Approved Thoughts

1. How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life: What a story.

   One Sunday morning in 2014, he opened The Seattle Times and found a feature story about Bob Montgomery, age 92, known to friends, customers and locals simply as Mr. Montgomery. The article read like an obituary for a vanishing trade — fixing typewriters — suggesting that when Mr. Montgomery went, seven decades of expertise would vanish into the digital ether.

   Lundy read it once, then a second time. He had never given old typewriters much thought, but something stirred in him that he could not quite name. He showed the story to his wife, Lisa.

   “I think this might be it,” he told her. The next weekend, he drove to Bremerton, a weary naval town an hour’s ferry ride away and a world apart from gleaming, digitized Seattle.

2. The Untold Story of Charlie Munger’s Final Years: What a life.

   Near the end of life, Munger leaned on humor for strength. He told family members that Diet Coke was responsible for his longevity, lightening the mood.

   ​And he shared a wish with a visitor.

   “Oh, to be 86 again,” he said.

3. Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can’t Decrypt the Results.:

   A global group of researchers was unable to read the vote tally, after an official lost one of three secret code keys needed to unlock a hyper-secure election system.

4. AI in Education?:

5. Try a ‘fart walk’ to ease the pressure after that big Thanksgiving meal: Nominate for the Ignobel Prize.

   Walking to relieve bloating and gas had long been advocated by doctors, but for years, we had no real experimental proof that it works. So in the mid-2000s, researchers from Barcelona decided to end the speculation and test whether even mild exercise could propel gas forward … and outward.

   The group first looked at healthy volunteers who pedaled on an adapted bicycle going at the equivalent of around 7 mph. The scientists infused gas into the people’s small intestines — mimicking what happens with meals — and then measured how much gas was expelled both during exercise and at rest.

   At rest, the result was a net gain in gas. Not fun.

   But after exercise? Things got juicy. After short bursts of mild physical activity, the scientists found that the amount of gas evacuated was greater than the amount infused. Exercise forced the removal of the added experimental gas and then some — meaning, it also pushed out gas hanging around even at baseline.

   So after a fart walk, you’ll be better off than you started.

1. The Algorithmic Turn: The Emerging Evidence On AI Tutoring That's Hard to Ignore: An excellent and balanced piece on impact of AI on education.

   The Harvard study was conducted using GPT-4 in autumn 2023; by the time the paper was published in 2025, the underlying technology had already advanced. If AI tutoring can produce effect sizes of 0.73 to 1.3 standard deviations now, whilst still requiring pre-written solutions and careful scaffolding to prevent errors, what happens when the models can reason through physics problems independently? When they can diagnose misconceptions in real time? When they can adapt not just to individual students but to culturally specific contexts?

   and

   Yet there is a troubling paradox at the heart of AI tutoring. The very same technology that can produce effect sizes above 0.7 standard deviations can also make students demonstrably worse at learning. And I would argue that the harmful version is the one most students are currently using today.

2. If a bot passes your exam, what are you teaching?

   My Tools in Data Science course has a Remote Online Exam. It was so difficult that, in 2023, it sparked threads titled “What is the purpose of an impossible ROE?”

   Today, despite making the test harder, students solve it easily with Claude, ChatGPT, etc.

3. The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills:

   This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.

4. Friction Was the Feature:

   There was a time when applying for a job meant choosing a handful of roles, tailoring a resume, and writing a real cover letter. The effort was a nuisance, but it quietly enforced focus. If you were going to burn a Saturday on an application, you probably cared about the job.

   Today, a candidate armed with an LLM can parse dozens of job postings, lift phrasing from each, and generate a set of keyword-optimized cover letters in no time. They can auto-tailor their resume to each posting. They can submit 30 applications in one sitting.

   This is better, right?

   Not for anyone, actually. Applications soar; recruiters drown. So we bolt on more automation: applicant tracking systems, resume parsers, AI interview schedulers. We convince ourselves we’ve built a better machine, but we haven’t redesigned the only machine that matters: the system matching the right people to the right work.

5. Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview is the best available image generation model: Read the whole thing and never believe an image again.

   That’s a pretty extraordinary result for such a simple prompt. The text is all spelled correctly and rendered without glitches. The content is solid too—it even included logos for the most popular publish platforms, and a tiny thumbnail of the Datasette UI which is close-enough for an infographic.

