Approved Thoughts

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.

1. Jeremy Lin Retires After 15 Years That Included ‘Linsanity’ With the Knicks (NYT):

   The journeyman played for eight N.B.A. teams and won one championship. But he is best known for a brief stretch on the Knicks where he electrified fans and the nation.

   How to feel old #3892: Linsanity for 13 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday!

2. How to resist everyday temptations: A guide we can all use, but probably won't.

3. You're Overthinking Packing:

   The amount of planning and thought that needs to go into the enterprise is surprisingly minimal. Count how many days you’re going for, then bring the same number of shirts as the number of days minus one (unless you have access to laundry, then probably less), 2-4 pairs of pants, a couple nicer dresses if that’s your thing and a change of shoes. Something to sleep in at night and a bathing suit if you’re headed somewhere warm. I always bring an extra pair of underwear and socks because sometimes I like to change throughout the day. Then experiment by trying on a bunch items to ensure everything goes together. Frankly, it’s not that different than figuring out what you’re going to wear on a day-to-day basis, which I trust you do all the time.

   Some thinking about packing, maybe some tools (I like using packing cubes and a travel scale is a must when flying budget) are surprisingly useful but yes, the curve drops sharply.

4. My journey from ADHD skeptic to Adderall enthusiast:

   At 22, I thought ADHD was fake. An excuse for underachieving kids to get “accommodations” for procrastinating on their homework. From what vague knowledge I had of stimulants like Adderall, I regarded them with the same scorn as the accommodations.

   Seventeen years later, I credit Adderall with enabling me to build a 10x happier, healthier, more virtuous version of myself (to the chagrin of the countless Twitter trolls decrying my “meth addiction” in reply to this recent viral post). Here is my story.

5. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?: God and Iblis debate if human intelligence is hitting a wall. Hilarious and insightful.

6. if you meet the singaporean on the road:

   All this effort — fifty years of non-stop toil — turning a fallow wasteland into fertile earth, and where are all the crops we have to show for it? Where are all the local companies that we can point to and be proud of? Where are our Ericssons and Nokias?

7. LLMs Will be Like Ozempic for Golf:

   Rob was fantastic but it’s not as though I can just do a TrackMan excursion all the time. Yet I remained curious about why my swing was what it was. I had decent power, but lacked the ability to square the ball up with anything approaching consistency. Was I destined to always have this problem?

   And so I turned to LLMs, feeding the TrackMan stats into GPT. Based on 12 numbers, from one swing, GPT had me clocked. It knew my strengths and weaknesses. It fully understood the specifics of my poor technique. I’m sure Rob could have walked me through as much, but his time is limited. The machine had all the bandwidth in the world to deal with my “over the top” swing, how to fix it, and any other questions I might nag it with.

   A day later, my swing was different and self recorded video sent to Google’s Gemini confirmed the change. Swing errors that were decades in the making were corrected in the span of minutes. I’m not saying that I’ve suddenly made a leap from “Struggles to break 100” to “scratch golfer.” I’m just saying that a process that could have been expensive and arduous was instead efficient and relatively cheap. I apply the LLM’s fix, and it tells me whether I’ve actually applied it. The feedback is instant and objective.

   LLMs will be like Ozempic for a lot more than golf. Ability to ask unlimited questions without feeling embarrased or paying by the hour is a big deal. Imagination is the only thing limiting us.

8. GPT-5: The Case of the Missing Agent

   It’s hard to say exactly why, even with all this progress, current AI models are still so hopeless at dealing with open-ended real-world situations. GPT-5’s inability to recognize that it was incapable of playing Minesweeper may indicate that its reasoning abilities do not generalize well. Its decision to spend 5 solid hours beating its head against the unimportant side goal of sharing a spreadsheet suggests a lack of training on the importance of setting priorities. The repeated factual errors in Gemini 2.5 Pro’s writeup of its merch store experience (click the link and look for “Editor’s Notes”) suggest an inability to keep track of key information over an extended project. Claude losing track of the fact that it is not a person is a reminder that in some ways these models really are just shallow imitations of human behavior (even as they demonstrate deep capability in other areas).

   So many benefits and so many limitations.

9. Reading with AI:

   Reading a non-fiction book from cover-to-cover is not efficient. I used to say that I read books “from the outside in.” I look at the book flap to find out about the author, who wrote the blurbs, and the subject matter of the book. Then I read the introduction and conclusion in order to get the main ideas. If I have read something by a different author that seems relevant, I look for that author in the index, and I head to those pages.

   and

   Once again, I believe in “Stop, Look, and Listen.” I start by asking the AI to summarize the key themes of the book. For each theme that the AI lists, I stop and try to put it into my own words. I test my understanding by feeding my words into the AI, in order get confirmation that my interpretation is correct. Another way that I ensure understanding is to suggest possible examples or ask the AI to provide examples.

10. How to think about AI progress: Reproducing the entire post as it really is worth reading:

    The Zvi has a good survey post on what is going on with the actual evidence. I have a more general point to make, which I am drawing from my background in Austrian capital theory.

    There are easy projects, and there are hard projects. You might also say short-term vs. long-term investments.

    The easier, shorter-term projects get done first. For instance, the best LLMs now have near-perfect answers for a wide range of queries. Those answers will not be getting much better, though they may be integrated into different services in higher productivity ways.

    Those improvements will yield an ongoing stream of benefits, but you will not see much incremental progress in the underlying models themselves. Ten years from now, the word “strawberry” still will have three r’s, and the LLMs still will tell us that. There are other questions, such as “what is the meaning of life?” where the AI answers also will not get much better. I do not mean that statement as AI pessimism, rather the answers can only get so good because the question is not ideally specified in the first place.

    Then there are the very difficult concrete problems, such as in the biosciences or with math olympiad problems, and so on. Progress in these areas seems quite steady and I would call it impressive. But it will take quite a few years before that progress is turned into improvements in daily life. Again, that does not have to be AI pessimism. Just look at how we run our clinical trials, or how long the FDA approval process takes for new drugs, or how many people are reluctant to accept beneficial vaccines. I predict that AI will not speed up those processes nearly as much as it ideally might.

    So the AI world before us is rather rapidly being bifurcated into two sectors:

    a) progress already is extreme, and is hard to improve upon, and

    b) progress is ongoing, but will take a long time to be visible to actual users and consumers

    And so people will complain that AI progress is failing us, but mostly they will be wrong. They will be the victim of cognitive error and biases. The reality is that progress is continuing apace, but it swallows up and renders ordinary some of its more visible successes. What is left behind for future progress can be pretty slow.

    Yet another periodic reminder that MR and The Zvi are both must-read for everyone.

1. IST: Indian Spotlight Time:

   Exploring the India that often escapes headlines through the lived experiences of an ABCG: American Born Confused Gora. It’s a look beyond polished narratives and the obvious into the beautiful contradictions that actually power the country.

3. tokens are getting more expensive: A good discussion of why the AI Labs might stuggle with profitability.

   while it's true each generation of frontier model didn't get more expensive per token, something else happened. something worse. the number of tokens they consumed went absolutely nuclear.

4. Patrick OShaughnessy podcast with Joe Liemandt, Principal @ Alpha School

5. Failure of imagination is the only thing holding us back!

1. Why Is Martha’s Vineyard Going Vegan? It’s All About Tick Bites. (NYT):

   On the porch of the Chilmark General Store and at sunset-watching parties on Menemsha Beach, conversations circle ineluctably to the lone star tick, which after a single bite can leave people with a life-threatening allergy to most meat and dairy.

   Known as alpha-gal syndrome, the condition is changing the way many people shop, cook and eat in a place long known as a food-lover’s retreat for its thriving independent farms and restaurants. These new habits may prove to be lasting, as some islanders who initially avoided beef and cheese temporarily, out of necessity, later give them up for good out of preference.

   “It’s sort of supersized vegetarianism,” said Rebecca Miller, a farm owner who has the syndrome herself.

