A lot of NYT links today. For all its flaws, of which there might be many, the NYT is incomparable.

1. Good advice from Ross Douthat:

   Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.

2. Or play a boardgame?:

   New York can be expensive, overwhelming and intimidating, and sometimes it is hard for people to connect. A martini can cost $25 in a bar that’s too noisy for conversation, and raucous nightclubs aren’t for everyone. So a free, monthly B.Y.O.B. (bring your own board game) night in an office building food court has become a big hit.

   In addition to Werewolf, people were playing classics, like chess and mahjong, but also relatively newer games, including Catan, Splendor, Hues and Cues, Saboteur, Nertz, Wavelength, Blokus and Camel Up.

   Board game events and clubs have grown in popularity in recent years — in New York and across the country. This one is organized by Richard Ye, a 24-year-old who works in finance. He bills the event as New York City’s largest board game meet-up, and a video of Mr. Ye celebrating his March gathering — where 500 people were in attendance — was widely shared on social media.

   File another one under #youcanjustdothings.

3. What I Didn’t Know About the Egg Industry Horrified Me: As a life-long vegetarian who can’t even imagine turning vegan, I try to avoid evangelizing about what people should eat. Despite the click-baity headline and not the most objective tone, the scientific brekthrough here is worth cheering.

   Called in ovo sexing, it determines the sex of the chick embryo long before it hatches, allowing the producers to get rid of the male eggs and hatch only the females.

   This is important because:

   I had no idea that while the Ladies enjoyed shelter and sunshine, fresh bugs and freedom, their newborn brothers faced a gruesome fate shared by 6.5 billion male chicks around the world each year. These male birds can’t lay eggs but also aren’t raised for meat. Because they come from egg-laying breeds, they don’t grow big or fast enough to be used for food. So they are ground up alive or gassed to death.

4. Questions about the Future of AI by Dwarkesh Patel: I haven’t read most of this but what I have is great.

5. Another important question about AI by Radek Sienkiewicz : Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? Click the link. They really do.

6. In a year will this still make news?:

   Australian Radio Network (ARN), the media company behind KIIS, as well as Gold and iHeart, used an AI-generated female Asian host to broadcast 4 hours of midweek radio, without disclosing it.

   This probably still will:

   “It seems very odd that CADA hired a new ethnically-diverse woman to their youth station and then just forgot to tell anyone.”

   It’s notable because ARN is the whitest thing in media since the Night King and his throng of walkers on Game of Thrones. The network is also home of Australia’s most expensive, complained about and censured radio show, Kyle and Jackie O.

7. Penn Station’s Not-So-Secret Other Life: The People’s Dance Studio:

   “Penn Station is first and foremost a transportation hub,” said Aaron Donovan, the deputy communications director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “But you know, as long as folks abide by the rules and regulations that govern the use of the space and don’t block platforms or interfere with passenger flows, we generally don’t have any problem with what’s going on.”

8. Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining by Simon Willison:

   First, this is really fun. Watching the model’s thought process as it churns through the photo, pans and zooms and discusses different theories about where it could be is wildly entertaining. It’s like living in an episode of CSI.

   It’s also deeply dystopian. Technology can identify locations from photographs now. It’s vitally important that people understand how easy this is—if you have any reason at all to be concerned about your safety, you need to know that any photo you share—even a photo as bland as my example above—could be used to identify your location.

1. How “The Joker” Took Down The Texas Lottery (WSJ Paywall): What a story. There is plenty of alpha out there, if you know where and how to look. Also, brute force is underrated. Sadly behind a paywall and there’s lot more to it than the gist below:

   In Texas, as in many states, most people who play the lottery go to a store with a machine, choose numbers, then walk away with a ticket. Back in 2023, Texas also allowed online lottery-ticket vendors to set up shops to print tickets for their customers.

   Marantelli’s team recruited one such seller, struggling startup Lottery.com, to help with the logistics of buying and printing the millions of tickets. Like all lotto retailers, it would collect a 5% sales commission. The Texas Lottery Commission allowed dozens of the terminals that print tickets to be delivered to the four workshops set up by the team.