6. Optimize your LinkedIn:

7. The Constitution of Innovation:

   However around 1980, this unprecedented growth period ended. While the United States maintained a remarkably constant 2 percent growth rate in average income, the European core economies decelerated, slowly and then sharply. Since 1995, Europe’s average annual growth has been just 1.1 percent; since 2004, it has been a mere 0.7 percent – all while the United States has continued on its steady track. By 2022 the relative gap in output per head has returned to where it was in 1970. Decades of convergence were surprisingly wiped out.4

8. Norway's Wealth Tax Unchains a Capital Exodus: Perhaps Norway needs to click the previous link.

   Norway's wealth tax increase, expected to raise $146M, led to a $448M net loss as $54B in wealth left the country, reducing tax revenue by $594M.

9. ‘Are they going to eat me alive?’: trail runners become prey in newest form of hunting:

   Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.

   Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.

10. She Took JPMorgan for $175 Million. That Doesn’t Include Her Restaurant Bills.:

    In September, Ms. Javice, 33, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for fraud. In 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired her start-up, Frank, for $175 million. Ms. Javice had claimed her company helped millions of people fill out their federal financial aid forms.

    After the acquisition, however, the bank discovered that she had lied about most of Frank’s customers. JPMorgan sued, and then prosecutors put Ms. Javice on trial. A jury convicted her this year.

    Along the way, Ms. Javice won a ruling that required the bank to pay her legal fees. JPMorgan has objected to the size of the fees in the past, and after her sentencing it decided to try to cut her off. The bank is trying the same maneuver with her former chief growth and acquisition officer, Olivier Amar, who was also convicted of fraud.

11. Dog Accidentally Shoots and Injures a Pennsylvania Man, the Police Say: No comment.

    The man had been cleaning a shotgun and placed it on the bed shortly before it was fired. He received treatment at an area hospital.

1. Brenda:

   I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast?

   Brenda.

   Who is Brenda?

   She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead and the sweat from Brenda's brow is what allows us to do capitalism. [...]

   She's gonna birth that formula for a financial report and then she's gonna send that financial report to a higher up and he's gonna need to make a change to the report and normally he would have sent it back to Brenda but he's like oh I have AI and AI is probably like smarter than Brenda and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won't be able to recognize it because he doesn't understand Excel because AI hallucinates.

   You know who's not hallucinating?

   Brenda.

2. Lovely Bakes, No Wig:

   Jasmine Mitchell, the winner of the 16th season of “The Great British Baking Show,” stood out in the competition mainly for her creations — including a cake that was nearly four feet long — but also for her statement earrings, brightly colored outfits and her shiny, hairless head.

3. Optimists: In stock market there's a saying: Pessimists sounds smart, optimists make money. Turns out they live longer too.

   Optimism is a psychological attribute characterized as the general expectation that good things will happen, or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes. Previous studies reported that more optimistic individuals are less likely to suffer from chronic diseases and die prematurely. Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15% longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond. These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.

4. Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist: Climate change seems quite visible. This year it rained in Indore through early November. In 90's and even early'00s anything beyond mid-September was extremely unusual. But is it catastrophic? Will it become so? Maybe not.

   Depending on how much weight one gives to individual studies and models, versus broader literature reviews and scientific assessments, you can find some evidence for some intensification of some features of tropical cyclone behavior and frequency in some places. But what you won’t find, Norris’ reference to a single unpublished and unpeer-reviewed study notwithstanding, is good evidence that climate change has affected those things very much.

5. He’s Been Charged With Dozens of Crimes. Nobody Knows His Name.

   Investigators confirmed that the caller was actually Carl Avinger and that the defendant was not. Nor was he Carl E. Avinger, John Stamp, Bobby Jackson, Craig Taylor, Graig T aylor, Anthony S. Williams, Kevin C. Windley, Kevin Windleg, Corey Blake Duncan, Marco Ferrari, Marco Ferrare, Elvis Taylor or Elvis Teller — names he had used to commit dozens of crimes across the city, on Long Island and as far away as Oklahoma over the last three decades, according to court, jail and prison records, and internal Police Department documents obtained by The New York Times.

   In the months that followed, Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, and her prosecutors from the housing bureau unearthed more information about the man whose roughly half-century life had been defined by deceit. But there was one fact they had yet to discover: his name.

6. UATX Is Ending Tuition Forever: Interesting but will it matter? See #7.

   UATX will never charge tuition. And we will never take government money.

7. University education as we know it is over

   TL;DR: AI now solves university assignments perfectly in minutes. Students often use LLMs as a crutch rather than as a tutor, getting answers without understanding. To address these problems, I propose a barbell strategy: pure fundamentals (no AI) on one end, full-on AI projects on the other, with no mushy middle. Universities should focus on fundamentals.

