mother and my partner adore. We connect the old VHS, put in a random tape, and go back in time. My parents filmed everything; the most mundane, wonderful days of my childhood are always there for me to revisit, curated moments unmarred by imprecision of memory. There I am, singing and twirling and exclaiming precocious things to my father as he films, preserved on tape for reevaluation. The older I am, the more I see. So, I watch again, learning anew about who I was and who I might become.

[...]

I was seven when I became aware of my longing for beautiful girls. All princesses fascinated me, but one stood out even more than Ariel. She was a beautiful blond girl on the kitchen towel my grandmother had placed above the stove, just out of my reach. It was just a dish cloth, but I couldn’t look away. “Please can I have her,” I would ask my grandmother whenever I went upstairs. Grandma would laugh and say “no” as she had already done so many times.

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Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing | Stratechery

7-minute read

It’s the nature of business that the eulogy for a chief executive doesn’t happen when they die, but when they retire, or, in the case of Apple CEO Tim Cook, announce that they will step up to the role of Executive Chairman on September 1. The one morbid exception is when a CEO dies on the job — or quits because they are dying — and the truth of the matter is that that is where any honest recounting of Cook’s incredibly successful tenure as Apple CEO, particularly from a financial perspective, has to begin.

The numbers, to be clear, are extraordinary. Cook became CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, and in the intervening 15 years revenue has increased 303%, profit 354%, and the value of Apple has gone from $297 billion to $4 trillion, a staggering 1,251% increase.

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What Happened With Mars Sample Return? (I) | Mars For The Rest of Us

7-minute read

It’s not clear whether to blame Trump, Musk, NASA, or Mars itself for the collapse of a flagship mission.

[...]

Say you want to study a bunch of alien rocks. Our planet is rich in scientists and sophisticated rock-examining machinery, so one approach is to put them all on a rocket and send them to where the rocks are. But our best machines are big and too delicate to fit on a rocket, and the scientists themselves are fragile—we have managed to keep a few of them alive in low Earth orbit, but they struggle to get any science done there.

So another idea is to bring rocks back home. And so sample return has been a top goal of planetary science for thirty years or more.

There have been some successes! Most famously, the Apollo astronauts brought back a few hundred kilograms of moon rocks. In 2004, a mission called Stardust flew past the comet Wild 2 and brought back dust grains from the comet’s coma. In 2005, the Japanese Hayabusa probe landed on an asteroid called 25143 Itokawa and brought back a little surface dust for study. Its successor, Hayabusa2, did the same for an asteroid called 162173 Ryugu in 2018. And in 2023, a mission called OSIRIS-REx returned to Earth carrying a sample from the asteroid 101955 Bennu.

Investigations from these missions have been fruitful and have built expectations for a Mars sample return mission, which would bring the full power of Earth laboratories to bear on some astrobiologically interesting rocks the Perseverance rover found on Mars. The circumstantial evidence for early life on Mars is now strong, and there’s a widespread hope that analyzing samples on Earth would have spectacular results, more than enough to galvanize public support for future Mars missions.

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Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier? | Noahpinion

5-minute read

First of all, I’m skeptical that regular Americans actually like the kinds of building styles that intellectuals often yearn for. If you plunk down old-looking European-style buildings in the middle of Houston or Seattle, people tend to ridicule them as cheesy and inauthentic. The typical insult is “pastiche”, a derogatory term for a style that jumbles and mixes old European styles (even though, as Samuel Hughes points out, mixing and matching older ideas is exactly how classic European building styles were created in the first place).

[...]

Nor is ornamental architecture necessarily what makes people love a city. Traditionalists may sigh over old European styles, and urbanists may salivate over the superilles of Barcelona, but the city that has captured the hearts of Americans in recent years is Tokyo. Downtown Tokyo is a forest of electric lights, strung up along the sides of stubby concrete mid-rises called zakkyo buildings. There’s nary a fancy cornice to be found; instead, the beauty comes from the bright cheery emblems of commerce.

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It Haunted Your Childhood Video Store. You Were Probably Convinced It Was Real. It Was—More Than You’d Like. | Slate

7-minute read

Some objects take up a place in memory so tangible it’s as if you could reach right into your mind and retrieve them from the past. For me, one of them is a black plastic case about the size and shape of a hardcover book, its edges rough and worn with frequent handling. On the front, large enough to be seen across the aisle of a video store, is a grinning skull, and above that, in large red letters, are the words Faces of Death. But what looms largest in my mind is the handwritten note Scotch-taped to the outside of the flimsy slipcover: “ADULTS ONLY—MUST BE 18 TO RENT.”

[...]