2. Are Samosas Unhealthy? Some Indians Find Official Advice Hard to Swallow.:

   So, when a recent government advisory put samosas — along with other deep-fried Indian snacks and Western foods such as burgers and French fries — on a list of things that should be eaten in moderation because of their high oil and sugar content, there was an unsurprising outcry. Social media erupted with memes, and Indian media chimed in to say the country’s most iconic bites were under attack.

3. @rivatez:

   That animals seemingly anticipate events should humble us more. Changes in groundwater chemistry, electromagnetic fields and sound waves make animals restless, distressed and even relocate

   In the West it is seen as ‘woo’ to contemplate that energy/weather humans don’t consciously experience can affect our psychology, and yet we forget that we are animals too.

   Even outside extreme weather events, the lunar cycle moves oceans, huge bodies of water. We are, like all animals, primarily made of water. The word ‘lunacy’ comes from the ancient understanding that our minds can be affected by it

   An interesting experiment is to log your daily mood for a few months- ups and downs, anxiety / joy levels, big arguments with loved ones etc. Then afterwards, retroactively chart it against lunar cycles and NASA space weather data that tracks geomagnetic storms, solar flares etc.

   Be open- minded and try it. I, too, used to think this stuff was BS

   Now I think much of modern psychiatry is giving people drugs to tune down people’s individual responses to these external inputs, eg ‘bipolar’ might just indicate high sensitivity

   How many important scientific breakthroughs lie on the other side of our collective dismissal of ‘woo’?

   

4. Why I believe in AGI (again):

   First, I’m now convinced that ChatGPT understands what it reads. Second, reasoning models persuade me that ChatGPT is creative. Third, ChatGPT summarizes texts extremely well, which I believe to be a robust measure of intelligence.

5. Derek Thompson:

   "The better news is that this is happening at a time when exercise seems to be increasing for many groups, especially the young and old. The bad news is ... deep Medicaid cuts and declines in childhood vaccine uptake are not exactly optimistic predictors of American health."

6. Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area: Not what it says on the label at all! Recommended.

7. Adults Are Going to Sleep-away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Actually Work.:

   “Anyone that has worked at camp or grown up in the camp world understands there is a powerful people connection that forms at camp,” said Liam Macleod, a longtime camp professional and marketing director at Camp No Counselors. “It’s camp magic and it’s hard to replicate in the regular world.”

8. What is the most profitable thing you have done with ChatGPT? on Reddit via Simon Willison: In dollar terms, probably crafting fundraising messages for charity event organized by my Alumni Association. In real terms, physiotherapy for my back and legs. So far. Some great examples at the link. Failure of imagination remains the biggest hurdle in getting value from LLMs.

9. AI Is Designing Bizarre New Physics Experiments That Actually Work:

   It took months of effort to understand what the AI was doing. It turned out that the machine had used a counterintuitive trick to achieve its goals. It added an additional three-kilometer-long ring between the main interferometer and the detector to circulate the light before it exited the interferometer’s arms. Adhikari’s team realized that the AI was probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago to reduce quantum mechanical noise. No one had ever pursued those ideas experimentally. “It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”

10. GPT-5 prompting guide:

    GPT-5, our newest flagship model, represents a substantial leap forward in agentic task performance, coding, raw intelligence, and steerability.

    While we trust it will perform excellently “out of the box” across a wide range of domains, in this guide we’ll cover prompting tips to maximize the quality of model outputs, derived from our experience training and applying the model to real-world tasks. We discuss concepts like improving agentic task performance, ensuring instruction adherence, making use of newly API features, and optimizing coding for frontend and software engineering tasks - with key insights into AI code editor Cursor’s prompt tuning work with GPT-5.

    We’ve seen significant gains from applying these best practices and adopting our canonical tools whenever possible, and we hope that this guide, along with the prompt optimizer tool we’ve built, will serve as a launchpad for your use of GPT-5. But, as always, remember that prompting is not a one-size-fits-all exercise - we encourage you to run experiments and iterate on the foundation offered here to find the best solution for your problem.

    And a tutorial by Anthropic.

11. Class Dismissed: Alpha School is getting a lot of coverage all of a sudden. Long piece about the people and the tech behind it.

1. Face it: you're a crazy person:

   I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

   If that’s a stumper, here are some followups: Which kind of coffee mug is best? How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost? Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?

   The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.

2. 50 things I know. And wish I'd known sooner:

   41. It’s almost impossible to have an easy life and be interesting. Suffering is what gives people texture.

   and

   47. Heaven is a set of gradually increasing but attainable challenges.

   Listicle has become a bad word but there is a reason they are popular. A well done one is *chef's kiss *.

3. 27 Notes on Growing Old(er):

   6. The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

   and

   17. ... The human condition is that we want it all, and we’re not willing to make trades… ‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path—the path they could have taken—without considering the cost of that path. So they say, “Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.” It’s like, well yeah, but you didn’t, because you actually chose the path that you’re on, and you weren’t willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.

4. Mad respect for whoever decided that there was a business opportunity here and then made it happen.

5. Space Rock That Punched Through Roof Almost Struck Resident (NYT):

   “I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things,” Mr. Harris said of the person whose home was hit. “One was the collision with his roof, one was a tiny cone of a sonic boom, and a third was it impacting the floor all in the same moment.”

   Looking at the photos, I think he would have died if it had struck him. Here's another amazing ancient rock story from the NYT.

6. Performance Art?

7. The ratio of members!

8. Great thread from a master. Love how he says so much without saying anything. See the photos in the third tweet for a masterpiece (as he puts it, the 3rd and the 4th slide.).

9. The Infinite Well: How Innovation Keeps Water Flowing:

   Solutions from experts follow a familiar pattern, claiming that the only way to avert a crisis is to adopt radical social and behavioral changes, driven by moral proselytizing, government intervention, or both, to save the water supply. Environmentalists urge people to replace old toilets with low-flow models, avoid running faucets while brushing their teeth or washing dishes, and switch to eating less water-intensive foods. Meanwhile, activists pressure elected officials to impose usage restrictions, ban certain crops in arid regions, and regulate everything from swimming pools to car washes.

   Fortunately the economics of water innovation reveals why the apparent scarcity tends to be self-correcting, without requiring us to adopt ascetic lifestyles or perform symbolic actions like picking up dropped ice cubes to water house plants or writing letters to elected officials. Rising prices, not moralizing pleas, lead people to conserve, look for substitutes, recycle resources, and innovate helping to meet demand through alternative means or improved efficiency.

   The same principles apply to many other things too.

1. How to Teach Your Kids Poker, the Easy Way:

   The right way to begin is with one-card poker. Everyone antes one chip and gets one card, face down. You look at your card. There’s a single round of betting, which proceeds around the table: If no one else has bet, you can bet or check (do nothing); if anyone in front of you has bet, you can call (or match the bet), raise or fold. When everyone has called the last bet or folded, those who are left in the hand show their card. The highest card wins: Ace is highest, then king, so on down to two.

   That’s it. No pairs, no flushes, no full houses, no complicated order of hands to remember, though you do have to remember that a queen beats a jack. But you learn a lot of poker. You will always win with an ace, but you have to learn to maximize the value of your ace, to induce other people to bet into you and call your raises. One of my proudest moments as a parent was when my daughter first check-raised me with an ace.

   You’ll probably win with a king, but if someone raises you, does that mean that they have an ace (and have you beat), or a queen (and are overconfident), or a six (and are bluffing)? There are 52 cards, so you can estimate the probabilities if you are mathematically inclined, though if you are four you probably won’t.

   You probably won’t win with a six, but if you bet it confidently you might bluff everyone else out. If everyone else checks, and you’re the last person to bet, you might as well bet: You have “position,” everyone else has a weak hand, and you might be able to steal a pot. The essentials are there.