   That April 19, the commission announced that there had been no winner in that day’s drawing. The next drawing, with an even larger pot, would be three days later, on a Saturday. The group sprang into action.

   The printing operation ran day and night. The team had converted each number combination into a QR code. Crew members scanned the codes into the terminals using their phones, then scrambled to organize all the tickets in boxes such that they could easily locate the winning numbers.

   The game called for picking six numbers from 1 to 54. For a pro gambler, some sets of numbers—such as 1,2,3,4,5,6—aren’t worth picking because so many other players choose them, which would split the pot. Marantelli’s operation bought 99.3% of the possibilities.

   Money moved to Lottery.com from Ranogajec’s accounts—held under the name John Wilson—in the Isle of Man, a tax haven off the U.K. coast, taking a circuitous route via an escrow account at a Detroit law firm, according to people familiar with the transfers and bank statements reviewed by the Journal.

   The crew hit the jackpot that Saturday. One of their tickets was the sole winner.

2. The Moon Should Be a Computer: Love the ambition. So much fun to read.

   There are other reasons to build a Moon computer, including to avoid the regulatory hurdles to build the energy centers needed to power centralized AI clusters and as a sovereignty play in the increasingly fraught geopolitical game on the road to developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a system with the ability to solve virtually any cognitive task a human can. We of, course, don’t have to mine the Moon just to replicate a single human mind, but we might have to do so to power superintelligence, same in kind but vastly superior to our own.

   How bad are these regulations exactly?

3. Stevens: a hackable AI assistant via Simon Willison: So many cool projects, so little time.

   The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you’d expect from a proper butler.

   Beyond the daily brief, we can communicate with Stevens on-demand—we can forward an email with some important info, or just leave a reminder or ask a question via Telegram chat.

4. Every: A great site focused on AI related stories.

5. Obvious travel advice:

   Despite being only 0.3% of the world’s population, Australians seem to make up 10% of overseas visitors everywhere on the planet. Do not be disturbed by this well-known optical illusion.

1. Digital hygiene by Andrej Karpathy: I discovered this just a little late to include in the last weeks post, where it would have been the perfect companion piece along with this one on getting phished.

   I practice some of these recommendations already and wholeheartedly recommend the password manager, for example. I use Dashlane, which is about $60 a year if you want to sync across devices, but there are many free tools out there. Bitwarden offers all the essential features, including syncing across devices, for free and the paid versions are cheaper too.

   I plan to explore his solutions for credit cards (privacy.com) this weekend. Work-life separation is also great advice, which I did not follow in the past but am doing at my new(ish) job.

2. Flight to unkown destinations. Would you take one? Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. As a reply to the tweet says, unlikely they will put you in a war zone, so if it is in Schengen, how bad could it be? I am probably clueless…

   Scandinavian Airlines are running “unknown” destination flights.

   You buy a ticket and board the plane. Then you find out where you are going.

   Would you do it?

3. Kim Shin-jo, 82, Failed North Korean Assassin, Dies as Pastor in the South (NYT Paywall) : What a story and what a life! And this story is straight out of hollywood, but without the happy ending.

4. Getting the Most from Deep Research Models:

   After a fair bit of experimentation, I’ve built a Claude project that handles all the repeatable high-effort prompt engineering (like source selection) for you. It asks for your preferences, clarifies what you need, and produces a well-structured prompt that you can then feed into any DR model.

5. Two high-value excerpts from John Authers Bloomberg newsletters:

   Here follows a crowd-sourced literary tip. I asked yesterday for recommendations on great detective franchises for easy reading in stressful times, and you delivered. I’ve had so many suggestions that this will need to come in installments.

   To start, the name you’ve recommended most often, and with greatest enthusiasm, is Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch series (the detective loves jazz and lives in the LA hills).

   Other entrants includes the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke (set in Louisiana and starting with The Neon Rain), Arnaldur Indridason’s “really good, bleak Icelandic stuff” (try Jar City first). Volker Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin series, set in Weimar Germany. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee stories (written some decades ago and set in Ancient China — try Willow Pattern). Also the Martin Beck books set in 1960-70s Sweden and written over 10 years by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo — a husband and wife team, and godparents of Scandinavian noir (Roseanna is recommended) and the Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo, set in Norway.