As it happens, much of what appears in Faces of Death is not real, beginning with those names. Both Alan Black and Conan LeCilaire—the latter meant to sound like the word killer in a French accent—were pseudonyms for John Alan Schwartz, a young TV editor in Southern California who’d been approached by a Japanese company to make an American version of a so-called shockumentary, like 1962’s notorious Mondo Cane, focused exclusively on death. Like other movies in this new “mondo” subgenre, named for that influential Italian film, Faces of Death presented itself as educational fare, an anthropological study of different cultures’ approach to mortality, hosted by the stern-voiced Dr. Francis Gröss. But it took that framing no more seriously than it did its narrator’s last name, another pseudonym for the actor (an unknown named Michael Carr) who played the part.

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1 star

‘They’re gonna make me cry’: I competed at a speed puzzling championship | The Guardian

6-minute read

I have been a lifelong jigsaw puzzle lover. But in recent years, I have observed the quintessential way to slowly pass time transform into a competitive sport. So I traveled to the USA Jigsaw Nationals to test my skill against the best puzzlers in the country.

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Miso Is Not a Soup | Marc Matsumoto

4-minute read

I often hear people say “miso” when they mean “miso soup.” If the only place you’ve encountered miso is in soup, the two naturally blur together. But it’s a bit like saying “flour” when you mean “bread.” Miso is an ingredient, not a soup, and once you start seeing it that way, a whole world of possibilities opens up.

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I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It | Medium

3-minute read

The domain name friendster.com was registered on March 22 2002. After the site shut down in 2015, the domain did not resolve for 8 years. However, in October 2023 I noticed that the domain name was resolving once again, but it was showing a lot of popup ads. I was curious who owned it, so I looked at the WHOIS info and recognized the owner as a customer of park.io, a company I founded in 2014, and that I had corresponded with him previously over email.

I reached out to him and said I was interested to buy the domain. He told me he had bought it for $8k and now was making ad revenue from the existing traffic. He bought it at gname.com, a site that hosts expired domain name auctions where you can buy prerelease domains from various Chinese/Asian registrars.

Original link | Archive.is link

Sabastian Sawe breaks two-hour barrier to make history in London Marathon | The Guardian

3-minute read

He came. He Sawe. He conquered. Not so very long ago, the idea of anyone running an official marathon in under two hours lurked only in the realms of the fantastical and theoretical: part holy grail, part scientific curiosity.

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The laid-off lawyers and PhDs training AI to steal their careers | The Verge

17-minute read

The LinkedIn post seemed like yet another scam job offer, but Katya was desperate enough to click. After college, she’d struggled to make a living as a freelance journalist, gone to grad school, then pivoted to what she hoped would be a more stable career in content marketing — only to find AI had automated much of the work. This company was called Crossing Hurdles, and it promised copywriting jobs starting at $45 per hour.

Katya clicked and was taken to a page for another company, called Mercor, where she was instructed to interview on-camera with an AI named Melvin. “It just seemed like the sketchiest thing in the world,” Katya says. She closed the tab. But a few weeks later, still unemployed, she got a message inviting her to apply to Mercor. This time, she looked up the company. Mercor, it seemed, sold data to train AI, and she was being recruited to create that data. “My job is gone because of ChatGPT, and I was being invited to train the model to do the worst version of it imaginable,” she says. The idea depressed her. But her financial situation was increasingly dire, and she had to find a new place to live in a hurry, so she turned on her webcam and said “hello” to Melvin.

It was a strange, if largely pleasant, experience. Manifesting on Katya’s laptop as a disembodied male voice, Melvin seemed to have actually read her résumé and asked specific questions about it. A few weeks later, Katya, who like most workers in this story asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, received an email from Mercor offering her a job. If she accepted, she should sign the contract, submit to a background check, and install monitoring software onto her computer. She signed immediately.

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China and the Future of Science | The Scholar’s Stage

9-minute read

Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.

Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”

My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?

Something similar might be said for science and China.

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In search of Banksy | Reuters

16-minute read

The British street artist’s identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan — and uncovered much more than a name.

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Our radical plan to replace the NBA draft | Silver Bulletin

13-minute read

What if you could penalize tanking, decrease randomness, reduce perverse incentives, and give teams more control over their fate? There’s one big catch: you have to ditch the draft for an auction.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m excited about the NBA playoffs. But my interest in the NBA regular season has been flagging in a way that it hasn’t in a long time. There’s a simple reason: it’s the tanking. A full third of the league — five teams in each conference — basically gave up on the season at some point between October and February. The identities of the 10 playoff and play-in teams in each conference were practically locked in a few weeks ago — and they’re literally locked in now.