   Once the kids have mastered this, you can introduce the order of hands gently with two-card poker. (Any pair beats a high card, highest pair wins.) Then teach the rest with five-card straight poker. This isn’t a great game, but it’s a brief stopover on the way to five-card draw, which is a perfectly respectable poker game. Texas hold’em is not far behind.

2. My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes:

   The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.

   Deeper than I would have imagined from the title.

3. A lot more than you wanted to read on College and College Admissions. Depressing.

4. The Imitation Game: Defending against AI's Dark Side!:

   A few weeks ago, I started receiving a stream of message about an Instagram post that I was allegedly starring in, where after offering my views on Palantir's valuation, I was soliciting investors to invest with me (or with an investment entity that had ties to me). I was not surprised, since I have lived with imitations for years, but I was bemused, since I don't have an Instagram account and have not posted on Facebook more than once or twice in a decade. In the last few days, those warnings have been joined by others, who have noted that there is now a video that looks and sounds like me, adding to the sales pitch with promises of super-normal returns if they reach out, and presumably send their money in. (Please don't go looking for these scams online, since the very act of clicking on them can expose you to their reach.)

   It was a matter of time.

5. GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff:

   GPT-5 just does stuff, often extraordinary stuff, sometimes weird stuff, sometimes very AI stuff, on its own. And that is what makes it so interesting.

   To be clear this wasn't my experience. I gave it a PDF and asked it to estimate something based on the data in the file. It made up all the numbers and suggested they were in tables and pages that didn't exist in the PDF. I was not able to get it focused on the actual information in the PDF despite multiple reminders and other attempts. Apparently though, there was a bug in their system yesterday that made it appear dumber. I will try again.

1. Philosopher–Builder Summer Reads:

   These aren't generic "tech books." They're works that can shape how serious builders think about what they're creating and why.

   And the original essay.

2. DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations:

   The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback. The PowerPoint also suggests the AI tool will save the United States trillions of dollars by reducing compliance requirements, slashing the federal budget and unlocking unspecified “external investment.”

   A worthy goal for DOGE and possibly the right use of AI. If done well.

3. America's AI Action Plan Is Pretty Good:

   Otherwise, while this is far from a perfect plan or the plan I would choose, on the substance it is a good plan, a positive plan, with many unexpectedly good plans within it. There is a lot of attention to detail in ways those I’ve asked say reflect people who actually know what they are doing, which was by no means something to be taken for granted. It is hard to imagine that a much better plan could have been approved given who was doing the approving.

5. Two long & good pieces on India this week though I have yet to fully read both.

6. Jhanas and Jhourney:

   So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had 'the right size', their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up ("Huh? I thought"). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling "It's... always been like this!!!!" "What the fuck??!" followed by "This is too much!! Too much!!!". The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what "painfully beautiful" means for the first time in my life. I had to look away. I calmed a bit. I walked a few steps and looked back. The exact same thing happened. "It's reproducible, hihihihi", and I started laughing. Then I found a log to sit on, calm down, and look back at the ocean. Now it wasn't overwhelming, but "kinda nice" was now "fucking amazing".

   To do list.

7. Yes, Adam Sandler really is a pickup basketball god (NYT Paywall):

   Jackson was struck by the man’s attire: extra-baggy shorts and an extra-baggy yellow T-shirt. “I’m trying to figure out: Does he buy clothes? Did he buy them and then just stop buying them? His clothes really might have been from 2008.” It soon became apparent, however, that the guy could play. He was a true court general. He impressed Jackson with his basketball IQ.

8. Life in deep:

   When her three-person submersible descended more than 30,000 feet into one of the Pacific Ocean’s deepest trenches, Mengran Du wasn’t sure what they would find.

   What she saw, she recalled, was “unbelievable”: Dense clusters of tubeworms with tentacles tinged bloodred, jutting up like skyscrapers. Iridescent snails scaling the worms, like window washers. Bristly, white creatures wriggling between them like rush-hour commuters trying to get home for dinner.

10.

Some readers have commented that I am obsessed with AI. This is not correct. I wish I was. But is there anything more interesting happening in the world right now? I don't think so.

1. Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music:

   Art can outlast the artist — but what about their artistic impulses?

   A new art installation project in Australia, titled "Revivification," raises this question with a very literal interpretation of "impulse": using his DNA, the team behind the project have performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals.

   At the center of the piece is an "in-vitro brain," grown from blood that Lucier, who passed away in 2021, donated in the final years of his life. Housed in a plinth, it's grown on top of an electrode mesh that connects it to twenty large brass plates placed around the room. Visitors can listen as the brain fires off electrical pulses that trigger a transducer and a mallet behind each plate, striking them to produce sound.

   Is this art? Is this science? Is this composing?

2. Gross(ery) Confusion:

   Teachout’s idea that suppliers “make up the difference” by charging smaller stores more is also economically incoherent. Profit-maximizing firms already charge what the market will bear. If Costco’s volume justifies a discount, that doesn’t mean suppliers can or should charge higher prices to other buyers. Yes, there are models where costs change with volume but costs could go down with volume and, in any case, those models don’t rely on the folk theory of “making up the difference.”

3. AIs and Spontaneous Order:

   This isn’t to say AI won’t help improve economic policy—it might, if we listen. But the future economy won’t look like a centrally planned machine. It will look like an economy of von Neumanns—autonomous agents buying, selling, and strategizing in complex interaction.

4. I Analysed 25,000 Hotel Names and Found Four Surprising Truths:

   And yes, the cat’s out of the bag: there are over 200 Hotels Bristol worldwide, and the reason goes all the way back to an 18th-century English aristocrat whose hotel preferences turned into a naming tradition.

5. I Drank Every Cocktail:

   The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards. As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.

   Legend.

6. How the System Works

   An essay series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life — and what happens if we don’t maintain them

   This should be amazing. So far, Agriculture, Water and Electricity.

1. The Diaspora Paradox Second in a series from Samir Varma

   But here's the paradox that has haunted me for decades: Why do so many Indians who escape India's constraints become more Indian abroad? Why does the uncle who couldn't be bothered to visit temples in Mumbai suddenly become a founding member of the Hindu temple in New Jersey? Why does the software engineer who rebelled against arranged marriage in Bangalore now insist their American-born daughter marry within the community?

2. The First in 30 Years: Scientists Discover New Class of Antibiotics:

   Led by scientist Gerry Wright, the team has discovered a powerful new molecule called lariocidin. This promising candidate shows the ability to fight some of the toughest, most drug-resistant bacteria known to science. Their groundbreaking findings were published in the journal Nature.

3. Why We’re Surrounding Our Kids with AI:

   We also don’t plan on perpetuating modern Western parents’ egregiously hands-off nature with regard to their kids’ dating and marriage prospects. We already have a going list of agentic, thoughtful, high-achieving families whose kids are close to our kids in age; as our kids get older, we’ll start organizing gatherings for families in this network where our kids can hang out and get to know each other (trips, summer camps, discord servers, study groups, etc.). As our kids reach their late teens and early 20s, we’ll begin organizing modern versions of the London Season—a series of events and gatherings at which our single kids ready for marriage can meet, mix, and get to know each other.

   Did not see this coming.

4. Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of hereditary disease:

   Eight babies have been born in the UK using genetic material from three people to prevent devastating and often fatal conditions, doctors say.

   The method, pioneered by UK scientists, combines the egg and sperm from a mum and dad with a second egg from a donor woman.

5. The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers

   I pointed out that the US response to Sputnik was fierce competition. Following Sputnik, we increased funding for education, especially math, science and foreign languages, organizations like ARPA were spun up, federal funding for R&D was increased, immigration rules were loosened, foreign talent was attracted and tariff barriers continued to fall. In contrast, the response to what I called the “DeepSeek” moment has been nearly the opposite. Why did Sputnik spark investment while DeepSeek sparks retrenchment? I examine four explanations from the comments and argue that the rise of zero-sum thinking best fits the data.

6. Reflections on OpenAI:

   I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024.

   I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like.