   To be clear, I didn’t mention Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe books because I’ve already read all of them. If you’ve never dipped into Chandler, you have a treat in store — perhaps start with The Big Sleep. And as more than one of you said Connelly was as good as Chandler, I definitely want to read one of his. I’ll have plenty more suggestions tomorrow. Please, if you have any more to recommend, let me know.

   Herewith another installment in our crowd-sourced tour of great detective fiction franchises. You might want to try: Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series is set in India under the British Raj; the Canadian writer Eric Wright’s John Salter series, set in Toronto; Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, set in Nazi Germany; the Whitstable Pearl mysteries by Julie Wassmer (who used to be a scriptwriter for Eastenders so there are plenty of cliffhangers); Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series, featuring Sicily and plenty of great food; and Death of a Red Heroine, the first of the Inspector Chen series by Qiu Xiaolong in contemporary Shanghai. This comes highly recommended by Andy Rothman of Sinology, long one of my favorite guides to all things China, and by remarkable coincidence I had picked up a copy of this book from a neighborhood bookshelf earlier this week. So that’s what I’ll read next. More detectives next week.

6. Drew Breunig via Simon Willison:

   The first generation of AI-powered products (often called “AI Wrapper” apps, because they “just” are wrapped around an LLM API) were quickly brought to market by small teams of engineers, picking off the low-hanging problems. But today, I’m seeing teams of domain experts wading into the field, hiring a programmer or two to handle the implementation, while the experts themselves provide the prompts, data labeling, and evaluations.

   For these companies, the coding is commodified but the domain expertise is the differentiator.

7. S Anand: A great website from a college senior. On campus he was know as Stud Anand.

After a few more iterations with Claude, the website is looking a lot better but it isn’t working that much better. The Archives link on top right throws up a poorly formatted page.¹ The huge, black “Approved Thoughts” at the top of the page and the smaller blue version in the header are redundant.² There are many other issues to be fixed.

I also managed to get the CMS set up so that I could login and see all the posts in the CMS.³ It is useless though because the posts I create there do not show up on the site. So there is some solid debugging needed before I can get more ambitious here. Still I am quite chuffed that I have this set up and working.

Between the markets and a potential relocation, I have not devoted any time to this website. Hopefully that changes soon.

I have also decided another project I want to try my hand at. More as I get started.

Thought for the day: If you ask “do I feel like doing this now”, you won’t do it. Certainly not regularly. First, figure out how to stop the question.

1. Myanmar Earthquake passing through Europe: I experienced the shaking in Bangkok. First, I thought I was getting dizzy before the realization struck. It was kind of disorienting walking down the stairs of the building, periodically feeling dizzy. It didn’t feel real, almost as if it was just a drill or a joke.

2. AI vs. Human: Odysseus Translation: I, too, preferred the AI version. Even if you don’t agree with the ranking, it is clearly good enough.

3. Tough out there for kids: Hard to understand the rejection ratio. I was originally going to link to a thread by a university professor with experience in admissions, critiquing his personal essay but she has locked her account now, I assume after it went viral. If I recall correctly, she felt his essay did not show the right attitude for various reasons. Many on twitter (and I) disagreed but even if you agree with her take, the essay highlights a very impressive person (and seems factually accurate). So I struggle to understand the rejection ratio.

4. If he can fall for a phishing attack, so can you and they are only going to get more sophisticated. Be careful out there and step up your safety protocols.

5. AI 2027: I have yet to fully read this but it is a lot more “optimistic” on AI progress than I am right now and at least somewhat scary.

1. Unintentionally hilarious:

   The Danish Defense Ministry also plans to fund two more dogsled teams to protect the 375,000-square-mile Northeast Greenland National Park, the largest in the world. These would be the hardcore Sirius patrols, viewed by the Danes as the Navy SEALs of the Arctic, which began operations during World War II.

   Two. Not one.