The NBA is acutely aware of the issue, though it’s unclear whether the league considers it a real problem or just a PR issue. (Here’s why it’s an actual problem: about half the games on any given night “feature” a tanking team. I’m not about to pay $200 a ticket to see a team that isn’t even trying to win play the Knicks at MSG.) And the solutions it has proposed are mostly tinkering around the edges with the current rules, full of the same kinks and quirks that will be exploited by future Sam Prestis and Daryl Moreys.

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2 stars

Did New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces Survive? The Search for the Eighth Wonder of the World | Now Voyager

14-minute read

May 31, 1886, began like any other day for Sophia Hinerangi. She woke early at the steep-roofed whare where she lived, and gathered her touring party from their lodgings. From there she took them on a short walk from the village of Te Wairoa to the shore of New Zealand’s Lake Tarawera, where they would navigate on a pair of paddle-powered whaleboats.

For some of the travellers, this was the final leg of a voyage that had lasted months. They’d made long journeys on ocean liners and steamboats and stagecoaches from homes all over the world to one of the British Empire’s farthest-flung frontiers. These were, arguably, the world’s first ecotourists, and they were there to glimpse a geothermal marvel unlike any other, known widely as the eighth wonder of the world.

[...]

Sophia herself had noticed long-dormant geysers and hot springs sputter back to life. Later, she told the historian Ellen Massy that she’d feared something dreadful was about to happen.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Sophia and her touring party reached Lake Tarawera’s shore one morning that May—only to discover it was dry, and that the whaleboats were stuck in mud. After a moment, she wrote, the water returned “with a crying, moaning sound.” The boats floated, then dropped as the water receded again. Then the water returned, its level higher than before. Everyone was scared, but they’d made it too far to turn back. After some discussion, the party pushed out across the water.

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My Mother’s Dying Wish Took Me on a Trip I’ll Never Forget | New York Times

2-minute read

On the ship I boarded at the bottom of Argentina with the three men I love most, I put my socks in a drawer, my sweaters on a shelf and my mother’s ashes in the cupboard above the minifridge. They were in a clear plastic bag inside a blue plastic box I’d ordered from Amazon, emblazoned with stickers that said “Cremated Remains” and “Fly Safe.”

[...]

One morning we awoke to a grayscale landscape: rock, ice, cloud. In the photo I took of Mom on our balcony, her hands are balled into fists, pressed to her heart, her smile tremulous. When we first stepped ashore, she said she wanted to kiss the briny pebbles under her boots. She wanted to do everything. She hiked in the snow; she kayaked. She fell in love with penguins, especially the saucy, knee-high gentoos with thick white markings above their eyes like Ernest Borgnine brows. I was chastened by the peninsula’s austere, extreme beauty. Here, like the Ross, was a place that would kill you without noticing, a place that made you feel tiny and vulnerable, its fearsome grandeur offering access to the sublime. When we sailed north, away, Mom embraced me in our cabin and cried. When she got home, she ordered a vanity license plate for her car that read: “GENTOO1.”

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Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly | Idle Words

6-minute read

Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight | Ars Technica

7-minute read

The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.

NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem. In early press releases, they stressed that both rocket and spacecraft had performed exceptionally, while declining to publish the post-flight assessment review. The first mention of heat shield damage came from Orion program manager Howard Hu on a call with reporters in March of 2023. Hu said: “we observed there were more variations across the heat shield than we expected; some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted.”

[...]

In a nutshell, Camarda argues that NASA is demonstrating the same dysfunction that led to the Columbia and Challenger disasters. Faced with an unexpected engineering failure, it has built toy models to convince itself that the conclusion it wants to reach (it’s safe to fly) are supported by evidence. These toy models are not grounded in physics, but because they appear to be quantitative, they create a false sense of security and understanding, an epistemic fig leaf for management to hide behind.

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Isaacman made it clear at the outset that, after reviewing the data and discussing the matter with NASA engineers, he accepted the agency’s decision to fly Artemis II as planned. The team had his full confidence, and he hoped that by making the same experts available to Camarda and Olivas, it would ease some of their concerns.

What followed was a spirited discussion, with Camarda sparring regularly with the presenters and Olivas asking questions more infrequently. The engineering team in Houston, led by Luis Saucedo, went through dozens of charts and presented reams of data that had not been made public before.

“That level of openness and transparency is exactly what should be expected of NASA,” Isaacman said after the meeting.

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An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire’s Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin | 404 Media

9-minute read

Immediately something was wrong. People on the ground saw the Venom’s wings rock back and forth shortly after its sluggish takeoff, a sign that it might be caught in the wake of the first plane. One video showed the Venom started to make a shallow left turn, and the plane’s engine sound decreased and then rapidly increased. Black smoke billowed. The plane stalled. As the aircraft barely reached 200 feet, it started to descend with its nose still pointed upwards.