7. ChatGPT Agent and Gold-medal level performance in International Math Olympiad (IMO). More on the IMO.

8. Psychological techniques to persuade AI.

9. Spud-tacular: How India became a french fry superpower:

   Gujarat has become India's capital of french fry production, home to huge factories churning out chips, including facilities belonging to Canadian giant McCain Foods and India's biggest maker of French Fries, HyFun Foods.

10. Bill Ackman changed Tennis forever.

1. Terrified Girls, Helicopters and a Harrowing Scene: A Rescuer’s Account at Camp Mystic (NYT):

   Scott Ruskan, a Coast Guard swimmer, is credited with saving 165 people at the all-girls’ camp from deadly floods in Central Texas.

   Mr. Ruskan realized that staying on scene would free up two extra spots on his helicopter for the evacuees, he said, so he told his unit, “I’d love to stay, I could do a lot more good on the ground.”

   He became the main person on scene to both triage and provide emotional support to the survivors.

   Hero.

2. Death of partying in the USA:

3. The forests are coming back: 36 countries, including India and China, gained more tress than they lost, between 2000-2020.

4. @levelsio speaks to John Collison

5. For a few days this summer, your days will be just a smidge shorter (WaPo)

   During the summer, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, which minimizes the difference in temperature between the equator and Earth’s poles. This smaller temperature variation slows down the jet stream — a narrow band of strong winds around 30,000 feet above us — and moves it northward.

1. John Oliver on AI Slop:

John Oliver is always funny and often insightful.

2. Defeating a Virus That Killed Half a Billion People - The Plea. Timely and important. Trigger warning: Images of diseased people.

3. Operation Midnight Hammer: What a story.

4. Helicopter Money. Literally. Talk about going out in style.

5. Does CPS Investigate One Third of All Children in the US? Yes. But...

   The scale of CPS investigations in the US is staggering. Like all things, this trend began in the late 60s and early 70s as mandatory reporter laws expanded and caused massive growth in child maltreatment reports. Since the 90s, the number of reports has stayed pretty stable and the number of substantiated investigations and interventions has been falling.

   The CPS could probably scale back it’s interventions for cases of maltreatment that only involve neglect, especially those that only involve lack of supervision rather than physical neglect. Other tradeoffs between false positive and false negative investigations and interventions are more difficult to have a strong opinion on given the terrible outcomes on both sides of the trolley track.

   There are probably some available pareto improving moves. The most straightforward in my view would be increasing staffing and state capacity in family courts so that cases can be reviewed more accurately and without requiring months or years of effort and tens of thousands of dollars on the part of the parents.

6. Tech C.E.O. Pays $400,000 to Conduct the Toronto Symphony (NYT):

   After the performance, Cheung and the orchestra received a standing ovation. He said he was grateful for the opportunity.

7. Will AI Drive 20%+ Annual GDP Growth?:

   Steam, electricity, computers delivered enormous benefits while their economic importance shrank through success. AI will transform society profoundly. But 20% GDP growth? History says no.

8. Medical Superintelligence from Microsoft?:

   Microsoft's LLM is not only designed for multiple-choice questions, but also for real medical diagnoses in realistic scenarios – and outperforms even top models such as o3.

   In a large-scale study with over 300 case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine, the system achieved a diagnostic accuracy of over 80%. This is not only four times higher than the participating doctors, but also marks a qualitative leap: the AI was not only more accurate, but also made more economical decisions – with around 20% lower costs because it avoided unnecessary tests.

9. A Doctor Responds

   Microsoft claims their new AI framework diagnoses 4x better than doctors.

   I'm a medical doctor and I actually read the paper. Here's my perspective on why this is both impressive AND misleading ...

   ...

   Final thought: We don't need AI that can diagnose every rare disease. We need AI that knows when to diagnose and when to reassure. That's the real art of medicine.

10. Gymnastics Bot using LEGO SPIKE Prime. My weekend project.

A jumbo edition this week after a two-week break that was really not necessary.

1. At Secret Math Meeting, Researchers Struggle to Outsmart AI:

   On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group’s members faced off in a showdown with a “reasoning” chatbot that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its mathematical mettle. After throwing professor-level questions at the bot for two days, the researchers were stunned to discover it was capable of answering some of the world’s hardest solvable problems. “I have colleagues who literally said these models are approaching mathematical genius,” says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting.

2. Hajj on Horseback (NYT):

   More than 1.5 million people traveled to Saudi Arabia this year for the hajj. Only three of them rode on horseback all the way from Spain, recreating the pilgrimage of Andalusian Muslims centuries ago and sharing their travels in the most modern way with big followings on social media.

3. Festivo, All Festivals, Everywhere (in Asia, for now): A calendar of all festivals.

4. Did She or Didn’t She? She Did, and She’ll Tell You Exactly How. (NYT): I am surprised it took so long to get here and not at all surprised who made it happen. Smartest family?

5. New York City’s Best Chefs Pick Their Favorite Restaurants (NYT)

6. Is it any surprise he won? (The Pope):

   As a bishop in Peru, Robert Prevost was often on the lookout for used cars that he could buy cheap and fix up himself for use in parishes around his diocese. With cars that were really broken down, he'd watch YouTube videos to learn how to fix them.

7. I used to be a high-performing robot and Maybe you’re not Actually Trying. "Agency" is having a moment online as seen in all the "You can just do things" memes. Interesting.

8. LLMs in Kitchen?: I made Tofu with peanut sauce today based on a receipe created by Claude. Honestly, the proportions were off but it wasn't half bad.

   are LLMs 10X-ing anyone else in the kitchen? I am so much more confident cooking when I can ask infinite dumb questions and brainstorm ideas, backup plans, substitutes, etc.

   in the last couple weeks I’ve made jerk chicken with coconut rice and mango salsa, chipotle turkey tacos, honey-lime sriracha chicken & sesame snap peas, skillet-blistered tomato and ravioli, and a fancy dessert. some of these things were just me looking in the fridge and saying “uhh this is what I have, help me turn it into something good” and so far they’ve all been great.

   I’m the stereotypical guy that knows how to make ~3 variations on a protein bowl and maybe ~2 nicer dishes for impressing girls when I was single and that’s about it.

   it’s fun feeling my agency expand and confidence quickly increase in this very practical domain. AI is great.

9. Andrej Karpathy's Keynote at YC. Self recommending as some say.

10. Kitty Olympics: AI Video is getting better.

11. Texan guy recites his electric bill like he’s a character in a William Faulkner novel. Hilarious.

12. AI is transforming Indian call centers.:

    For three years, Kartikeya Kumar hesitated before picking up the phone, anticipating another difficult conversation with another frustrated customer.

    The call center agent, now 29, had tried everything to eliminate what a colleague called the “Indian-ism” in his accent. He mimicked the dialogue from Marvel movies and belted out songs by Metallica and Pink Floyd. Relief finally arrived in the form of artificial intelligence.

13. Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide by Ethan Mollick:

    Every few months I put together a guide on which AI system to use. Since I last wrote my guide, however, there has been a subtle but important shift in how the major AI products work. Increasingly, it isn't about the best model, it is about the best overall system for most people. The good news is that picking an AI is easier than ever and you have three excellent choices. The challenge is that these systems are getting really complex to understand. I am going to try and help a bit with both.

14. How cultures heal:

    Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video—and by a huge margin.

15. Flying on Frying Oil:

    The noodle hawkers in Kuala Lumpur are getting a nice little bump in profit but who is going stall to stall to check that the oil is in fact used? And what counts as used? One fry or two? Clever entrepreneurs have cut out the middleman. Virgin palm oil can be substituted for used cooking oil and voila! Sustainable aviation fuel is contributing to deforestation in Malaysia. Malaysia exports far more “used” cooking oil than oil that it uses. No surprise.