8. You Should Write An Agent:

   Some concepts are easy to grasp in the abstract. Boiling water: apply heat and wait. Others you really need to try. You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one.

   There are big ideas in computing that are easy to get your head around. The AWS S3 API. It’s the most important storage technology of the last 20 years, and it’s like boiling water. Other technologies, you need to get your feet on the pedals first.

   LLM agents are like that.

   People have wildly varying opinions about LLMs and agents. But whether or not they’re snake oil, they’re a big idea. You don’t have to like them, but you should want to be right about them. To be the best hater (or stan) you can be.

   So that’s one reason you should write an agent. But there’s another reason that’s even more persuasive, and that’s

   It’s Incredibly Easy

9. Game design is simple, actually:

   So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design.

   One thing I have noticing recently is that there are a ton of interesting blogs out there. Of course, there is substack, but there is a lot more and of extremely high quality except that my discovery model has broken down. Twitter / Google are no longer the best discovery option. I would like a better solution to this problem.

1. 5'11"?:

2. Pumpkin Stylists Are Making a Killing This Fall:

   Her most popular package today is her smallest, which costs $325, comes with about 20 pumpkins and takes her six minutes to assemble into a display. The second-most popular is the biggest, at $1,350; that one takes her about 30 minutes. She can do the installations in the dark, wearing a headlamp.

3. Japan’s sushi legend Jiro Ono turns 100 and is not ready for retirement:

   What’s the secret of his health? “To work,” Ono replied to the question by Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, who congratulated him.

   “I can no longer come to the restaurant every day ... but even at 100, I try to work if possible. I believe the best medicine is to work.”

4. She hiked the entire Appalachian Trail at 80, unaware she’d just made history:

   The day Betty Kellenberger hit a patch of freezing rain on Mount Madison, quitting crossed her mind. She was hungry, cold and sore.

   “You’re 80 years old,” she told herself in a pep talk atop a mountain in New Hampshire. “You can do it.”

   A few months later, Kellenberger stood at the Massachusetts-Vermont border, having just finished hiking the entire 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail. She became, without realizing it, the oldest woman ever to do it.

   “We put all kinds of limitations on ourselves,” said Kellenberger, who lives in Carson City, Michigan. “Sometimes the biggest one is we don’t get up and try it.”

5. I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. I look forward to the day something like this becomes real and it may be "real soon now", but I think this take from Daring Fireball is exactly right:

   The argument from CEO Bernt Børnich is that they’re using the videos from the current state of Neo, where its actions are entirely remote-controlled by employees of 1X Technologies, to train its autonomy. I call bullshit. This looks to me like nothing but a scam. It’s not autonomous at all, I don’t believe this company is going to achieve any practical degree of autonomy with this product, and even while it’s remote-controlled by human operators, it’s slow and clumsy.

6. 5 Tips When Consulting ‘Dr.’ ChatGPT: As someone who has saved hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in Physiotherapy bill using ChatGPT and is seemingly at the verge of fixing a long-standing chronic back pain, I am a fan. Used sensibly this is a powerful tool. Sensibly being the key word.

   For me, the ability to ask unlimited questions and provide unlimited context was a huge unlock relative to visiting a Physio. Also the time saved going to and from the clinic meant I could be much more regular.

   I fully agree that sharing detailed context and inviting clarifying questions are very important.

   In general, A.I. chatbots are far better at offering answers than asking questions, so they tend to skip the important follow-ups a physician would ask, Dr. Turken said — like whether you have any underlying conditions or are taking any medications. This is especially problematic when you’re asking about potential diagnoses or medical advice.

   To compensate, Dr. Turken recommended prompting the chatbot with a line like: “Ask me any additional questions you need to reason safely.”

7. When Will Quantum Computing Work?

   Huge investments are flowing into QC companies today. IonQ has a $19B market cap, Rigetti has a $10B cap, and PsiQuantum recently raised $1B.3D-Wave is not relevant, despite high qubit counts. Their machines are annealers, rather than gate based, and have less computational power than the QCs that IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, etc. are working on. This is a lot of money for an industry generating no real revenue, and without an apparent path to revenue over the next 5 years. Qubit counts have not been doubling each year, but even if they did, we'd have 32 kq machines in 2030.4If qubits double each year, 1,000 qubits today grows to 32 kq in 5 years' time. There are few - if any - commercial applications for machines of that size. Will these companies keep raising larger rounds until they achieve 100 kq? Or have they got some secret sauce we don't know about that investors are betting on?