[...]

The man in tears on the phone was Ylli Didani, a now convicted cocaine trafficker who orchestrated massive shipments of drugs into the UK and multiple European ports. Tibbitts, it turned out, had a secret life. Without the knowledge of his family, Tibbitts worked closely with Didani to become an aspiring international drug lord. The pair commissioned the construction of an elaborate underwater drone that would be stuffed with cocaine and latch onto ships with magnets. Tibbitts was the money and brains behind the operation, funding the submarine’s design and development. In messages with Didani, he referred to himself as Tony Stark, the alter ego of the millionaire inventor and superhero Ironman. According to investigators, Didani’s cocaine trafficking business was worth tens of millions of dollars. Didani had now lost his business partner and friend.

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Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

13-minute read

An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.

A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.

He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.

Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.

Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.

Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.

When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.

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Apple’s 50 Years of Integration | Stratechery

10-minute read

More generally, Apple’s market share in all of its markets, including the phone, continues to increase over time, not decrease. This is happening despite the fact that Apple is not investing at a meaningful level — at least compared to its Big Tech peers — in AI server capacity, and has yet to ship the new AI-empowered Siri it promised nearly two years ago. The reason it doesn’t matter is that no matter how powerful AI becomes, you still need to access it with a device, and Apple, thanks to its integration of hardware and software, makes the best devices.

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Transference in the Afternoon | Granta

22-minute read

A friend sent me the newspaper story. NYC hedge funder says shrink ‘seduced’ him into office sex sessions – and charged $250k in ‘mistress money’. The hedge funder, Michael Pollack, was suing his former therapist, Heidi Kling, for having sex with him nearly every week for ten years, all while accepting regular payments in cash.

Pollack did not claim that Kling had physically forced him to have sex. He had been an active participant in the sexual relationship for a decade. Only later, after they had stopped their meetings, did he come to view the experience as non-consensual, the destructive result of a force he called ‘erotic transference’. The lawsuit, filed in February 2023, claimed Kling’s actions left Pollack with severe emotional distress and panic attacks; landed a ‘debilitating’ blow to his self-confidence; and permanently damaged his relationship with his wife and sons.

Kling claimed that Pollack’s story was all wrong. She did not dispute the existence of a sexual relationship, but said she had terminated Pollack’s therapy before it began. In other words, even if she continued to meet Pollack in her office, what followed was not medical malpractice but an extramarital affair. Kling’s argument raised questions about Pollack’s motivations: if he had wished to break off the relationship without shouldering the blame, wouldn’t being a victim of mismanaged transference be the perfect alibi?

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Being John Rawls | Astral Codex Ten

14-minute read

“My theory of charity,” said John Rawls Visionary, “centers on nine words: there but for the grace of God go I. Society is a contract where we agree to help the less fortunate, knowing that if the shoe were on the other foot, they would help us in turn.”

“You have a rosy view of human nature,” said John Rawls Banker, in the same tone of voice he might use to say You have a bug on your face. A waiter came by, and brought each of them a glass of expensive wine.

“I don’t,” said John Rawls Visionary, “and that’s exactly what I bring to the table. My theory of charity is that we should only give to those poor people who, in the counterfactual where they were rich and we were poor, would give to us. I’ve been working on a pharmacological solution to the problem. This is what I’ve got.” He held up a vial of a colorless liquid. “Here. Take it as a souvenir. It’s one part sodium thiopental, one part LSD, and one part calea zacatechichi, the lucid dreaming herb of the Chantal Indians - plus a secret ingredient of my own devising. When a person drinks it, they enter a highly suggestible state. If a trained psychologist provides hypnotic keywords during their trip, they can sculpt an immersive dream where the patient lives an entire lifetime in a situation of the hypnotist’s choosing. The patient narrates their experience, letting us extract information. You can see the utility. When poor people ask us for money, we induce the trance and make them think we are poor, they are rich, and they’re being asked to donate to us. Then, we give money only to those beggars who would help us if the roles were reversed.”

“Astounding,” said John Rawls Banker.

“Can I pencil you in for a starting donation of $100,000?”

“I’m afraid not,” said John Rawls Banker. “I am certainly impressed with what you’ve accomplished, but it doesn’t change my fundamental position that the poor should work to better their own lives.”

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Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces | One Useful Thing

4-minute read

AIs are already far more capable than most people realize. A large part of this so-called capability overhang comes not from the limits of AI (though, of course, they still have many limits), but from how people interact with it. The vast majority of people access AI through chatbots, and usually the free versions with less capable models. A chatbot is fine for a quick question, but it is a bad way to get real work done.