16. The search for MH370 has resumed. (NYT). What a mystery.

17. Rick Perry: I’m dedicating my life to fighting for a psychedelic drug. (NYT): Yes, Rick Perry.

    Marcus had lived with my wife, Anita, and me at the governor’s mansion after coming home from war. He was in constant pain from his injuries and dependent on opioids just to get through the day. He also drank heavily and used nicotine to cope with stress. Worse, he was carrying the burdens that come with war: grief, trauma and survivor’s guilt. For years, we tried to find him help. And for years, nothing worked. But after undergoing ibogaine treatment at a clinic in Mexico, Marcus came back changed. He no longer needed opioids. He hasn’t touched alcohol in years. He even quit chewing Copenhagen, a longtime habit.

18. When your father is a swimming coach

19. Alpha School:

    I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized‑controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was).

20. Your semi-regular reminder to subscribe to Don't Worry About the Vase.

1. More kids are beating cancer. Improving the rest of their lives is next. (WaPo)

   When oncologists gave my 5-year-old daughter the all-clear from high-risk neuroblastoma in 2010, I breathed a sigh of relief.

   But her health needs were just beginning.

   Fifteen years later, the intense and often toxic treatments that saved Emily’s life have left her with a host of lifelong health challenges — hearing loss, stunted height, endocrine and kidney dysfunction, and permanent hair-thinning — issues no one talked about during her 18 months of cancer treatment.

   A good problem to have from one perspective but no less hard to deal with.

2. Questions about AI 2025:

   My working hypothesis is that human cognition improves markedly once pen is put to paper, and in some cases can continue to improve with extended writing (but note many prominent failures).

   This is correct and yet I do this less than I should. Time to commit to writing non-link posts weekly?

3. Exact Instructions Challenge (YouTube): Fun.

4. A ‘Mission: Impossible’ Fan Favorite Returns 3 Decades Later. Even He’s Surprised. (NYT)

   But according to the “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”

   “And I realized why William Donloe resonated,” McQuarrie said. “There was a perceived injustice, whether anybody could put their finger on it or not.”

5. The Rise of the Japanese Toilet (NYT):

   In 1982, a peculiar commercial aired on televisions across Japan.

   An actress in a pink floral dress and an updo drops paint on her hand and futilely attempts to wipe it off with toilet paper. She looks into the camera and asks: “Everyone, if your hands get dirty, you wash them, right?”

   “It’s the same for your bottom,” she continues. “Bottoms deserve to be washed, too.”

   Civilization on the march.

6. Zarna Garg Went From Stay-at-Home Mom to Stand-Up Comedian (NYT):

   After 16 years focusing on her husband, Shalabh, and her three children — Zoya, Brij and Veer — Ms. Garg re-entered the work force in 2019, but not to return to her erstwhile career as a personal injury lawyer. Instead, encouraged by her children, she started working the New York open-mic circuit and performing at Westside Comedy Club before headlining at Caroline’s on Broadway by 2020.

   In 2023, she talked her way into opening for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on their Restless Leg Tour, and Prime Video aired her special “One in a Billion.” This spring, she made her film debut in the critically acclaimed rom-com “A Nice Indian Boy.” Her second special, “Practical People Win,” will air on Hulu in July, and she is developing a sitcom called “Zarna” with Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart.

7. The Lightcone Podcast on Prompting (Video Podcast): I am hungry for more such reources.

8. Chattel Childhood: Trigger warning - fairly explicit start and parts.

   I don’t approve of the Simbari childrearing, not because I think the pain and disgust of what the children are forced to do is inherently bad, but because they are forced.

   To love someone skillfully is to pour fuel on their soul. It’s to see the world through their desire, to delight in it, and go “I desire you to get what you want.” It is the amplification of their will.

   The Simbari people are destroying the will of their children. My parents destroyed my will. And I think, quite seriously, that our current culture is likewise destroying the will of its children en masse. That’s what you do to property.

   Worth thinking about although largely I don't agree with this. Her will seems to be doing just fine.

   I think humans are are social animals and whether something traumatizes us or not is often (but not always) a function of the social context surrounding the event. What happens to the Simbari children (if it in fact, does happen. I have not verified or heard of this before) doesn't traumatize them because everyone around them considers it perfectly normal.

   In my mental model, the trauma happens, when you feel something shameful or otherwise different has happened to you and everyone looks at you different.

9. Artichokes: For the photos.

10. High cost of building in US:

    Zuckerburg's worth is 226 billion. The NY Subway builds tunnels at $4 bil. per mile. SF's BART builds subways at $2 bil. per mile. It's crazy that all of Zuckerberg's wealth would build just 8% of the current NYC subway network.

    Meanwhile in Paris cost $250 mil. per mile.

11. UFO?:

    The object was precognitive in behavior. The radar data from the SPY-1B system showed that the Tic Tac descended from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds, a feat requiring acceleration up to 5,880 Gs. But here's what no one focuses on: that data was correlated by both radar and infrared, meaning this was not a sensor glitch or hallucination...it was a multi-spectrum-confirmed, real-world event. And what’s worse? The object decelerated to a dead stop… mid-air. Bonkers!

A long list today because this week two of my top sources were on fire - MR and NYT.

1. My Parents Expected to Be Retired. Instead, They Are Raising My Sister’s Kids. (NYT): Beautiful, heartbreaking and uplifting.

2. Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers: None of the above. Well... maybe heartbreaking. No need to click the link though, the title says it all.

3. Measles cases in Europe, the Americas skyrocket: This is infuriating for two reasons. The second reason is that you wouldn't know it from reading most news that Europe has 10x the cases of USA. NYT I can understand, but I had to scroll down 3 pages on BBC website, after searching for "measles" to find a story about something other than RFK Jr. and Texas moms.

4. Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Same Pattern Every Time After Long Exposure to Water: Heh. Also apparently they wrinkle to improve underwater grip, not because the skin expands by absorbing water, which would have been hypothesis.

5. How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future (NYT)

6. 5 weeks ago, someone buried a 22 lb chest with $10,000 of prizes (half in gold), somewhere in San Francisco. No one has found it yet. This is the only clue. It was found within a day of this post, so clearly the only thing holding back the search was the number of eyes looking. How many other problems is this true for?

7. "One of main goals in life has been to make my parents proud". 92% in Iraq, 78% in India. I remember realizing sometime in my early 30s that my parents didn't know the hierarchy of success in my field. As far as they were concerned I was already successful after college and any "actual" success wouldn't register with them. I felt the void in my movtivation for quite some time. Having your own kids helps with the transition.

8. AI & Critical Thinking:

   An interviewer just asked me what skills AI will make more important. My response? Critical thinking skills.

   This is because in the past there was value in creating large quantities of information. That is now costless. The new currency is how to generate, assimilate, interpret, and make that large amount of information actionable.

   The next question then becomes how do we teach, and improve our own, critical thinking skills? I discuss that in a recent study where I create a critical thinking skills hierarchy.

9. The Agentic Web and Original Sin: I have been wondering about this problem for a while - who puts up the content for the LLMs to train on if everyone gets their answers from the chatbots and doesn't visit websites anymore.

   The problem, as both I and Patel noted, is that this ecosystem depends on humans seeing those webpages, not impersonal agents impervious to advertising, which destroys the economics of ad-supported content sites, which, in the long run, dries up the supply of new content for AI.

   A potential solution:

   First, the protocol layer should have a mechanism for payments via digital currency, i.e. stablecoins. Second, AI providers like ChatGPT should build an auction mechanism that pays out content sources based on the frequency with which they are cited in AI answers. The result would be a new universe of creators who will be incentivized to produce high quality content that is more likely to be useful to AI, competing in a marketplace a la the open web; indeed, this would be the new open web, but one that operates at even greater scale than the current web given the fact that human attention is a scarce resource, while the number of potential agents is infinite.