2. How to vibe code?: A fairly decent app and when you see his conversations with ChatGPT, its mostly just plain english. Does a programming background help. Sure, but you can go quite far without any. Here are the actual conversations:

   a. Starting the app

   b. Enhancements

   c. More enhancements

   d. Deploy to iPhone

   e. The actual App

3. Why we ended up homeschooling:

   TL;DR: homeschooling makes it much easier to individualize education, which makes it more efficient and meaningful.

4. Tokyo vs. Rest of Japan:

   This is called the sponge city effect in my little world of demographics. In a declining region we often see the biggest city soaking up population since jobs and health services etc cluster in a single area rather than spreading out. Japan has been shrinking for three decades while Tokyo happily grows.

5. How Much Would You Need to be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island for 1.5 Years and Do Nothing but Kill Seals?: What it says on the label.

6. Best take:

   people are rightfully upset about this atlantic story because it gets at a truly alarming issue: being added to large, ongoing group texts without consent

   😂

7. True that!:

Your brain will invent fake problems for you if you don’t go out and find real ones

8. I don’t know if this is the right path, but its the right destination

1. The Kids Are Not All Right via MR: Reminder that humans, often the smartest humans, can believe anything. Wonder how much of the coventional wisdom today falls in this category.

   Two weeks after his birth, Jeffrey’s health took a turn for the worse: He developed a heart defect common in premature infants – patent ductus arteriosus, or PDA. Jeffrey was scheduled for open-heart surgery and transferred to the nearest children’s hospital.

   In those days, surgery for PDA was invasive. Holes were cut on either side of Jeffrey’s tiny neck and chest to insert a catheter into his jugular vein. His little body was opened from breastbone to backbone, his flesh lifted aside, ribs pried apart, and a blood vessel near his heart tied off, and then all the tissues were stitched back together.

   Baby Jeffrey felt everything – every incision, every internal repair, every stitch. The medical team had not given their fragile patient any drugs, any comfort, anything to protect him from the excruciating pain of open-heart surgery – just a paralyzing agent to keep him still during the procedure.

   Five weeks later, Jeffrey passed away.

   In the days before her child’s death, Jill Lawson learned a shocking fact: Anesthetizing babies for surgery was not common practice. After Jeffrey died, Lawson called his doctor for reassurance. Surely, she thought, her child had been given something for the pain.

   “The anesthesiologist informed me that she had not used any anesthesia or analgesia on Jeffrey,” Lawson wrote in an account of her son’s experience. The doctor told the grieving mother it hadn’t even occurred to her to do so because it had never been demonstrated that babies can feel pain.

2. @peelraja via MR:

   The paradox of India:

   Punjab is over 60% vegetarian, but Tandoori chicken and butter chicken are its most popular dishes outside the state.

   Tamil Nadu is less than 1% vegetarian, but its “pure veg” idly, dosa, sambhar, pongal, etc are its most popular dishes outside the state.

3. The Seneca via Daring Fireball:

   The Seneca is my middle finger to the aesthetic homogeneity and economic over-optimization of 21st century life.

   A keyboard for the low, low price of $3,600. Yes, a computer keyboard. Yes, US$. Although to be fair, it is not $3,600. Its “from $3,600”.

4. My Thoughts on the Future of “AI” via Simon Willison:

   I have very wide error bars on the potential future of large language models, and I think you should too.

   Specifically, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in three to five years, language models are capable of performing most (all?) cognitive economically-useful tasks beyond the level of human experts.

   And I also wouldn’t be surprised if, in five years, the best models we have are better than the ones we have today, but only in “normal” ways where costs continue to decrease considerably and capabilities continue to get better but there’s no fundamental paradigm shift that upends the world order.

5. The Anatomy of Marital Happiness via MR:

   Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net “happiness” measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero.

   Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents from 1972 to the last pre-pandemic survey (2018). However, there is a wide gap of around 30 points between married and unmarried respondents.

   This “marital premium” is this paper’s subject. I describe how this premium varies across and within population groups. These include standard socio demographics (age, sex, race education, income) and more. I find little variety and thereby surface a notable regularity in US socio demography: there is a substantial marital premium for every group and subgroup I analyze, and this premium is usually close to the overall 30-point average.