In fact, recent research suggests that we pay a mental tax when using chatbot interfaces for work.

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The fascinating insights of Robert Trivers | Optimally Irrational

9-minute read

Trivers was one of the most—perhaps the most—influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His work should be much more widely known in social and behavioural sciences, in particular in economics, as Trivers’ intellectual approach is very much in line with a game theoretic understanding of social interactions.

It is hard to overstate the importance of his work.

[...]

Evolution is often conceived as implying that people should be selfish and cynical. This view is mistaken. As early as Darwin, evolutionary thinkers have suggested that cooperation was fully compatible with evolution. That being said, how cooperation evolved was, for a long time, an unresolved problem. One seemingly intuitive answer was proposed by Vero Wynne-Edwards: altruism is good for the group and hence altruism will be selected to help the group survive. Some old animal documentaries illustrated this idea, describing the old wildebeest allowing itself to be caught and eaten by the lion so that the younger ones in the herd could survive.

This idea, now labelled “group selection”, does not work. Selection operates at the individual level. If altruists sacrifice themselves for the group, the group might benefit, but the altruists in it will tend to disappear over time. So, self-sacrificial altruism is not something that we would expect to be selected.

[...]

Trivers’ insights align closely with those of game theory on the rationality of cooperation in repeated interactions. Indeed, Trivers was aware of the game-theoretic results and mentions them in his article.

Reciprocal altruism has become one of the main explanations of the emergence of cooperation between non-kin. Cooperation does not require society to be populated by saint-like figures; it works with humans as they are, warts and all. It is indeed the blend of cooperation and conflict in social interactions that explains the rich nature of our social emotions and the many mini intrigues layered into our social relations.

[...]

Trivers uses differential parental investment to explain a number of patterns observed across the animal kingdom: the greater tendency of males to desert their partners, the greater choosiness of females, who typically decide with whom to mate from a pool of pretenders, and the greater, sometimes violent, competition between males. More broadly, this framework also helps explain associated sex differences, such as higher male mortality and greater male body strength in species where success depends on winning intra-male competitions.

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Our possums are a problem. Could Selena Gomez be the solution? | The Spinoff

4-minute read

Last year, American pop star, actor and beauty mogul Selena Gomez launched a surprising new expansion of her empire: Oreos. The chocolate and cinnamon limited-edition creme cookies, described as “flavour-forward and horchata-inspired”, popped up in hypnotic displays in supermarkets across the country in July, complete with a giant rotating cookie that simply read “Oreo Selena Gomez”. The promotional material claimed the cookies were “great for movie night, and make wonderful birthday treats and music awards watch party snacks”.

What neither Selena Gomez nor Big Oreo could ever have anticipated is that these cookies, which feature music-themed designs including “Selena in the Studio” and “Play Your Heart Out”, would become a crucial weapon in the war against one of Aotearoa’s most infamous pests.

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News of the Selena Gomez-based success soon started to spread across social media after the results of Hickling’s trial were published on Predator Free 2050’s website, and caught the attention of Ian McNeill from the Herald Island Environmental Group in Tāmaki Makaurau. The small urban island had been entirely possum free for over five years, but a handful had snuck back over from the mainland in December last year. “I could see them on the camera. In fact, I caught them mating on the camera at my home, giving me the right royal finger,” says McNeill.

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A Buddhist Sun Miracle? | Astral Codex Ten

4-minute read

In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn’t see it. Catholics continue to bring this up as one of the best-attested miracles and strongest empirical proofs of the faith - including here on Substack, where there was a spirited debate about the event last fall.

[...]

The setting is the Dhammakaya Temple, a culty Buddhist megachurch in Bangkok.

On September 6 1998, a crowd of 20,000 gathered for a ceremony. Someone cried out that they saw a vision of the sect’s founder, Luang Pu Sodh, in the sky, with the sun at his heart. The crowd turned and focused on the sun.

[...]

This replication of Fatima in an “uncontaminated” context pushes me further towards believing that sun miracles are neither true divine intervention nor vague hypnotic suggestion, but some particular illusory/psychological phenomenon which necessarily manifests as the sun spinning and changing color, and which can occur independently even among people who aren’t primed to expect it.

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Retirees receive six times as much in federal dollars as young people | Washington Post

2-minute read

Considered per capita, the ratio between generations only grows. Retirees received the equivalent of about $43,700 per person — 10 times the amount that children and young adults received, at about $4,300 per person. Working-age adults received about $7,300 per capita, according to Penn Wharton’s analysis.

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