10. Cargo Ship Crashed Into Man’s Yard After Crewman Fell Asleep, Police Say (NYT)

11. The 22 Best Pizza Places in New York Right Now (NYT)

12. New Studies Dismiss Signs of Life on Distant Planet (NYT): Dang.

13. SEO for AI: A look at Generative Engine Optimization

14. The best bookstore in NYC, and then some

15. They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper. (NYT):

    “We still haven’t done hot dogs,” Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.

    and

    “We were still very young; we had no idea what we were doing,” said Billy, a junior varsity quarterback whose hair was tousled into a cruciferous mop.

16. Know hope!

    …Use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment (OR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.35–0.52) and reduced time-dependent rates of cognitive decline (HR = 0.74, 95% CI 0.66–0.84). Effects remained significant when accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, health and cognitive reserve proxies.

    Paper here.

17. Putting Claude 4 Opus in an open playground to chat with itself led to it diving into philosophical explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and by 30 turns it eventually started using Sanskrit: Can't wait till nationalist politicians from my home state get their hands on this. Sanskrit!

18. Toronto burger shop called Good Fortune Burger renamed its menu items to sound like office supplies, helping remote workers potentially expense meals through work accounts. The "basic steel stapler" and "braided HDMI cord” are popular. : As a reply points out this doesn't make sense because the order is still from a place called Good Fortune Burger.

19. Who Benefits from Surge Pricing?:

    What are the welfare effects of surge pricing? Using Uber data, I develop an empirical model of spatial equilibrium composed of demand, supply, and matching. I find that surge pricing raises total welfare, benefitting riders but hurting drivers.

    Welfare effects differ substantially across sides of the market: rider surplus increases by 3.57% of gross revenue, whereas driver surplus and the platform’s current profits decrease by 0.98% and 0.50% of gross revenue, respectively.

    This doesn't make sense. If it hurts the platform or the drivers, why would they do it?

    After dropping the pearl of wisdom above, I decided to actually read the paper. In the first two pages I found this:

    Uber’s current profits decrease by 0.50% of gross revenue. This probably does not mean that Uber is hurt, but rather that it is willing to forgo current profits to increase rider surplus—the right choice if it believes that long-run shareholder value is more closely tied to rider surplus and customer retention than to current profits.

    Makes sense. After this my eyes glazed over and I dropped the paper in Claude and asked it why drivers would participate in this. Here's what it says:

    The paper acknowledges this is the more problematic finding. "My findings suggest that drivers might have good reason to complain. Their hourly earnings are not much higher than the minimum wage, so even the small effects I find might be a concern."

    However, drivers may not have full information about the counterfactual (uniform pricing), and many drivers are part-time workers using Uber for supplemental income rather than as their primary employment.

1. How to make money betting on the new Pope: Great discussion of the betting process. Still plenty of luck involved but a reminder that there is plenty of "alpha" out there if you look in the right place. Maybe I should create a hashtag for these stories. #alpha

   A few minutes later, my jaw dropped as Prevost -- the guy I had just amasssed shares in at 200-1 like 20 minutes earlier-- walked out onto the balcony as Pope.

2. On the NBA and economic theory: Solving the problem of late season tanking to get a shot at the draft lottery in the NBA. Quite simple when you think about it.

   Optimal mechanism: get points for each loss. In game 1, a loss is worth 1 Draft Point. As season continues, loss is worth less, becoming negative late. Draft position based on Draft Points. Everyone wants to win late in season. Early season used to handicap truly bad teams.

3. Populism is not popular. Success is popular.:

   And Singapore is well run precisely because it adopts “unpopular” technocratic policies like zero tariffs, forced saving, and congestion pricing.

   And the PAP keeps getting re-elected, not despite, but because of those unpopular policies. Playing the long game, succesfully, since 1965.

4. Harvard Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original.: To be fair it was $27 in 1946 dollars, but still. #alpha

   Professor Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south east London, plowing his way through Harvard Law School’s digital images as research for a book when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 — the catalog name for Harvard Law School Manuscript 172.

   “I get down to 172 and it’s a single parchment sheet of Magna Carta,” he said. “And I think ‘Oh my god, this looks to me for all the world — because I read it — like an original.’”

   Professor Carpenter emailed Professor Vincent, who was, at the time, at work in a library in Brussels. “David sent it with a message saying, ‘What do you think that is?’” said Professor Vincent. “I wrote back within seconds, saying, ‘You and I both know what that is!’”

   I would not have answered like that.

A light week on links as it was a heavy week in life.

1. You Sent the Message. But Did You Write It?: Hilarious.

   Chatcident: When someone slips and pastes the prompt into the chat or email instead of the polished AI output – exposing the wizard behind the curtain.

2. Points for kills: How Ukraine is using video game incentives to slay more Russians:

   Ukraine's military is turning to incentive schemes used in video games to spur its soldiers to kill more Russian troops and destroy their equipment.

   The program — called Army of Drones bonus — rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It will soon be integrated with a new online marketplace called Brave 1 Market, which will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment for their units.

3. How far are you from India, measured in units of India?: I really need to update the site to show Tweets inline or at least display images. Hope Claude is up to the task.

4. This Is the Moment for Mexican Indian Food to Flourish (NYT): A marriage made in heaven. Literally.

   A small, close-knit Mexican Indian American community formed outside Sacramento when a generation of Punjabi Sikh and Muslim men immigrated from India to find work as farmers and loggers beginning in the late 1800s. After the Immigration Act of 1917 made it near impossible for Indian women to immigrate, hundreds of these men married Mexican women. New kinds of cooking emerged from their idiosyncratic home kitchens and a handful of restaurants the families went on to run.

5. Lego built full-size F1 cars for the Miami GP drivers’ parade.

   “That was the most fun drivers’ parade we’ve ever had,” Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton said. “Some dirty driving from this one here (Gasly)! That was great fun.”

   “They’ll have to sweep the track, there’s quite a bit of Lego debris on the track,” Max Verstappen said. “A bit different, that’s for sure!”

6. Tim Urban on AI. In 2015.: Really need to add the Tweet feature.

7. Unparalleled Misalignments: I think I have shared this before but some things are worth sharing twice.

   This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other.

   Butt dial // Booty call

   Father figure // Dad bod

   Local girl // Near miss

8. Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class

9. Pro-Prompting: A master in action. Prompt used for GeoGuessr by Kelsey Tuoc, in the last week's link on AI playing GeoGuessr.

10. Boy Accidentally Orders 70,000 Lollipops on Amazon. Panic Ensues. (NYT) :

    On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Ky.

    And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when Ms. LaFavers heard what no parent wants to hear: Her child had unwittingly placed a massive online order.

    “Mom, my suckers are here!” said her son, Liam, who had gone outside to ride his scooter.

    “I panicked,” Ms. LaFavers, 46, said. “I was hysterical.”

1. How to make hard choices (YouTube): A great video and especially personally relevant right now.

2. Just how good is O3 at playing GeoGuessr: Apparently very good. It still makes errors of course, but I was amazed at how close it got with very limited clues. Worth repeating this bit from last weeks link:

   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.

3. Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times (NYT):

   The video is just under two and a half minutes long. A slim man with close-cropped hair walks into a room, pulls a long black mamba — whose venom can kill within an hour — from a crate and allows it to bite his left arm. Immediately after, he lets a taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his right arm. “Thanks for watching,” he calmly tells the camera, his left arm bleeding, and then exits.

   Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.

4. Ken Rogoff on Conversations with Tyler: Great discussion on so many different topics - China, Pakistan, US, Chess. I found it very insightful.

5. Macro Utopia: Economics heavy list today but I have found Scott Sumner to have the most useful and probably most accurate predictions about macro.

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.

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.

1. A.I. and Vibecoding Helped Me Create My Own Software: The limitation here is my imagination.

2. Humanoid Robots are coming. Wild dogs will not stop me from paying good money for a bot that can iron and fold clothes.

3. First world problem?: Nebraska Man Struggles to Change Daughter’s Name From ‘Unakite Thirteen Hotel’. For two years.

4. Michelle Trachtenberg: I did not watch Buffy or any of her other work but it is always depressing to see so many child celebrities die early deaths. This job is hazardous. To be clear cause of death is not known and I do not want to speculate.

   What struck me was this bit in the report:

   In a 2012 interview with Complex magazine, she recalled a scene in the 2006 film “Beautiful Ohio,” starring William Hurt and Rita Wilson, that featured her “naked tush.” It was, she said, “probably one of the most horrendous moments of my life.”

   “It would take an army — or Martin Scorsese — to ever get me naked again,” she added.

As a viewer, I almost never think about the person behind the character. Sure if a Christian Bale loses nearly 30kg for a role, its visible enough and stark enough that one is forced to think about the how of it. But for the most part, I watch the program and move on. Maybe if there is something really interesting or shocking, a comment to my SO.

So it is a jarring to see that the impact of a brief scene stuck with the actor for years after the fact.

These days there is enough nudity on screen that most of us are desensitized to seeing it and I hope the actors are too, to performing them. Even in 2006 or 2012, when maybe it was less common, I would not have imagined an actor, and especially an American¹ actor, would be so traumatized by such a scene.

Maybe it is because she grew up in a time when that was a much bigger deal that it was harder on her. Perhaps actors like her were the trailblazers and paid a price and it is easier for actors now.

It is, however, possible to imagine a possibility where being naked on screen is traumatizing, no matter how common and acceptable. According to Claude, the "being naked in public" dream genre is common across cultures and age groups and more common in adoloscents.

If that is the case I shudder to imagine the cost of all the content on Netflix and other services in a few years time.

The report also has a bit on another scene she was not happy about. And guess what? At the time (and thankfully no longer), the report carried a photo from that scene.

Footnotes

1. Though, it turns out, America has a complex relationship with nudity and sexuality. Who'da thunk! ↩

1. 50 years of Travel Tips: Some great tips.

   For the best travel experiences you need either a lot of money, or a lot of time. Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money. Although it tries, money cannot buy what time delivers. You have enough time to attend the rare festival, to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, or to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep. Time is the one resource you can give yourself, so take advantage of this if you are young without money.

2. 100% HIV Prevention:

   ...we now have evidence that in real-world use it can do something that has never been seen before: twice-yearly injections in thousands of female trial volunteers in high-risk areas (South Africa and Uganda) showed a one hundred per cent prevention rate of HIV infection.

3. Stable Systems (X):

   I don’t think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don’t understand or even realize exist.

4. AI or No I (X):

   Me using LLMs for fun little personal projects: wow this thing is such a genius why do we even need humans anymore.

   Me trying to deploy LLMs in messy real-world environments: why is this thing so unbelievably stupid and dumb.

   This fits with my experience. But also for doing "real" work, prompt engineering matters. Giving the right instructions in the right order does make a difference.

   See more scepticism in this thread. Along with some of the comments I am hearing Satya Nadella made in his podcast with Dwarkesh, I wonder if we are seeing a vibe shift on AI?

5. My LLM codegen workflow atm(via):

   I have been building so many small products using LLMs. It has been fun, and useful. However, there are pitfalls that can waste so much time. A while back a friend asked me how I was using LLMs to write software. I thought “oh boy. how much time do you have!” and thus this post.

Again, for real work, prompt engineering matters.

6. Consensus projections on AI (X):

   I think Grok 3 came in right at expectations, so I don't think there is much to update in terms of consensus projections on AI: still accelerating development, speed is a moat, compute still matters, no obvious secret sauce to making a frontier model if you have talent & chips.

7. Three Observations: Obligatory link to every Sam Altman post.

   Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025; everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine. There is a great deal of talent right now without the resources to fully express itself, and if we change that, the resulting creative output of the world will lead to tremendous benefits for us all.

1. Translating with LLMs: A fantastic guide from a professional translator on how he is using LLMs to do his job better.

   For my day to day queries, I simply ask Claude, like I would ask a colleague or a friend and it just works. But for professional work, correctly prompting the LLMs improves the quality of output significantly. I hope to find (and create) more such examples.

2. Wisdom:

3. Wisdom II: A lot of AI cheerleading takes this form. Yes, you can just do things. I have also thought and posted along those lines. But as Gergely points out, the hard thing in building a payment system is not the code - its fraud, AML, KYC, tax, reporting, reconcilliation...

   That is true for most other hard things too. The hard thing in pharma is not finding the compound but getting the trials and approvals done. The hard thing in politics in not the manifesto but the consensus.

4. Tarriffs and Modern Supply Chains: Tarriffs are more disruptive than I thought.

5. How My Dad Reconciled His God and His Gay Son: Beautiful.

   This is me with my dad, Bill White. For decades, he has been an evangelical pastor. Before I was born, he wrote a letter to my future wife. He didn’t know what we both do now: that I’m gay. When I came out nearly 16 years later, it shook his faith and fractured his church. But it never separated us. I wanted to understand how. So I read his journals.

6. Strongly endorse:

   One of the reasons making things is satisfying is that it's a concrete demonstration of the notion that you can have some amount of control over your environment and circumstances. Passive media consumption is the opposite of that.

7. Should you value the life of your brother more than that of a stranger?:

   But again, this is a distraction from any real issue! Oh, you should value the life of your brother more than a stranger? You don’t say? I’m hearing this for the first time! Now let’s kill five million foreign children to fund one sixth of a broadband boondoggle.

   I am happy to “concede” that if you face a choice between saving a stranger and saving your brother, save your brother! Or your cousin, or your great-uncle, or your seven-times-great-grand-nephew-twice-removed. I’ll “concede” all of this, immediately, because it’s all fake; none of your relatives were ever in any danger. The only point of this whole style of philosophical discussion is so that you can sound wise as you say “Ah, but is not saving your brother more important than saving a complete stranger?” then sentence five million strangers to death for basically no benefit while your brother continues to be a successful real estate agent in Des Moines.

   When will I be able to write so well?

Most books should have been blog posts, most blog posts should have been tweets and most tweets should never have been written. - Unknown Tweeter

Another set of AI-heavy links. I can’t help myself right now.

1. Set up a fake cricket league:

   These arrangements might have suggested that the league featured professional-grade cricket that an online audience would find worth watching, but in fact, the players weren’t established cricketers or even skilled amateurs. They were locals that Davda had recruited with the promise of paying 400 rupees (about £3.50) per day — twice what people in the area make in daily wages working on farms and for local businesses.

   Respect.

2. How to choose a religion (NYT Paywall):

   But for the general obligation imposed upon us all, as time-bound creatures in a world shot through with intimations of transcendence, a different Eliot line is apt: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

   I didn’t know Eliot plagiarized The Gita. The book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I hope to read this book.

3. I am (not) a Failure: Lessons Learned From Six (and a half) Failed Startup Attempts. I am a sucker for these stories, having a failed startup in my recent past. The conclusion conveniently helps me feel good about the failure.

4. Agency:

5. How to prepare for an AI future: Coincidentally, I ran into a number of pieces on this topic last week. The first one from Tyler Cowen and the second from Nate Silver. Both have the same advice in the first place: use LLMs more than you do and for more things than you do.

6. Using AI to build a nuclear fusor: Combining the wisdom of the previous two links.

7. Using AI to improve learning: I would love to see how the tutor was created. Perhaps I, too, need to take the advice from links 4 & 5 and do this project myself.

1. Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive? by Brian Potter via MR: A great piece objectively exploring a question getting a lot of coverage after the recent LA fires. There’s so much I love about this link. Original, deep analysis of an important question debunking the popular narrative (climate change, see next two links). Also, a great blog on Construction Physics? With 51K subscribers! Isn’t internet the best?

2. Gell-Mann Amnesia: First described by Michael Crichton and apparently nothing to do with Gell-Mann. He just gave it an important sounding name to have it taken seriously.

   Gell -Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

   In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

   I should make a spaced repetition card for this.

3. Bjorn Lomborg: A good follow if you want to see less depressing news about climate change, for instance that polar bear population has been increasing since the 1960s or that the Great Barrier Reef is doing just fine. Do note that his work is also subject to Gell-Mann Amnesia.

4. Only reason I am posting this is because I am right now in the land of the great UFO scare of 2025, New Jersey. Trump appointed CIA Director? On Fox News? Former Texas Congressman? There should be an emoji for that. Here’s a palate cleanser (via Alex Tabarrok at MR).

5. Jokic. Watch till the end for the reaction.

6. Is it better to bribe Trump by purchasing his memecoin or his stock? Not financial advice.

No AI in the links at least, although I cannot confirm or deny if an AI was involved in the selection of these links.

Programming note: Since I am traveling for the next few weeks, some of those letters may only contain the links section.

1. This feels accurate. 😅. He says AGI but looking at the next link I wonder if this is true for plain old AI.

2. Two weeks ago, it was Will Smith eating pizza. Now its this. Click the link to see the video. WhatsApp University is about to go nuts.

3. She Is in Love With ChatGPT (NSFW. NYT Paywall.) And you thought K-Dramas were stealing your spouse.

4. The Serendipity Machine or how to use Twitter better. A few years ago I implemented a simple algorithm on my twitter feed:

   a. Block everyone who talks about politics and

   b. Block everyone who is is dissing / attacking anyone / anything.

   In less than a month my feed stopped being the anxiety inducing, doomscrolling nightmare that it was and transformed into the best source of learning & inspiration on internet. This piece takes you to the next level.

   Committing to writing this newsletter has also been great. Now instead of mindlessly flicking my finger and consuming, I have a purpose every time I open Twitter. Its almost energising to engage actively with each tweet, thoughtfully considering whether its fit to be served to my exceptionally smart and good-looking audience.

5. E(X)>0: An Open Letter to Elon:

   “Your top engineers and programmers are only able to work 80-hour weeks because they can hire nannies and maids, ride in Ubers, and order food delivery. High-skill productivity depends on an abundance of complementary low-skill productivity.”

   As a repeat immigrant, I have many thoughts on this debate going on in US right now. There’s a lot that is wrong with a policy of focusing exclusively on so called Skill or Merit based immigration. This piece from Bryan Caplan makes some good points.

6. The War for India: I am enjoying this talk by Prof. Sarah Paine of the Naval War College. She talks about the history of international conflict and politics in South Asia and the role to US & Russia. I did not know that India supported China’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. 🤯 😱

7. Better ways to wear a Polo: Always a pleasure to see a master in action.

“…networking conferences where there’s plated cantaloupe.” chef’s kiss.

Here’s another one from Derek:

8. Fix Your Glutes. (NYT Paywall) Strongly endorse. Really helps when trying to hold a fart but many other benefits too.

   My frail-as-porcelain glutes — the cluster of tissue from hip to thigh tasked with keeping the body upright and on occasion propelling it forward — were causing a domino chain of damage, and had most likely been doing so for some time. To compensate for the glutes’ infirmity, my ankles, knees, hips and even my shoulders and arms had to thrash madly, taking on vast and uneven amounts of pressure, often far more than they were structurally fit to bear

   and

   Only after I started remedying my “gluteal amnesia” (real medical term) did it become clear how little I knew about basic affairs like walking, standing and sitting (or living, for that matter). Within a week of the mandated twisting and shimmying and clam-shelling, my spine was noticeably straighter, smoother. Four weeks later and I could finally walk without pain again. It took three months more to fully rebalance my loopy musculature and break into a manageable jog — but when I did, I noticed a wondrous new power to each step and spring. My reawakened haunch muscles were doing their job.

   For the last two months, I have been doing a core workout formulated personally for me by (who else?) ChatGPT, with a special focus on glutes and I can feel the difference, not just in my ability, but my willingness to do things. Core strength is underrated and it isn’t just about the abs. You can have a six-pack and a weak core. I happen to have one of those.

That’s it for this week. It seems like my writing and links are all AI all the time but that isn’t the intention. However it is a space where a lot of fun stuff is happening right now and so that’s the path of least resistant.

I will be on the road for the next few weeks so programming may be light. Hopefully the website will be ready soon.

1. Reflections - Sam Altman:

   We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

   We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

   This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company.

   Emphasis mine. Those are tall claims. More from Zvi here.

2. How to grow a $3tn market cap? - John Gruber. When You Search for ‘Google’ on Bing, Bing Attempts to Trick You Into Thinking the Results Page Is Google. Don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

3. Having spent more time on LinkedIn last year than anyone should ever have to, I fully endorse this advice. via Shaan Puri.

3. It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman - WSJ (Paywall). One can never get enough of ASML:

   Brienna Hall has the most valuable role that you’ll never see at the most vital company that you’ve never heard of.

   Until she began working at ASML last year, she didn’t know the first thing about the company. She also didn’t know what she would be doing as a customer-support engineer—a “fancy mechanic,” as she calls herself.

   It’s the machine that produces the most advanced microchips on the planet. It was built with scientific technologies that sound more like science fiction—breakthroughs so improbable that they were once dismissed as impossible. And it has transformed wafers of silicon into the engines of modern life.

   Even today, there are only a few hundred of these EUV machines in existence—and they are ludicrously expensive. The one that Hall maintains cost $170 million, while the latest models sell for roughly $370 million.

   But maybe the most remarkable thing about these invaluable machines is that they’re all made by the same company: ASML.

   ASML is the glue holding the chip business together. That’s because this one Dutch company is responsible for all of the EUV lithography systems that help make the chips in so many of your devices. Like your phone. And your computer. And your tablet. And your TV. Maybe even your car, too.

   These machines have become indispensable. And they depend on the invisible work of Brienna Hall.

   Truly a case of following the previous tweet’s advice. Brienna Hall still has a LinkedIn profile, but I give it another 18 months at most.

4. Meta announcements. If you’ve been hiding under a rock and missed this on the airwaves. Not much to add but Zuck knows how to nail a pivot.

1. How to be More Agentic by Cate Hall - Staying with the new year resolution theme… as the twitter meme goes, you can just do things.

2. Life Without Stars: Stanets and Ploons by Julian Gough - Could most life in the Universe exist without stars, in the deep oceans on icy moons of large planets?

3. How to do the jhanas by Nadia Asparouhova

4. Will Smith eating spaghetti - the pace of progress in AI is mind boggling.

5. How Dwarkesh Patel uses AI a podcast by Dan Shipper - Also subscribe to Dwarkesh’s podcast if you don’t already.

6. A Tutorial on Teaching Data Analytics with Generative AI by Robert L. Bray

The last two are a great if you are thinking about how to incorporate Generative AI in your work or life.

A hack I learned recently is anytime I have a question I am too embarrassed / worried / lazy to ask the right person or even google for, I just ask Claude or ChatGPT. Here are some examples of questions that would have gone unanswered but for the chatbots.

A piece I was reading mentioned that Starlink’s low earth orbit satellites have a useful life of 5 years. I wondered what happens to them afterwards. Sure I could have googled that1 and probably found the answer somewhere in the top 3 links2. But having the bot answer your exact question has a lot less friction than doing that and I find I am asking a lot more of these questions.

I recently started reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, apparently a modern classic. After the first 10 pages I was really struggling to understand what was going on and ordinarily I would have just dropped the book.

Instead, I asked Claude “I am reading the book Cloud Atlas. I am struggling to understand the theme through the first few pages.” I got this response: “The book is structured in a unique way, with six nested stories that span different time periods and genres. Each story is interrupted halfway through, only to be concluded in reverse order in the second half of the book.”

No risk of spoilers and I suddenly felt more comfortable navigating the book.

Claude has already changed my mind on multiple questions and I am sure will keep doing so. I hereby declare 2025 the year of asking more questions.

Did you know that (in iOS at least) this button allows you to dictate text? I used to think it was to send a voice message (don’t do that) but no, this types it out and does a pretty good job of it too. This deserves to be used a lot more.