A long one to mark a year of link posts. Starting with feel-good stories for the festive season.

1. The best story you’ll read this Christmas. Truly.

   JC

   James Chapman@jameschappers · Dec 25

   The best story you’ll read this Christmas https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxwllqz1l0o

   

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2. Your Social Muscles Are Wasting Away. Here Is How to Retrain Them.: Everything old is new again and the search for connection is timeless.

   I’m a married 41-year-old woman who lives with housemates by choice. Rather than trying to acquire as much space and privacy as we could as quickly as we could, my husband and I decided to do the opposite. Parenting in our mid-30s, bursting out of our small London flat, we rented and then bought a London home with another couple.

3. Sisters in Sweat: A couple years ago I played soccer every saturday morning, for about a year. Great memories. I get this. New year resolution.

   SiS has become a lifeline for thousands of women like Almeida in India, helping build a rare space where sport turns into an experience of liberation and camaraderie.

4. How I read: I have stopped reading long form for a while, so I am a sucker for these guides. Not a New Year resolution though.

   One of the many joys of living in New York City is the library system. The Performing Arts Library and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (on Fifth Ave across from the main branch) are both delightful places to spend a few hours in Manhattan, and in Brooklyn I spent more than my fair share of afternoons at the Grand Army Plaza main branch. I pick a section and walk the shelves until I get hungry, thirsty, or under-caffeinated.

5. I count AI summarized books as “Read”: Possibly a New Year resolution.

   I upload books to Claude and ask it to “Comprehensively and engagingly summarize and fact-check, writing in Malcolm Gladwell’s style, the book …”. I can read it in an hour instead of twelve. Four bullet points instead of forty. With (this surprised me) roughly the same number of insights I actually do something with.

6. Ruby's Ultimate Guide to Thoughtful Gifts: New Year resolution?? Who am I kidding?

   Give a man a gift and he smiles for a day. Teach a man to gift and he’ll cause smiles for the rest of his life.

7. The Lost Generation: Tough reading.

   At the time, I blamed those women. Of course I did. They’ve since ascended the TV ladder and work as co-executive producers on major shows. On some level, even today I can’t help but think: That could have been me. That should have been me.

   But those women didn’t take our jobs any more than the 50-year-old Hollywood lifers had. The lifers were still there. They’re still there. And I’m not angry at the women and people of color who made it instead of me—people have the right, in most cases the responsibility, to take the opportunities that are offered them—or even at the older white guys who ensured that I didn’t.

8. Paranoia: A Beginner's Guide: Worth reading just for the first line.

   People sometimes make mistakes. (Citation Needed)

9. Chemical hygiene: A good follow up to the previous link?

10. How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device? Where else but in India?

    A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a hush-hush mission the U.S. still won’t talk about.

11. Castration increases lifespan across vertebrates: Or at least, it feels longer.

    DD

    Dr. Dominic Ng@DrDominicNg · Dec 12

    Massive new @Nature study: castration increases lifespan across vertebrates (zoo mammals, rodents, wild animals).
    
    This aligns with historical human data: Korean eunuchs lived 14-19 years longer than their peers.
    
    Your move, @Bryan_Johnson.

    

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12. Pedagogy Recommendations:

    I think the single most thing important I can say is this: Every time you are inclined to use the word “teach”, replace it with “learn”. That is, instead of saying, “I teach”, say “They learn”. It’s very easy to determine what you teach; you can just fill slides with text and claim to have taught. Shift your focus to determining how you know whether they learned what you claim to have taught (or indeed anything at all!). That is much harder, but that is also the real objective of any educator.

13. How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants: It's amazing the rabbit holes people will go down.

    I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning model.

14. I didn't think the current LLMs could solve "out-of-sample" problems, ones that are not in their training set. But I was wrong. And another one. These are hard problems from the looks of it.

    JS

    Johannes Schmitt@JohSch314 · Dec 17

    For the first time, an AI model (GPT-5) autonomously solved an open math problem submitted to our benchmarking project IMProofBench, with a complete, correct proof, without human hints or intervention.
    
    A small but novel contribution to enumerative geometry. Some background:

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    S

    spicylemonade@spicey_lemonade · Dec 26

    🚨 Math + AI milestone 🚨
    
    Our Archivara Math Research Agent (in alpha) just became the first AI system to fully solve an Erdős problem on its own (zero human input or literature online).
    
    It produced a complete counterexample to Erdős Problem #897, resolving the question end-to-end. Proof is live online.
    
    This is AI doing real mathematics, autonomously.

    

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15. Automate your life with Claude Code:

16. Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry: It is coming for the white-collar jobs.

    AI is really dehumanizing, and I am still working through issues of self-worth as a result of this experience. When you go from knowing you are valuable and valued, with all the hope in the world of a full career and the ability to provide other people with jobs... To being relegated to someone who edits AI drafts of copy at a steep discount because “most of the work is already done” ...