8. Depreciation: A skeptical take.

   He assumes that the ASICs are obsolete when they can no longer keep up with the hash rate so are no longer mining any Bitcoin. That is wrong. ASICs are obsolete when the Bitcoin they mine no longer pay for the electricity they use. The newer ASICs aren't just faster, they also use much less energy per hash. Look again at the depreciation graph, which suggests current ASICs go obsolete after 16 quarters. But Alex de Vries and Christian Stoll's estimate of 5 quarters to obsolescence is based on comparing the ASIC's production with the cost of their power consumption, which is the correct approach. The curves in the graph are correct out to the 40% line, but then should drop to zero.

9. What Palantir Sees:

   Douthat: So we’re going to talk about a lot of things. We’re going to talk about your biography and background, how you came to be an officer in the U.S. military, the future of technology and warfare. But we have to start with a very, very simple question: What is it that Palantir does?

   Sankar: Great question.

   Douthat: Thank you.

   Sankar: Obviously the most important question, yeah.

   Douthat: I spent a long time crafting it, I have to say.

1. Landon Donovan’s new hair, and the side effect he wasn’t expecting (NYT): As a man of a certain age, this hit a little too close to home. But, hats off (heheh!) to the man for having the courage to participate in a story like this. Making the world a hair safer for the rest of us.

   Donovan’s journey to a hair system started two decades ago when, as a 20-year-old, he noticed his hair was receding. He remembers one moment when he was warming up for a game against FC Dallas in Frisco and fans started chanting at him: “Rogaine! Rogaine!”

2. Populism fast and slow:

   Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.

   Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”). Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

3. Age Inversion:

   Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE).

   Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics).

   My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once.

   Information abundance also made the old young by showing them all missed experiences all at once.

   So now Gen Z talks like retirement planners and boomers act like teenagers.

   It's so over.

4. The Remains of the Day and the movie:

   I recently read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, after coming across a positive review and remembering that there was an Oscar nominated movie based on the book in the '90s, when watching the Oscars used to be in thing in India.

   After the first couple of chapters, thinking that this was perhaps an artsy book, I also opened up a chat with ChatGPT to improve my understanding of the book.

   This was useful but note to self: in future explicitly tell ChatGPT to avoid spoilers or otherwise reveal information or conclusions from the later chapters. To be fair, I did ask for themes to notice in rest of the book so its mostly on me.

   This isn't a thriller so in one sense the damage was limited. It is, however, a very subtle book that gradually unveils its layers and getting a bunch of bullet points upfront, spelling out every complexity and nuance wasn't ideal.

   The book is a masterpiece. Very few books have ever had this effect on me where, for days afterwards, I suddenly get a flash of feeling, a pang that forces me to stop for a breath.

   The closest analogy that came spontaneously to my mind was of eating great Japanese food (yes, even as a vegetarian) - the flavours are extremely subdued - very much the opposite of, say, Indian food. But they are unmistakable, sharp even, if you stop and notice, and you know it took a lot of effort and craftsmanship to pull it off just right.

   When reading fiction, I have a tendency to really flip pages towards the end, a tendency developed from years of reading mostly thriller novels. Because of this I found the book depressing, having barely spent any thought on the final pages. It is only while writing this post that I revisited the ending (and the title) and had to reconsider my understanding.

   I had identified so deeply with the sense of loss in the middle of the book that I completely missed the gentle ray of hope that Ishiguro leaves us with at the end: as humans, on any given day and at any given time, all we can do is to make the best of whatever remains of the day.

   Highly recommended.

1. Happy Diwali to those who celebrate! NYT had two glossy stories on just one Diwali Ball in New York organized by Priyanka Chopra's manager. Made me go "Hmmm...". Was this about Diwali, was this about Priyanka Chopra or was this something else?

2. London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why. Not a fan of clickbait headlines in NYT TBH but this story was revealing. I was under the impression that phone theft was a thing of past because of the hard to crack passcodes. Turns out not. The article didn't make it very clear how the thieves could get the phones working again. Apparently they can be sold for parts and something something China. Anyway, time to be careful out there again.

3. The pendulum has swung away from wokeness and cancel culture, as it should have. But sometimes it feels like, instead of passing through the center it went straight to the other end.

4. Title Arbitrage as Status Engineering:

   Title arbitrage is one of the most scalable levers a company can pull to increase the status of certain roles and attract talent. It costs nothing, works at scale, yet has the ability to reshape labor markets. The design space for title arbitrage remains wide open.

5. There are many ways through which the LLM subscriptions pay for themselves. For me it was physiotherapy. Here it is filing tax returns. I also wish more people would share "how tos" for solving different problems with LLMs. Here's a manual for tax returns. Full disclosure: I haven't tried it yet but the source is credible.

6. Five technological achievements! (That we won’t see any time soon.):

7. Observations on AI and the Capital Markets in 2025

   "To provide some sense of scale, that means the equivalent of about $1,800 per person in America will be invested this year on AI". That is a bucketload of spending.

8. China Can't Win: Retweets are not endorsments, as they say. However there is a chorus of experts out there loudly claiming that China holds the upper hand in the tariff negotiations with US. I am not so sure and this looks like a worthwhile counterpoint. Added to reading list.

   China cannot win the decoupling because they face an impossible trilemma: protect the currency, bail out the banks, or maintain social stability. They can pick two at most. More likely, they get one. The math is unforgiving: $5-10 trillion in hidden property losses against $3 trillion in bank equity. That’s not a solvency problem—it’s a physics problem. Meanwhile, they’re bleeding $1.1 trillion annually just to hide the losses, burning their entire defense and R&D budget combined on financial zombies.

9. Now that wokeness is over, is it ok to link to Louis CK clips again? Can one separate the art from the artist? I don't know but I love this one:

1. An Economists Guide to Weight Loss: Pre-Ozempic. New Year Resolution?

2. The Patel Motel Story: I hope its well done. Must watch.

3. 99 Percentile vs. 99.9 Percentile: Some of the responses are insightful too. This can be the problem of growing up in a small town or going to a "weaker" school for a certain type of person.

4. Bernie Madoff Stole My Savings. Here’s How I Got My Life Back.: Hats off.

   I think people who are facing a sudden reversal can learn from my experience. You can get through it. You have family, you have friends, you have resources that you don’t even know that you have.

5. Average? I had to go down about 100 responses before someone asked, "Man or woman?"

1. Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War - Astral Codex Ten:

   One day as I was being lectured by a female HR representative for leaving my (cloth, non-medical) mask off for too long during lunch, I could barely hear what she was saying. All I could think of were the uncounted men across untold generations who had lived and died as warriors, with all the honor and pain that entailed. I thought of how men in Ukraine right now lived a modern version of that, while I allowed myself to be subject to the feminized safteyist ideology of everyday civilization.

   The spiritual offensiveness of this contrast hit me like a ton of bricks, more vividly than ever. At that moment I silently made my final decision. I wasn’t going to wait around to hear back from the Ukrainian Government. It was time, in the immortal words of an ISIS recruiter on Twitter to “put down the chicken wings n come to jihad, bro”.

   The entire non-book review contest at Astral Codex Ten has been fantastic.

2. Subjective Time:

   Like most people, I’ve noticed that time seems to speed up as one gets older. I moved to California in 2017, and the past 8 years seemed to pass by very quickly. I feel like time is moving twice as fast as when I was 35. Even as a 16-year old high school student I had already noticed that those “long summer vacations” seemed to pass by at twice the speed as when I was only 8 years old.

   In mathematical terms, subjective time seems roughly proportional to the inverse of one’s age. (At least since age 3 or 4, before that I recall nothing.) At age N, each lived year represents 1/nth of our life. If this is true, then this has some fairly startling implications.

3. Jane Goodall: A life well lived, can anyone ask for more

4. Democracy vs. Dictatorship

5. 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties:

   Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that's thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.

   Not so much facts, as very good opinions, but still.

6. New data on social media (MR):

   It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.

   Societies, generations tend to develop immunity from toxic trends over time.

7. Do LLMs favor outputs created by themselves? (MR)

   It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.

   Is it surprising that a system trained on human output is tribal, favoring in-group over out-group?

8. Sora update #1:

   Please expect a very high rate of change from us; it reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT. We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly. We plan to do our iteration on different approaches in Sora, but then apply it consistently across our products.

1. Pulse: These days my morning work routine starts with trying to replicate this functionality through the use of multiple prompts and GPTs, so I am looking forward to when then feature comes to cattle class subscriptions.

2. YouTube Star MrBeast Is Building an Entertainment Empire - Bloomberg: Beast Industries sounds like a regular corporation with regular corporate problems.

   Right now, however, Beast Industries is hemorrhaging money. It’s had three years of losses, including more than $110 million in 2024. The viral videos account for all of it, overwhelming the profits from Feastables. Donaldson has been spending between $3 million and $4 million on every video he produces for the main YouTube channel, most of which lose money. In 2023, Beast spent $10 million to $15 million shooting videos it never released to the public because they weren’t up to its standards. He also lost tens of millions of dollars producing Beast Games, a popular show for Amazon Prime Video in which 1,000 people competed for $10 million by, among other things, moving a 10,000-pound boulder.

Ignoring the hype up top, Google does seem to be creating some practical tools with LLMs. With base LLMs getting quite good now, I wonder if the next unlock is in creating tools with customized workflows for specific tasks. Wrappers.

4. Periodic Videos

1. If you’ve got a compliment, just let it out.

2. And the amazing thing is that the opposite works too!

   I think I mentioned this before but I was a national speech and debate octafinalist in high school and I was able to parlay that into a job running a debate program at an ambitious charter middle school in college.

   My approach was the exact opposite of this. Like half the kids were TERRIFIED of public speaking and were only doing it because their tiger moms insisted they had to (and the other half LOVED the attention).

   I had a lot of trouble getting the scared kids to open up and one day I asked one of the youngest ones what made her so afraid of speaking in front of the class, especially since they were all her friends.

   And she told me she was afraid she’d say something dumb or make a mistake and everyone would make fun of her. And that they’d laugh and laugh at her if she froze up.

   The next day I asked the class if anyone was scared of being made fun of and all the shy kids raised their hands.

   Now I don’t actually know if this is the same pathology in adults with fear of public speaking but I suspect it’s similar, and now I’ll get to how I addressed it which worked fabulously.

   First I told them that this was a ridiculous fear and that no one would make fun of them. But of course that doesn’t do anything lol. But then I told everyone to rip out 10 pieces of paper from their notebooks and crumple them up.

   And I told them I was going to give a speech. I told them if I said “uhh” or “um” or used any filler words they were to throw a paper ball at me and shout “shame!” 3 times pointing at me.

   And I gave a terrible speech. And they loved it! It was so much fun for them.

   But then! I had the students give speeches with the same rules, starting with the confident ones.

   After the third student the shy ones were volunteering.

   After the lesson I explained to them that we had accomplished 2 things:

   1. We had demonstrated how absurd such a reaction really is, because none of them would have ever reacted in that way if they weren’t specifically asked to, and none of them had any actual malice even when they did shout “shame” at their classmates

   2. Everyone had experienced the comically worst case scenario imaginable of public speaking and survived!

   So they became the rule during EVERY class and I was told by the other teachers that my shy students had started leading presentations and speaking up in class and some of them asked me how I worked with them.

   They were HORRIFIED when I told them lol.

   But it worked!

   This reminds me of Boggarts in the Harry Potter books.

3. Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus:

   This guy is founding an evangelical church, and I find his ecosystem fascinating. First for its stunning similarities to venture-capital-funded tech start-ups, and then for its simplicity and open-heartedness. None of the dynamics in church planting are unique or even particularly rare, but they are unobfuscated, and that makes church planting the equivalent of a large print book for the social dynamics that favor charismatic narcissists.

4. Moon helium deal is biggest purchase of natural resources from space:

   Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon — spending “above $300 million” — through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space.

5. We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another (NYT): I try to avoid posting political or negative items but this was worth making an excception for. A long and insightful discussion between Ezra Klein and Ben Shapiro. Eye opening, if you read with an open mind.

6. They traveled to Thailand. They wound up cyber scam slaves in Myanmar.: Scary. I am not sure I like graphical news but an interesting experiment.

7. Teen depression has declined for the past 4 years, after peaking in 2021.:

8. ICPC medals for OpenAI and Gemini:

   We received the problems in the exact same PDF form, and the reasoning system selected which answers to submit with no bespoke test-time harness whatsoever. For 11 of the 12 problems, the system’s first answer was correct. For the hardest problem, it succeeded on the 9th submission. Notably, the best human team achieved 11/12.

   We competed with an ensemble of general-purpose reasoning models; we did not train any model specifically for the ICPC. We had both GPT-5 and an experimental reasoning model generating solutions, and the experimental reasoning model selecting which solutions to submit. GPT-5 answered 11 correctly, and the last (and most difficult problem) was solved by the experimental reasoning model.

   and

   An advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think competed live in a remote online environment following ICPC rules, under the guidance of the competition organizers. It started 10 minutes after the human contestants and correctly solved 10 out of 12 problems, achieving gold-medal level performance under the same five-hour time constraint. See our solutions here.