   This holds not just for standard characteristics but also for those directly related to marriage like children and sex (and sex preference). I also find a “cohabitation premium”, but it is much smaller (10 points) than the marital premium. The analysis is mainly visual, and there is inevitably some interesting variety across seventeen figures, such as a 5-point increase in recent years.

1. Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart in world-first success via Nico McCarty:

   An Australian man with heart failure has become the first person in the world to walk out of a hospital with a total artificial heart implant.

   The Australian researchers and doctors behind the operation announced on Wednesday that the implant had been an “unmitigated clinical success” after the man lived with the device for more than 100 days before receiving a donor heart transplant in early March.

   The BiVACOR total artificial heart, invented by Queensland-born Dr Daniel Timms, is the world’s first implantable rotary blood pump that can act as a complete replacement for a human heart, using magnetic levitation technology to replicate the natural blood flow of a healthy heart.

2. Inflation Expectations by Political Party Affiliation: Entry #3692 in “Politics makes you stupid”.

3. Broccoli, the Man – and Vegetable – Behind the Bond Franchise: What a story.

4. The shift from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance is overdue.(NYT Paywall) The article itself has a strong partisan tone. I hope the book is different.

   In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains.

   I do not want America to become China. But I do want it to be able to build trains.

5. Some Vegans Were Harmed in the Watching of This Movie (NYT Paywall): Even as a vegetarian, this seems over the top.

   “People might think a glass of milk is innocuous,” she said. “It’s not. It’s full of violence.”

6. In Search of a Boring Business (NYT Paywall):

   On BizBuySell, the popular listings site where the Rizzos found the Smiths, “corporate refugees” ditching the 9-to-5 have surged to 42 percent of buyers, roughly double the 2021 figure. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of American small businesses are owned by people 65 and older, making the Smiths part of a “silver tsunami” of sellers.

7. Cognitive security is now as important as basic literacy: Must read link of the week. Between this stuff and use of AI in scams, I am more than a little scared.

8. Is this good or bad? Policy can be hard.

1. James Harrison: The Man Who Saved 2.4 Million Babies: Hall of Fame.
2. Coincidentally, this week both Tyler Cowen and Karthik S shared memories of playing card games as kids. And then today my sister mentioned my younger newphew had started playing Dungeons and Dragons recently. We have played card games and board games with our boys, especially during COVID and it was fun. Clearly we should do more of this.
3. Another entry to the hall of fame. A different hall, sure, but come one, clearly this guy is a legend.
4. A different way of learning math? Via Zvi, who belongs in a third hall. Can’t fault him for lacking ambition but perhaps this is the rare tweet that should have been an article.
5. A Cheeto Shaped Like the Pokemon Charizard Sells for Nearly $90,000. NYT Paywall but do you really need to read anything else?
6. Honey on a razor blade: Something about the actual visualization struck a chord with me.

I need to sit down and combine some of these thoughts into a coherent piece but for now, I just want to dump it all here for reference later. I doubt any of these are original and I have certainly seen some elsewhere.

1. Market structure for LLM makers may end up being like the airline market. High fixed cost to set up, hard to create a product differentiation that users care about (other than price), lots of competitors entering, at least in part due to the “prestige” of owning one. Lots of utility for consumers but hardly any profit for producers.

2. An LLM with an infinite context window, one that can contain all my life, will be an entirely different product than an LLM with a limited context window. You can never have enough when it comes to context windows.

3. Notwithstanding 1, “personality” makes a huge difference in the experience of working with an LLM and the ability to create the right one could determine whether a model can dominate a market or a niche. Claude Sonnet 3.5 absolutely had than special sauce in my experience. We need a lot more of it.

4. This.:

   I don’t see how we’re going to avoid a situation where the internet become lousy with AI-created, pseudo academic writing filled with made up facts and quotes, which will then get cemented into “knowledge” as those articles become the training fodder for future models.

   But combine it with the fact that if we all start getting our answers from LLMs, the online content & ad based business model goes caput and then what is the incentive for people to put up good content on the web? None.

5. But anyone who has good proprietary, verified, high-quality data & content will potentially control the value for the customer even as base LLMs become a commodity. Therefore does more data and content start going behind the paywall? If it doesn’t it becomes training data and cannot be monetized.