17. SK

    Séb Krier@sebkrier · Dec 13

    (I know I'm a stuck record) An important assumption in AI discourse is that sufficiently capable generalist *models* are the main event. Get the model smart enough, and it more or less does everything. Value creation, competitive advantage, and risk would all concentrate at the frontier training cluster. Post training and products were almost an afterthought: thin wrappers that would get eaten once models became capable enough to handle tasks end-to-end.
    
    I think this picture is wrong, and understanding why matters for how we think about AI trajectories (and risk and policy too, but that's for another post). In short:
    
    1. Local knowledge can't be centralized. Hayek's work on knowledge applies directly. The knowledge required to deploy AI usefully - what workflows need automation, what error rates are tolerable, how to integrate with existing systems, what users will adopt - is dispersed across millions of firms and contexts. It's often tacit and contextual rather than explicit and generalizable. A model can't just internalize this by training on more data, because much of it is generated in the moment through interaction with specific environments. Even arbitrarily capable models would still require an adaptation layer to translate general capability into specific value. (Note however that this doesn't mean the product layer *always* stays fragmented - you don't see a thousand Microsoft Words.)
    
    2. Products are where the translation happens. Cursor, Devin, vertical AI applications - these aren't thin wrappers waiting to be disrupted by the next model release. They're doing the hard work of integration, UX, workflow design, and context management. The scaffolding *is* the product. A better base model makes better scaffolding possible, but doesn't generate it spontaneously. I don't see Gemini 7 making Cursor obsolete. There's a reason Thinking Machines is deemed a viable business model!
    
    3. Efficiency is a permanent constraint, not a temporary bottleneck. Even today we see model routing, smaller models for lighter tasks, distillation, and labs offering model menus rather than just the largest thing they have. This is because of a Jevons-paradox-like dynamic. Even as compute gets cheaper, more use cases become viable, demand expands, and so efficiency still matters. You don't escape resource constraints with abundance; you just face them at a new scale. There will always be reasons to prefer lighter-weight specialized components over invoking maximum capability for every task.
    
    4. Specialization is a feature, not a limitation to overcome. Intelligence applied to a specific task in a specific context is more efficient than general intelligence reasoning from first principles every time. Even a hypothetical superintelligence would face this: why burn compute figuring out what's relevant when you can have pre-adapted components for known contexts? So you get specialization not because models aren't smart enough to generalize, but because specialization is how you minimize waste. For this not to matter you'd have to assume infinite free compute.
    
    5. What this implies for AI trajectories. But you don't get an omniscient model that centralizes all intelligence and value. You get something more like Drexler's CAIS picture - comprehensive AGI services composed of many specialized, adapted, efficiently-routed components. Agents will be useful, and drop-in generalist AI workers will proliferate, but like humans they will specialize, and this is a feature not a bug. The picture isn't "AGI arrives and one system does everything." It's "capabilities improve and this enables a richer ecosystem of specialized instantiations."
    
    So diffusion - getting AI usefully integrated into diverse contexts - matters just as much as development - pushing the frontier capability threshold. I feel like the discourse continues to underrate this, and the implications for policy and risk could be significant - but that's for another post.

    

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18. A curated list of the best finance blogs, tools, and webpages.

1. The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI:

   Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.

   But you don't have to wait until then because I am going to break down the entire book's thesis for you tonight, over the next 40 minutes. I am going to talk fast.

2. The Best Philosophy Lectures on YouTube:

   Platforms like YouTube are the home of most slop, but they are also home to some fantastic educational content. I’ve compiled a list of philosophy lectures which you can enjoy, free of charge, to further your philosophical education.

3. Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy:

   A few weeks ago, Michael Green wrote an article stating that $140k is the new poverty line, that no one can afford to participate in society. It took over the Internet in a fiery storm. There have been many rebuttals, from Tyler Cowen to Jeremy Horpedahl. But the reaction to the piece was very interesting, as John Burn Murdoch wrote about.

   People overwhelmingly agreed with the article (many of the rebuttals to the rebuttals were “who cares if the math is wrong, the vibe is correct!). Both More Perfect Union and the Free Press republished it. People on both sides of the aisle, read the article and said “Well, yes, that is why things feel so bad. This is poverty. My economic pain is justified by the data now. What a relief.”

4. Tangled Parachute Leaves Skydiver Hanging From Plane (NYT): Video at the link.

1. Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price. (WaPo): So many unexpected links and unintended consequences.

   Although other animals scavenge dead cattle, none do so as effectively as vultures. The birds will pick ovedthoughts clean a bull carcass in 30 to 40 minutes.

    

   A paper published a year ago in the American Economic Review concluded that in certain districts, “the functional extinction of vultures — efficient scavengers who removed carcasses from the environment — increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation.”

2. Accommodation Nation:

   At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent.

   The types of accommodations vary widely. Some are uncontroversial, such as universities outfitting buildings with ramps and providing course materials in braille. These allow disabled students to access the same opportunities as their classmates. Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.

   Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.

   Professors told me that the most common—and most contentious—accommodation is the granting of extra time on exams. For students with learning disabilities, the extra time may be necessary to complete the test. But unlike a wheelchair ramp, this kind of accommodation can be exploited. Research confirms what intuition suggests: Extra time can confer an advantage to students who don’t have a disability.

   DT

   Derek Thompson@DKThomp · Dec 2

   This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics.
   
   - At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled
   - At Amherst: more than 30 percent
   - At Stanford: nearly 40 percent
   
   Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving [disability] accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago."
   
   As students and their parents have recognized the benefits of claiming disability—extended time on tests, housing accommodations, etc—the rates of disability at colleges, and especially at elite colleges, has exploded.
   
   America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.

   

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3. 52 things I learned in 2025:

   Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, due to measures like pesticide bans, more responsible media reporting of suicide, mental health education in schools and improved healthcare responses.

4. Kidney Recipient Dies After Transplant From Organ Donor Who Had Rabies (NYT): When its your time...

   Since 1978, four organ donors have passed rabies to 13 organ recipients, the report said. Of the 13 recipients, six who received treatment for rabies survived. The seven others, who did not receive treatment, died.

5. Bublé for a Day, but He Can’t Sing and There’s Little Resemblance (NYT):

   “Any outcome is funny,” Perlman, 36, said in an interview. “If they hate me, it’s funny. If they’re confused, it’s funny. If they love me, it’s funny. And my ego is not wrapped up in the idea of being the best Michael Bublé impersonator, so there’s some freedom in that.”

   After the performance, Perlman was astonished as people approached him for autographs and photos. He riffed about his Christmas special, his children and his love of Canada, and assured a handful of skeptics that, yes, he was the real Bublé.

6. How Kit Kat Was Killed: Video Shows What a Robot Taxi Couldn’t See (NYT): Both the points below are correct but do they belong in the same paragraph? Of course, Ms. Brigman is right that Kit Kat might still be alive if there was a human driver behind the wheel of that car, but how many more cats and humans will die and be injured because the emotional response to incidents like these delays the adoption of self-driving cars? The response to this accident will make every Waymo better. The same is not true of accidents with human drivers.

   Those who defend Waymo taxis have pointed out that human drivers kill hundreds of animals each year in San Francisco. But Ms. Brigman believes that Kit Kat might still be alive if a human had been behind the wheel that October night.

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?:

   PZ

   Poe Zhao@poezhao0605 · Nov 25

   😂 Chinese parents are finding a new use for AI assistants. They're deploying them as homework monitors.
   
   Here's the setup with ByteDance's Doubao AI. Parents start a video call and aim the camera at their child. One simple prompt: "Doubao, watch my kid. Remind him when he loses focus or his posture slips."
   
   The AI tutor goes to work. "Stop playing with your pen. Focus on homework." "Sit up straight. Your posture is off." "No falling asleep at the desk. Sit up and study." "Don't lean on your hand or chew your pen."
   
   Doubao isn't alone. Other AI apps offer similar video call features.

   

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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.

   DG

   derek guy@dieworkwear · Nov 29

   imagine posing for a photographer friend who sells your image to istock and a year later, you see this is what the washington post has done with your image

   

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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:

   AP

   Aniket Panjwani@aniketapanjwani · Nov 8

   If you're an econ PhD job market candidate looking for a private sector job, here's what you need to do to optimize your LinkedIn:
   
   1. profile pic. find an undergrad good at making tiktoks and pay them $40 to take a decent picture of you
   2. no "open to work" flag. on LinkedIn this screams "I'm desperate", don't hire me.
   3. headline. I recommend something like "<uni_name> Economics PhD Candidate | Quantitative Research & Data Analytics | AI & ML Engineering". you can adjust the latter two phrases for the broad tranches of private sector jobs you want.
   4. connections. send connection requests to everyone you know up to your limits until you hit 500. It looks weird to people on LinkedIn if someone has 10 connections. here's mine, send me a request and I'll accept:

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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"?:

   H

   Hunter📈🌈📊@StatisticUrban · Oct 27

   Objectively one of the funnier graphs out there. Measured vs. reported male height.

   

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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.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Oscar-nominated film.

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. 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.

   FN

   Fernando Nikolić 🇦🇷 🟠@basedlayer · Oct 18

   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.

   View on X

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.

   PM

   Patrick McKenzie@patio11 · Oct 15

   @TheZvi Are you going to write an essay about that second thing or do I have to, because feels extremely obvious that there needs to be a URL “They can now successfully shake money tree for you *additively to what your highly paid advisor will do.*”

   View on X

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: