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Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/16/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

New NIH research center on vaccine harms takes shape
The Cost of Cutting American Science: How Federal Cuts Diminish Public Health Capacity
Diabetes association turmoil roils journal as group tries to thwart boycott
As diseases loom, CDC’s response to measles deaths stirs fears about agency’s reliability
Nationwide safety program associated with 65% reduction in hospital-onset MRSA bloodstream infections
Bezisterim may help with some Long COVID symptoms, drug’s developer reports in early trial results
Why are Americans so tired? CDC report highlights who’s feeling it most. Fatigue is one of the most common concerns reported in primary care visits, yet not much attention is given to how often adults in the U.S. are coping with it.

Other:

The Cult of Trump Is Waning
‘Burnham will be the last PM of the UK’: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’s leaders sign independence pact. SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin leaders sign pact to pressure Downing Street into holding independence referendums
Could rogue agent swarms take over the entire internet in the next six months? What does and doesn’t make sense about Dario Amodei’s latest extravagant claim
He Marched With Nazis in Charlottesville. Now He’s Expected to Join the Florida Legislature.
Ectopic pregnancy deaths have nearly doubled. It’s worse in states with abortion bans.
The politics and possibilities of ‘AI could kill us all’. AI will not exterminate the human race. But what big tech really *is* doing is bad enough, and the notion may help fuel the movement against it.
Divorce becomes next battleground as states debate family values
The Quick Case Against Using AI. If AI companies say their products will kill us, we shouldn’t give them money—even if we don’t believe them.
OpenAI Says It’s Not Responsible for the Leading the Future Super PAC. But Only Its Employees Seem to Believe That.
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Used Small Cages as ‘Calming Areas,’ Report Says. The Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog provided new details about conditions at the now-shuttered Florida detention center.
Waymo Sponsors Neighborhood Events Around D.C. As It Fights For Council Approval. The robotaxi rideshare company says it has spent “tens of thousands of dollars” to partner with local nonprofits amid its local lobbying push.
Professional soccer player describes weeks in ICE custody after arrest
Stripsearch Sammy
The Connecticut Avenue deckover should tell Dupont’s artistic story
The Supreme Cult
U.S. Health Officials Move Quickly to Deploy Medical A.I. Despite Concerns
DC asks for public’s help in getting rid of rats
Trump prepares to cash out his crypto grift
NPS to remove Dupont’s Stumpy after storm cracked tree
The Final Battle for America’s Democracy. Forget November 3. It’s January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here’s how.
Is the Trump Family Preparing to Cash Out on Its Own Crypto?
Trump finds new DC landmark to trash
Dario Amodei’s Essay Was Gutsy. It Didn’t Go Far Enough.
San Francisco’s AI-run store is losing money fast. After a visit, I’m not surprised.
A New Book Seeks to Shame the Elites Who Caved to Trump
The New Majority Makers: A group of unapologetic economic populists are defying the conventional wisdom that only moderates can succeed in swing seats.
Texas Republican Candidate Does A Racism So Bad It Turns Karl Rove Into A Democrat
‘Musk’ film is almost four hours long, engrossing and terrifying. What to know. The documentary paints the tech titan as a power-hungry megalomaniacal con man with a god complex. Musk accuses the filmmaker of compiling a “hit list” against him.
ISIS supporter in Pennsylvania sought to poison synagogue food — FBI
Baal out: Top diplomat’s worry about pagan god elicits eye rolls

Mike the Mad Biologist

The Singularity, Such As It Is, Will Be Boring and Mundane

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

While the ketamine-addled wunderkind of the tech world are panicking about AI achieving consciousness, the actual harms it is causing, such as denying patients needed pain medication, are very real, if not sexy (boldface mine):

The rollout of a Medicare program that uses artificial intelligence to approve or deny care was hasty and error-ridden, according to more than a thousand pages of recently released documents and data.

The pilot program, called the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model, or WISeR, launched in January and requires health care providers to seek approvals before they can provide certain procedures and products, like skin substitutes and epidural injections for pain management. The experiment operates in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington and will run until 2031…

During the early months of the rollout, both the company, called Innovaccer, and its Medicare contracting partner reported issues that matched complaints coming from providers. The poorly implemented technology resulted in canceled and postponed surgeries and “patients calling our offices crying in pain because their procedures are being delayed while awaiting approvals or guidance,” providers said.

“I have had to watch 3 patients cry at bedside for not hearing back on their prior auth for kyphoplasty/vertabral augmentiation [sic] procedure,” wrote one Ohio-based provider in a feedback survey. “These patients are in deep pain. So many offices of my physicians are not hearing back from Innovaccer and […] there is no way to get a hold of a human to talk to on Innovacer [sic]. What a disgrace to the human race in America. This is Third World.”

And the Trump administration’s belief in AI über alles is contributing to this problem:

Earlier this summer, the Senate unsuccessfully attempted to end WISeR after the Government Accountability Office found that CMS did not follow proper procedure in setting up the Medicare experiment. The federal watchdog’s finding came amid complaints that the pilot was harming people in Washington state.

Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who led a House effort to stop WISeR, told STAT in a statement that “the more that American seniors learn about WISeR, the more they are outraged that the Trump administration is allowing tech companies to profit by delaying and denying necessary care.” While the new information answers many questions, she said, it also begs new ones, and she pledged to hold the administration accountable. “It’s incredibly frustrating how reticent HHS has been in sharing information about this hastily put together AI experiment,” she said.

And the people building this system had no idea what they were doing:

More than two months after WISeR’s launch, a Medicare administration contractor, Noridian, realized that one of the vendors did not know the difference between Medicare Part A and Part B. It traced back ongoing provider complaints about claims being incorrectly categorized to Zyter, the company administering WISeR for Arizona. “Zyter acknowledged that access to its portal was limited to ‘outpatient’ requests due to a misunderstanding that outpatient hospital services equate exclusively to Part B,” Noridian wrote, adding that it provided Zyter guidance as to the distinction between the two.

In the same March report, Noridian reported that Zyter’s portal was not configured to handle requests from ambulatory surgical centers, and that it had warned Zyter that simply dismissing requests coded for ASCs “could result in provider abrasion and potential compliance concerns.”…

Despite ambitions of using AI to make the review process quick and easy, providers complained about how non-functional vendors’ portals were and ended up reverting to paper.

“It appears that all documentation has to be faxed, the portal cannot be used to submit the documentation. I have been told that there is a way to submit via the portal, but the customer service representatives have not been able to provide instructions on how to proceed,” wrote a provider from Kettering Health Network in Ohio…

All of the technical hiccups have created greater costs for the Medicare program. According to an email between Medicare staffers, the Medicare contractor for Texas, New Jersey, and Oklahoma alerted CMS that it was going to need more funding than originally planned.

This is going to be a far more common problem with ‘AI’: the people building, testing, and managing the system build bad systems, but, because various leaders are committed to AI, those bad systems will be forced on people and do great harm. In other words, it will just amplify the same old problems, but an ideological commitment–and likely a financial one too–to ‘AI is the future’ will hurt people.

And before anyone excuses this, the story also notes that it is incredibly difficult to get details from CMS about what went wrong. The ideology that we must use AI, consequences be damned, combined with the time-honored need to cover one’s ass will be the far more likely and ugly outcome of rapid AI, not some Lovecraftian godhead. AI won’t be used in some ethereal plane without real-world complications, but within a political and economic context. And when combined with a belief that AI must be adopted at speed–move fast and break patients–the consequences will be bad.

Schneier on Security

Fake CAPTCHA Scams

Bruce Schneier
Updated

New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.

Patt Morrison

News helicopters are very L.A. It's a dangerous job

Los Angeles and airborne reporting were always a match made, if not in heaven, then a quarter-mile or so closer to it than the rest of us earthbound beings.
Noahpinion

The anti-American Right

Noah Smith
Updated
Hook ‘em, Horns.

After days of thinking about the possibility that AI might kill all of humanity, it’s almost a relief to be able to write about a lighter topic — like how the xenophobic Right is threatening to tear my country apart.

Who is Bo French? No one of much consequence. He’s a mostly failed Texan politician — the heir to an oil company, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who alienated his business partners, who lost two Republican primaries for the Texas House of Representatives before finally becoming the chair of a county-level party chapter. He finally got his first political success this year, when he won a narrow primary victory and became the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner. He currently trails his Democratic opponent in the polls.

Bo French isn’t that important, but this week he set off a national firestorm when he tweeted the above photo of a bunch of Indian kids celebrating University of Texas football at a Longhorns game, along with some alarmist anti-Indian rhetoric:

It was hardly a surprise that French tweeted something like this. He’s tweeted plenty of stuff along the same lines in the past. Here are two famous examples:

He’s also repeatedly called for the deportation of 100 million people; since there are only 50 million foreign-born people living in the United States, this means French was either getting his numbers wrong, or (more likely) calling for deporting tens of millions of American citizens. Reading his tweets, it’s not hard to imagine which citizens he’d choose for deportation.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that French’s race-war ideology has taken over the GOP. Plenty of Texas Republicans, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Jared Patterson, Representative Lacey Hull, and others publicly denounced his tweet. Karl Rove declared that he’d vote for the Democrat over French. Governor Greg Abbott, who has endorsed French despite his history of similar tweets, was milder in his criticism, but still affirmed the fundamental Texan-ness of the football fans in the picture:

“That is not my message,” Abbott said. “A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams.”

“The way we win the state is the same way we win football games,” Abbott added. “We unite under the brand of Texas.”

But despite these official condemnations, it’s easy to tell which way the wind is blowing among the GOP base. All of the Republican tweets denouncing French were heavily attacked on X. Rightist journalists, activists, and even a few GOP politicians poured out of the woodwork to support French and affirm his message. Here are a few examples:

French himself, who had been pressured to delete his poll about Jews and Muslims last year, now felt encouraged enough to double down on his anti-Indian tweet.

I can’t tell you whether the New Right — represented by French and his supporters in the right-wing media — will prevail over the Republican establishment. But watching the movement go after a bunch of Texas college football fans tells us something important about the New Right as a movement.

What it tells us is that if you’re a nonwhite immigrant, or the child of nonwhite immigrants, it doesn’t matter what you do — the New Right will still view you as an enemy and as an invader.

It doesn’t matter whether you or your parents came to this country legally. How many times have we heard rightists shout “Illegal vs. legal!!” in response to anyone who defends immigration? Many regular Americans care about “illegal vs. legal”, but the New Right does not. Everyone in that UT photo either came to America legally, or was born to parents who came here legally. It didn’t matter to Bo French, or the people who defended him.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re high-skilled or low-skilled. How many times have we heard rightists complain that immigrants come to America because they want welfare benefits? And yet everyone in the UT photo is going to spend their lifetime paying taxes to support native-born Americans on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security Disability. Indian Americans in general are the highest-earning group in the country, and those who go to a good college like the University of Texas are going to beat that average.

That matters to many regular voters, but it doesn’t matter at all to the New Right. Yes, they’ll shout about poor (nonwhite) immigrants on welfare. But when they encounter nonwhite immigrant groups who make lots of money, they suddenly pivot to accusing those groups of stealing their jobs and their spots in colleges. There’s just no way to win.

It also doesn’t matter whether you assimilate or not. Yes, if you speak a foreign language or build a Hindu temple or wear traditional Indian clothing, the New Right will scream their heads off about it. “Alien invaders!!”, they’ll cry. But if you put on a University of Texas sweater and go to football games, they’ll still scream “Alien invaders!!” when they see you in a photo. It’s who you are that bothers them, not what you do.

Nor does it matter whether your entire ethnic group is well-behaved. Indian Americans are incarcerated at only 25% of the rate of non-Hispanic White Americans. And basically none of the people in the photo that frightened Bo French will ever go to jail. That probably matters to some voters, but not to the New Right.

In fact, it doesn’t even matter if you vote Republican. As a matter of fact, Donald Trump won a pretty solid victory among Asian people in Texas (which includes Indians):

Source: CNN via Wikipedia

It’s not clear whether Bo French and his fellow New Rightists are even aware of this fact, but what is clear is that it didn’t matter to them at all.1

This is why there is no pro-immigration argument that will ever sway members of the New Right. You can give them research showing that high-skilled immigrants raise employment and wages for native-born Americans, and they’ll either disbelieve it or (usually) ignore it. You can talk about Nobel-winning scientists and Operation Paperclip all you want, and it won’t make a dent. You can cite statistics about immigrant entrepreneurship and job creation, you can talk about how Satya Nadella saved Microsoft and Sanjay Mehrotra is the reason why America still has a presence in the memory industry. They will counter with some fabricated anecdote about how their friend got fired from their company because Indians came in and only hired other Indians.2

So why am I even talking about this? If the New Right can never be persuaded to stop thinking of brown faces as invaders, then why discuss this topic at all?

Well, two reasons, actually. First, it helps us more clearly understand the New Right as a movement — how they think and what they want. Most importantly, they see the world in terms of collective zero-sum competition between groups.

To the New Right, if Indians get into the University of Texas, it means that White people must have been “replaced” at that university — or at American universities in general. Bo French himself tweeted that the presence of Indian students at American universities is evidence that “they hate white Americans and prioritize everyone else”. They do not even consider the possibility that the Indian kids got in because of individual merit. If an Indian American succeeds, that represents not the success of that singular individual, but a win for Team Indian in general.

And the New Right worldview sees any win for Team Indian — or Team Asian, or Team Hispanic, etc. — as a loss for Team White. Nowhere do they consider the possibility that the system might not be zero-sum. The fact that the number of freshmen admitted to UT grew from 15,000 in 2011 to 19,000 in 2021 means nothing to them. The historical fact that Italian and Jewish and Polish and Japanese Americans attained economic success sixty years ago without consigning WASP Americans to poverty is lost on them — as is every other example in which immigrant groups and existing groups succeeded in America side by side.

Crucially, this zero-sum assumption is why the New Right constantly shrinks their tent instead of expanding it. In principle, even if you see the world as a collective interaction between groups rather than individuals, that interaction doesn’t have to be zero-sum — you can have alliances between groups, for mutual benefit. The Christian conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s accepted Catholics, “white ethnics”, and some Jews into their coalition as “co-belligerents”, and won many battles as a result.

The New Right had a golden opportunity to do something similar after Trump’s victory in 2024. Hispanic and Asian voters (and even some Black voters) shifted strongly toward the Republicans, and toward Trump specifically. But instead of embracing that influx of new voters and building a big conservative tent to defeat wokeness and progressivism and the Democrats, they went all-in on race war.

Stephen Miller relied so heavily on racial profiling for his mass deportation efforts that many Hispanics felt that Trump had betrayed them. Muslim voters might have gone back to the GOP, but rightists made resistance to Muslim immigration a “civilizational” crusade. Jewish voters turned off by the antisemitism of the Left might have switched their allegiance to the GOP, but the New Right allowed Nazi apologetics to fester within their ranks.

Now it’s Indians’ turn to feel the sting of unprovoked rightist attacks. All those kids in Texas wanted to do was to cheer for their football team; instead, a political movement is calling for their ethnic cleansing simply because they showed up at the stadium. As a result, despite the best efforts of Republicans like Cornyn, the GOP is poised to mobilize and piss off a group of Americans who are just about as numerous as Jews — and who earn even more money.

It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity. If they ever managed to see off the Hispanics and the Asians, the rightists would start in on the Greeks and the Italians, and so on. There’s no victory in sight — only eternal conflict. These are not nation-builders; they are nation-dismantlers.

Coming to grips with the extremism and intransigence of the New Right also helps us understand what an unpopular fringe they really are. The New Right screams and shouts and acts very aggressive on X, but this aggression is just a way of concealing their numerical weakness. Most voters are not part of the New Right, and they don’t think that immigrants are invaders or that immigration is “replacement”. Most Americans say that immigration is a good thing as of today:

Source: Gallup

Essentially none of that 73% majority is going to be part of the New Right, and some portion of the 21% minority probably isn’t either. That means the New Right is a fringe movement — a very loud, very aggressive group of people who are adept at bullying regular Americans on certain social media platforms, but who ultimately lack the numbers to overcome the mainstream in a direct contest.

Just watch some of the reactions of the UT students who were targeted by Bo French and his racist social media hordes:

Consider how regular and non-alien those young people seem, compared to the screeching bigots attacking them on X for going to a football game. I guarantee you that the majority of regular, normal, non-internet-poisoned Americans will watch those videos and just want to say “Hook ‘em Horns”.3

That means that the immigration argument is winnable. A reasonable liberal position on immigration — one that respects the law, honors the democratic will of the people, and treats immigration as a privilege rather than a human right — has a good chance of winning over the majority of the country. The New Right can only succeed if they manage to divide and conquer the pro-immigration majority, as they did in 2024; immigration supporters should focus on making common cause with the persuadable center, in order to make sure 2024 isn’t repeated.

That means not treating all immigration skeptics the same. Republicans like John Cornyn, who like to see Indian American kids cheering for Texas football but who hate to see asylum seekers rewarded for illegally crossing the border, should not be lumped in with those who simply see any brown face and think “invader”. Xenophobes exist, and they are growing more powerful within the GOP, but not every Republican voter is a xenophobe, and not every restriction on immigration is xenophobic.

If Democrats understand and accept that fact, I think they will be able to turn the tide.4 Throughout America’s history, pro-immigration forces have won a lot more battles than they’ve lost, but it was never easy. It always required compromise, reassurance, moderation, and coalition-building. This is not the time for Democrats to respond to the maximalism of xenophobes like Bo French with maximalism of their own.

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1

This also applies to the small and rather pitiful number of immigrants who go online and shout that immigration is “replacement” and “invasion”. It will not save them.

2

Not that anyone in the New Right actually cares about the research on this topic, but…It’s actually true that Indians, like basically every group in existence, do have some tendency to hire their co-ethnics, though whether this represents a bias is harder to say. What we do know is that Indians do it much less Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, South Korean, Filipino, Polish, or Russian people, but much more than Dominicans, Guatemalans, or Jamaicans.

3

And I say that as someone who grew up in College Station, Texas…

4

Indeed, the tide may already be turning; Trump is now underwater on the immigration issue:

Source: NYT via Sahil Kapur

But 52% to 47% is still a fairly slim margin; Dems can do better than this.

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Mustafa Suleyman

We should not treat models as though they have feelings, preferences, rights, or any entitlement to our welfare. Consciousness is the foundation of our ethical, legal, and political systems. To invite another entity to share any flavor of these rights isn’t justified by the evidence and will make the AI containment and alignment challenge even harder.

— Mustafa Suleyman, A warning about ‘model welfare’

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, ai, microsoft, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Gemini Live audio

Tool: Gemini Live audio

Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking today - two new speech-to-speech models that are a similar shape to OpenAI's GPT-Live family.

I pointed GPT-6 Astra Extra High at the documentation and had it build me this web UI for trying out the new models. You can select a model and voice preset, enter an optional system prompt and then start a voice conversation through your browser, including the ability to interrupt the model while it is talking.

Screenshot of a voice chat web interface with a transcript. Top buttons: Start session, End session, Mute mic, plus a Mic level meter and a timer showing 0:33. Status: Listening. Use headphones to reduce echo. Starting a session asks for microphone access. Transcript (with Download transcript and Clear buttons). Gemini: Yes, it's working perfectly. I can hear you clearly. How can I help you today? You: Okay, this is pretty good. Tell me some interesting facts about the California brown pelican. Gemini: They're famous for their spectacular plunge-dives to catch fish and have huge throat pouches that can hold up to three gallons of water and fish. They also made a great recovery after being endangered — marked as Interrupted. You: No, tell me different facts actually. Gemini: They nest in colonies on offshore islands and can hold up to three gallons of water in their throat pouches. At the bottom is a text input reading Or type a message… with a Send button, and the note: Sending a message interrupts the current response. Transcripts may include speech interrupted before playback.

The implementation uses no libraries. It connects to the wss://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/ws/google.ai.generativelanguage.v1alpha.GenerativeService.BidiGenerateContent?key=... WebSocket endpoint and uses a Web Audio API AudioContext for both capture and playback.

Here's the Gemini Live tutorial for getting started with that WebSockets API.

Tags: google, tools, websockets, generative-ai, llms, gemini, llm-release, speech-to-text

Paul Krugman

Conferencing, Day 1

Paul Krugman
Updated

So I’m at the European Central Bank, listening to papers about geoeconomics. Above is a screenshot from the livestream, available here (I think).

Much of the research being presented is very technical — I expect eventually to be able to do some translations relevant to current events, but not yet. One remark that did catch my attention, however, was Steve Redding noting one implication of his model with Liu, Yang, and Smith-Worthington (not in the conference draft, but coming): US power — measured “by asking how changes in each country’s domestic interests affect its own actions and those of others” — has depended to an important degree on the strength of its alliances.

Phillips O’Brien, take note.

It’s a bit of a luxury to listen to paper about eigenvectors and trading equilibria with the world on fire, but hey, it’s kind of a break.

Centauri Dreams

Disrupted Systems: Implications for Life

Paul Gilster
Updated

Anthropocentric thinking is a persistent problem when we’re talking about extraterrestrial civilizations. Some of our most cherished notions can be invoked so effortlessly as to defy the imagination. The Copernican idea that life must exist elsewhere because elsewhere is bound to be more or less like here has had a long lifetime in SETI studies. It seems like the most basic common sense. And yet, as we’ll see once again today, scientific results continue to make it apparent that the fact that we are here does not mean that they are there.

Finding stellar systems more or less like our own continues to be difficult. I’m not going full ‘rare Earth’ here but acknowledging that our circumstances may be unusual enough to tamp down estimates of the number of life-supporting planets. For that matter, our lack of knowledge about abiogenesis itself makes the case that we cannot necessarily expect it around other suns. On this matter, at least, we should be able to gather data soon, perhaps with a Mars lander.

Which gets me to today’s interesting take on binary stars. The binaries – HD 129171 and HD 129209 – are G-class, both having formed from the same molecular cloud. This is a common enough scenario, because binary systems are extremely common. In fact, about half of the stars in the Milky Way have a companion star, and thus are likely to share a common chemistry.

About 180 light years from the Sun (based on Gaia data) in Boötes, the system is proving unusually helpful. Using the UVES spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, an international effort led by Anne Rathsam at the University of São Paulo in Brazil is using this binary as a laboratory to study chemical differences between the stars that may be telling us something about planet formation and orbital evolution. What is driving the differences?

All this has a bearing on life, because for life to occur, conditions must exist for long enough to let the necessary processes go to work. And that may be a problem. HD 129171 turns out to be enriched in refractory elements, while its companion HD 129209 is not. Refractory elements condense at high temperatures, as opposed to volatiles, and the proportion of one to the other can be an interesting diagnostic tool, telling us something about the system’s history. A star depleted in refractories is likely one that has spawned planets, while one heavy in these elements has likely swallowed planets whole.

Rathsam’s work, available in a paper just published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, focuses on beryllium, whose abundance here is interesting because it is not produced in stellar interiors. Measured properly, its presence points to a star that consumed planetary material long after formation. Lithium, beryllium, and boron, in fact, share characteristics that make them exceptional in terms of chemical emergence in the galaxy. Jorge Luis Melendez Moreno (USP), who served as study advisor to Rathsam on this paper, explains:

“All other chemical elements originate from primordial nucleosynthesis [the formation of the first atomic nuclei in the minutes following the Big Bang] or stellar nucleosynthesis [the nuclear fusion process that occurs inside stars throughout their lifetimes]. But not beryllium and boron. They primarily arise through a process called ‘cosmic spallation,’ in which high-energy particles fragment heavier nuclei, such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, producing lighter elements.”

Image: The binary system of HD 129171 and HD 129209. Credit: Digital Sky Survey/Aladin/Anne Rathsam.

Lithium has its own uses as a marker, but the USP researchers found that beryllium is the more reliable tool, with a longer lasting chemical signature. HD 129171’s surplus of refractory elements (including magnesium, silicon, calcium and titanium) compared to its companion HD 129209 is accompanied by lithium and beryllium excess as well. The authors see evidence for rocky material equivalent to more than eleven times the mass of the Earth. This would have been ingested in the star, raising interesting questions about planet dynamics.

The infall of entire planets into a host star can be explained in various ways, from gravitational perturbations from other planets on eccentric orbits or skewed inclinations, to interactions within the early circumstellar disk driving young planets onto migratory trajectories. Although I hadn’t seen this paper before, the authors cite a 2025 study by Soares and team (citation below) that draws on simulations to show that about half of the stars simulated should ingest planets, leaving a chemical signature in perhaps 20 percent of them.

Evidently we can imagine system disruptions as a common occurrence in the Milky Way. We might add to this the fact that planet configurations with giant planets in circular outer orbits and rocky planets on inner ones are not common. Our observational data so far tends to confirm this, although tracking outer Jupiter-class planets with our current detection methods is always problematic given their sparse transit signatures. Overall, though, the picture that is emerging is that systems similar to the Solar System seem rare. If many systems are going through upheavals through planet migration and ingestion into the host, stable orbits may be trickier than we’ve thought. Rathsam comments:

“In our planetary system, the planets have relatively stable, low-eccentricity orbits. However, if planetary engulfment is common, it suggests that many systems undergo violent dynamic phases.”

Implications?

“Life wouldn’t just need billions of years to emerge and evolve. The planet would also have to remain in a sufficiently stable orbit to survive significant gravitational perturbations.”

If you’re wondering about our own star, it’s light in refractory materials relative to volatiles, which at least one recent study sees as a sign of planet formation at an early era. What became rocky planets and planetesimals, in other words, was never accreted into our star. I give that citation below. This and subsequent work seems to peg the Sun as the center of a dynamically quiet system compared to many, but be aware that the debate on this matter continues.

How useful is beryllium as a marker in such an analysis? The authors argue that despite the fact that beryllium is eventually depleted in a stellar interior, it persists long enough to provide reliable information. From the paper (my italics):

Refractory elements offer an excellent way to distinguish between the planet engulfment or the proto-cloud inhomogeneity scenarios. Since they have high condensation temperatures (≳1000 K), they are the primary constituents of the rocky material in planetary systems – terrestrial planets and cores of gaseous planets. In case of engulfment by a Sun-like star, this material is accreted by the star and then dissolved and mixed in the convective envelope, increasing the stellar surface abundances after the event (Sandquist et al. 2002). This process, however, produces a metal-rich outer layer with an unstable mean molecular weight gradient, which triggers thermohaline mixing (Théado & Vauclair 2012; Sevilla et al. 2022). For fragile elements such as Li and Be, this thermohaline mixing induces depletion, as it can carry these elements below the convective zone, into their burning regions. Thus, the chemical enrichment caused by the engulfment disappears over time. Nevertheless, Sevilla et al. (2022) demonstrated through simulations that the Li engulfment signature in stars with masses close to solar can be detected for ≥1 Gyr.

As far as I can tell, it’s the treatment of beryllium as a marker of engulfment that gives this paper its significance, as heretofore it has been used primarily as a diagnostic for the mixing of elements in stellar interiors. More broadly speaking, though, any reminders of the factors that make our Solar System adaptable for life should help us in identifying systems where life is less likely. That’s worth keeping in mind as we move beyond easy assumptions about life’s ubiquity and dig into realities that may make it more unusual than we thought.

The paper is Rathsam et al. (2026). Planet engulfment in the chemically anomalous HD 129171/HD 129209 pair. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 710, A236 (full text). The interesting paper on beryllium’s persistence is Soares et al. (2025). Assessing the processes behind planet engulfment and its imprints. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 693, A47 (preprint). The paper on the composition of our Sun is Meléndez et al. (2009). The peculiar solar composition and its possible relation to planet formation. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 704(1), L66–L70. Abstract.

Marginal Revolution

Wednesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Competitive market behavior with LLMs?

2. Prophets of the Marginal Revolution.

3. The university after AI.

4. Which African nations are spending on education?

5. @mattyglesias: “In an all-or-nothing scenario, bond interest rates would go to the moon. Why lend money at 5% (or whatever) if the two options are not being repaid and stocks going through the roof?”

6. David Schleicher on how property taxes are evolving, underrated yet important ideas.  Good sequence.

7. I just bought the new China Mieville book.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Daring Fireball

FT: ‘Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders Unite in AI Safety Call’

John Gruber
Updated

Joe Miller, reporting for the Financial Times (via Political Wire):

Veteran socialist Bernie Sanders and rightwing activist Steve Bannon are joining forces to call for greater guardrails on AI, even as Donald Trump insists concerns about the technology are a hoax that will help China overtake the US.

In a sign of how the outcry over AI safety is reshaping the US political landscape, speakers from the far right and left of the political spectrum will join an event billed as the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington on Tuesday to urge lawmakers to do more to tackle the effects of AI.

One take would be that Sanders is a voice of sound reason and compassion, and Bannon is aligned with him on this issue in the way that a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day. Another take is the horseshoe theory, which holds that leftwing and rightwing zealots are more alike than different, because they’re all crackpot ideologues.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

★ Thoughts and Observations on Apple’s ‘Surprise and Shine’ Event; the Announcements of the iPhones 18 Pro, AirPods 5, Apple Watches Series 12 and Ultra 4, and the iPhone Duo; and the Dawn of the Ternus, John Ternus Era at Apple

John Gruber
Updated

The Keynote

I loved the keynote’s “You want a great opening scene?” opening, which ran through a series of genre-inspired hook-you-from-the-first-shot pretend movie openings. Apple started with a title card that said “The following was shot on iPhone”, but the whole keynote — including the fun fake-movie openings — was shot on iPhone 18 Pros. Apple started shooting its keynote movies using iPhone Pros in October 2023, with the “Scary Fast” Mac event. That first one was shot on the then-just-released iPhone 15 Pro, the first iPhone Pro generation to support the necessary pro video features to enable Apple-level production quality (e.g. ProRes recording and Apple Log encoding).1 For the next few years, Apple shot each of its keynotes using whatever the current iPhone Pro model was. But last year, with the September 2025 “Awe Dropping” event, they shot the keynote using the as-yet-unreleased iPhone 17 Pro itself — a bit of a risk given that it was running mid-summer iOS 26 beta software. They did the same this year, shooting the entire keynote, including the prelude fake movies, using iPhone 18 Pros. But, they couldn’t say that it was the 18 Pro on the title card because the 18 Pro wasn’t announced until later in the keynote.

There was at least one report from an ill-informed know-it-all who claimed, with odd certainty given how often he’s wrong, that Tim Cook would not appear in the keynote. But the last segment of the keynote’s cold opening gave us Cook, Tim Cook, framed in an obvious homage to the opening of 2012’s Skyfall:

Daniel Craig in “Skyfall”.

Tim Cook in a “Skyfall” homage at the beginning of the keynote.

I’ve stolen those comparison frames from this splendid blog post by Vaziri, Todd Vaziri, in which he points out a few other Bond homages in this keynote — including using the new variable aperture on the 18 Pro’s main camera as a reference to the Bond title-sequence gun barrel. Fun stuff all around, and a perfect way to commemorate the Cook-to-Ternus passing of the torch.2 Also, the variety of visual styles in these mini movies really showed off the capabilities of the iPhone 18 Pro as a cinematic camera.

The little Cook / Bond homage that closes the opening segment starts with a voiceover from Cook himself (starting at 2m:07s):

Forget all that. Keep it classic. Open on an aerial shot, high above the California coast. A car drives down the highway. Then it disappears into a tunnel. Cut to an interior. Camera follows a mysterious figure, before revealing our main character...

No no no no no. Not me. That’s your guy. That’s your opener.

It’s a perfect segue, and Cook’s line reading is sublime. Cook’s on-screen persona improved a lot in the 15 years he served as CEO and keynote emcee, but even at his best he always came across as a bit, well, stiff. Voicing this introduction of John Ternus, on the other hand, he sounds cool as hell — relaxed, certain, and comfortable. I think the chairman role suits him better than CEO did. He’s a natural born éminence grise. And if this was Cook’s last appearance in a keynote, he went out on top.

Ternus’s Turn

For those of us invited to Apple Park, Ternus actually took the stage in person at 9:58 am, for a brief in-person greeting and introduction. What I recall isn’t anything he said but how he was greeted, which was with tremendous enthusiasm. The annual iPhone events always have a unique charge to them. WWDC is a far bigger event attendee-count-wise, but the September iPhone event is sharper, higher pressure. The exclusivity heightens the stakes — Apple only invites as many people as fit in Steve Jobs Theater: 1,000. The new era begins energy was palpable, if subtle. In the morning meet-and-greet coffee-and-apple-tarts mingling in and outside the Steve Jobs Theater upstairs atrium, attendees were genuinely unsure what to expect. A few were genuinely wondering if Ternus would bring back live-on-stage keynotes. (The apple tarts were supposedly made using apples grown on campus, and were quite good.)

In person, Ternus wore a dark t-shirt and jacket. In the keynote video, a burgundy shirt that clearly served as a reference to burgundy as the color of the year. (It’s hard to imagine Ternus in a cosmic orange shirt if he’d taken the top job a year prior.)

I think Ternus came across fine as emcee. Not great, but fine. He’s comfortable but I think the role still feels like a new pair of shoes he hasn’t yet broken in. Ternus’s opening line in the video was “Hello, and welcome to Apple Park”. I think that’s what he said on stage too. They’re leaving “Good morning!” as Cook’s signature, as they should.

Before any product announcements, Ternus laid out his theory of an “intelligent personal hub” for the AI era, making the case that if one were to design such a device from the ground up, starting today, you’d wind up with something exactly like an iPhone — with you all the time, with a great display, ubiquitous networking, great cameras and mics, and long battery life. The cynical take would be that this is an “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” guiding doctrine. Apple is not a leading AI model company, and is completely sitting out the capex data center rat race, so of course they’re going to argue that the most popular product they make — the iPhone — is the central device of the AI era. But, well, I think it’s true. You need devices to run AI. I wrote an entire column about this back in May — “AI Is Technology, Not a Product” — responding to Steven Levy’s argument that Ternus “needs to launch a killer AI product”.

Levy, in Wired, wrote:

By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”

I wrote:

Actual products have to be real. Actual experiences have to rely on actual products. How exactly in Levy’s end-of-this-decade scenario will we tell our “always-on AI agent” to get us home? What microphone is listening to the command? What speaker is telling us the request was understood and acted upon? What screen do we look at to see how far away the hailed car is? I’d bet a pretty large sum of money that in 2030, when someone hails a ride-share vehicle to take them home, the most common product they’ll use to do that will be their phone. Whether they’re doing it via a verbal command issued to an “always-on AI agent” or good old tapping and swiping, it’ll be a phone.

Ternus’s “intelligent personal hub” doctrine seems very much in line with my retort to Levy’s not-entirely-thought-through fantasy. It also sounds an awful lot like a modern-day reimagining of a former Apple CEO’s “digital hub” strategy for the Mac. I highly recommend you take 8 minutes of your time, right now, and watch Steve Jobs’s introduction of the digital hub strategy from January 2001’s Macworld Expo. History doesn’t repeat but it does echo, and Ternus’s “intelligent personal hub” sure sounds exactly like Jobs’s “digital hub” echoing a quarter century later. If Ternus’s “intelligent personal hub” strategy works out like Jobs’s “digital hub” one did a quarter century ago, Apple’s going to be alright.

iPhone 18 Pro

Heretofore, to my recollection, the iPhone Pro always came last in the September keynotes (including the years when the higher-tier iPhones didn’t yet have the word “Pro” in their names, like the XS in 2018 and X in 2017). This year the 18 Pro came first. This worked both as the immediate product announcement after Ternus’s expression of Apple’s intelligent personal hub strategy, and to clear the final act of the keynote for the much-anticipated Duo. (It’s somewhat telling that the Air didn’t get that cleanup spot in the announcement batting order a year ago.3)

Thoughts on the colors, based on my hands-on experience:

  • Black: Truly deep black. Reminds me a lot of the flat black iPhone 7 (not to be confused with the jet black iPhone 7 — what a year for black that was).
  • Silver: Looks good. Not sure how it’s different from last year’s silver, because I had no way to compare side-by-side.
  • Glacier: Nice. I think this will be popular. It’s definitely blue, not silver / gray (which you’d hope would be true in general, but especially alongside an explicit silver colorway).
  • Burgundy: Last year the iPhone 17 Pro only came in three colors: silver, deep blue, and cosmic orange. I sort of thought of the strategy as “light”, “dark”, and “special”. But this year there are two specials, glacier and burgundy, but burgundy seems more special. Last year cosmic orange was clearly the color of the year. It was the most-used by far in Apple’s advertising, and I suspect it was the most popular sales-wise. Burgundy is that color this year. I don’t like it nearly as much, and I don’t think it will prove to be as popular or as iconic as cosmic orange. The cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro seems set to go down as one of the most iconic iPhone colors ever made. I don’t think that will be true for the burgundy iPhone 18 Pro.

Pricing:

256 GB 512 GB 1 TB 2 TB
18 Pro $1,200 $1,400 $1,800 $2,400
18 Pro Max $1,300 $1,500 $1,900 $2,500

Compared to the 17 Pro one year ago:4

256 GB 512 GB 1 TB 2 TB
17 Pro $1,100 $1,300 $1,500 —
17 Pro Max $1,200 $1,400 $1,600 $2,000

So:

  • Max remains $100 extra.
  • 2 TB is now available on the regular-size Pro; last year it was exclusive to the Max.
  • 256 and 512 GB storage options are only $100 more expensive this year.
  • 1 TB costs $300 more this year.
  • 2 TB costs $500 more.

256 and 512 GB are by far the most popular sizes (and I think 256 in particular far outsells 512 — the base size truly is large enough for the majority of users), so for most 18 Pro buyers, the RAM/SSD shortage is only resulting in a $100 year-over-year price increase. The higher storage tier prices aren’t too bad, all things considered.

It’s worth pointing out here that coincident with the announcement of the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo on Wednesday, Apple raised the prices of all existing iPhones in its lineup by the same amounts, depending on storage — $100 for models with 128, 256, or 512 GB storage; and $300 for the iPhone Air with 1 TB.

Technically, the iPhone 18 Pro mostly offers three new things compared to the 17 Pro: the A20 Pro SoC (faster cores, two Neural Engines instead of one, and 50% faster memory bandwidth); variable aperture on the 1× main camera, ranging from ƒ1.48 to ƒ4.0; and an all-new thermal management system, including a much larger vapor chamber. The A20 Pro means peak performance is faster; the new thermal system allows it to maintain peak performance longer.

In a curious decision, the regular-sized 18 Pro models ship with Apple’s C2 cellular modem worldwide, but the 18 Pro Max models use a Qualcomm modem in the U.S., and the C2 everywhere else. Apple’s C-series modems are power efficiency marvels, with (in my experience) just as good reception and speed. I’d be just ever so slightly bummed about this if I were a Pro Max fan in the US.

That said, both the 18 Pro and Pro Max models continue to get slightly longer battery life in the US models than worldwide models, because the US models are eSIM-only, but most (all?) models elsewhere still have a physical SIM tray. The US models use the space occupied by the SIM tray in international models to make the batteries physically larger. Going by Apple’s new “typical use” tech spec, the US Pro / Pro Max models are rated for 24 / 30 hours respectively; the international models with a physical SIM tray for 23 / 29. Not a big difference, but not nothing.

In line with my belief that modern iPhones are best thought of as cameras with phones, not phones with cameras, most of the 18 Pro’s year-over-year improvements (and the features that set the Pro models apart from all other iPhones, including the Duo) are related to photography — both still and video:

  • Photographic Styles is now up to version 3, adding new controls for “texture”, film-look, and grain. One stated goal of this is to enable shooting images with a less processed look; on the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, though, I think it will also enable shooting with a more processed look, with the addition of “glow” and “soft skin” as texture alternatives alongside “film” (which is the only texture with the new grain option). The other, and default, texture option is “standard”, which effectively means no texture processing.

  • Apple Reference Image is a new shooting mode (main 1× camera only, because it’s tied to new features on that sensor) that performs pixel-by-pixel signing of the sensor data and embeds that signature in the file. After capture, reference images can be sent to Private Cloud Compute servers for verification and comparison to the original image sensor data. To capture images in Apple Reference format, you must shoot them in that mode, and you must enable that shooting mode first. The embedded sensor data doesn’t make files that much larger, but the sensor data stored in the file does uniquely identify your iPhone. When you “develop” a reference image — something the user must choose to do (not something that happens automatically each time you capture one) — the raw sensor data, sensor identifier, and time window when the image was captured are sent to Private Cloud Compute. When you share a photo captured in Apple Reference Image format, the sensor identifier is not included in the developed image, and you have the option to share a plain version without the embedded verification data. Apple Reference Image capture is not available in the EU or China, the world’s two largest bastions of freedom, but according to an Apple footnote, users in the EU “with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 will be able to develop and view reference images.”

  • Cinematic Mode can now be applied after shooting a regular video; on previous iPhones the Cinematic Mode effect was only available via a specific shooting mode.

To the layman’s eye, though, the 18 Pro just looks like it comes in new colors. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. Oh, but the Face ID infrared camera is now underneath pixels on the display, so the Dynamic Island cutout is now smaller. So the part of the Dynamic Island that is always black is smaller, but because there are now more display pixels next to it, the 18 Pro Dynamic Island can now show three active Live Activities, up from two. Apple is getting closer and closer each year to achieving a no-notch / no-cutout display.

AirPods 5

Just like with AirPods 4, Apple continues to make two different products under the same name. For $130, the cheaper AirPods 5 now have active noise cancellation (previously reserved for the higher-priced tier of AirPods 4), including Transparency and Adaptive modes. For $150, you get AirPods 5 with a wireless charging case (using MagSafe, Qi, or Apple Watch pucks), volume control by swiping up / down on the earbud stems, and longer battery life. It’s a much better product for just $20 extra, but it must have worked out well for Apple with a similar split with AirPods 4. I honestly can’t see why anyone should buy the $130 models, but someone must be buying them.

Apple provided me with a pair (the $150 model) to review, with no embargo. I wore them on the cross-country plane ride home, and compared them to my own AirPods Pro 3 for noise cancellation. It’s hard to make a direct comparison of the overall acoustic quality, but solely in terms of reducing the noise of the airplane cabin while trying to work, I found the new AirPods 5 with full noise cancellation to be roughly equivalent to the AirPods Pro 3 in Adaptive mode. That’s pretty good, and makes the ambient noise level in an airplane much more pleasant. But the full noise cancellation mode of the AirPods Pro 3 delivers an entire step change in noise reduction that the open-ear AirPods 5 cannot match.

I feel bad for people who despise airplane cabin noise but whose ears aren’t comfortable with closed-ear fit earbuds like AirPods Pro. But the noise reduction quality of the AirPods 5 seems impossibly good given their open-ear design. I don’t find AirPods Pro uncomfortable, but I do find regular AirPods more comfortable, especially for long stretches like hours-long flights. I’ll take the small trade-off in comfort for the big improvement in audio quality and noise cancellation with the AirPods Pro, though. With AirPods Pro you can truly forget you’re on an airplane at all if you’re watching a movie with Vision Pro or even on a MacBook or iPad display in a dark cabin.5

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4

The big new health thing is a next-generation heart sensor that takes readings every 5 seconds — 60× as frequent as with Series 11 / Ultra 3 a year ago. Apple commissioned a study comparing their new watches against a slew of competing heart rate monitoring devices, and released a paper with the results, claiming that Apple Watch was the most accurate. That’s an Apple-commissioned, Apple-released study, so take it with a grain of salt, but it looks solid to me and I’m unaware of any other studies showing otherwise. (And if I’m reading the results correctly, rings like Oura’s are crummy heart rate monitors.)

Ultra 4 looks the same as Ultras 1–3 (although Ultra 1 only came in natural titanium, not black). Series 12 comes in some tweaked colors in matte aluminum ($400) and polished titanium ($700), and for the first time since Series 5 seven years ago, brings back ceramic, in two colors: pearl white and night blue ($900). Those prices are for the smaller 42mm size; add $50 to each of them for the larger 46mm size. As has been true for every Series model to date, only the higher-priced materials come with sapphire crystal displays; the entry-model aluminum models still use Ion-X glass. But now those glass displays offer Ceramic Shield 2, which treatment has proven to be a tremendous boon to scratch resistance on iPhones.

The S11 chip powering the new watches enables two very interesting, and instantly controversial Apple Intelligence features:

  • Live Rewind is a feature that allows you to double-click the digital crown to bring up a transcript of the last 15 seconds of conversation around you. Apple claims, somewhat preposterously, that audio isn’t being continuously recorded, when it clearly is. What they mean is that audio is only being cached for 15 seconds, continuously. There is no way to set Live Rewind to transcribe more (or less, for that matter) than the last 15 seconds of audio.

  • Siri Recap is a feature that produces Apple Intelligence-generated summaries of your conversations throughout the day, while the feature is enabled on your Apple Watch. These are not transcripts, just bullet-point style summaries. You can set Siri Recap to only be enabled during certain times (like work hours), and you can toggle it on and off in Control Center at any time. But when it’s on, that’s the only control you have over it. You can’t manually start / stop conversations to record, like you do when recording something with Voice Memos. You just turn Siri Recap on, and Siri generates summaries when it thinks you’ve had a conversation worth summarizing. It’s entirely and exclusively automatic, when the mode is enabled.

Neither of these features are available in WatchOS 27.0. They’re both described as coming “in beta later this year”. I asked Apple reps if that meant 27.1, and they wouldn’t answer other than to repeat “later this year”, but I thought I saw a smile. Both features are English-only for now.

Some people are objecting to the very existence of these features as privacy intrusive. I think they’re pretty reasonably thought out. There are surveillance cameras all over the place now. I was walking home from dinner here in Philadelphia a few weeks ago with a friend visiting from out of town, talking about this, and he stopped midway between the restaurant and my house and asked me to count how many cameras we were on at that spot. I think we counted seven or eight. Who knows how many we missed? I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just the world today. So too it’s soon going to be with personal devices recording audio. This is inevitable. I’m glad to see Apple ship features like this early, with pretty limited scope, to provide good examples before other companies ship devices that record and save audio continuously throughout the day. I think it’s better for Apple to lead with privacy-minded versions of ambient transcripts and AI-generated conversation summaries than to follow after other products have hit the market with all-day recordings and whole-life transcripts.

Think back to Apple’s announcement of AirTags. A lot of people had a perfectly reasonable “Hey I don’t know if it’s a good idea for a product like this to even exist” initial reaction. But having Apple lead the way actually proved good. I suspect Live Rewind and Siri Recap will turn out like that.

It’s also interesting to think about why these two features are only on Apple Watch, not iPhone. I think it’s because once an Apple Watch is on your wrist and unlocked, it remains a “trusted device” until you take the watch off. An iPhone is only a trusted device while it’s unlocked. It’s locked, and thus untrusted, while it’s in your pocket or bag, or even just sitting on a desk. I leave my iPhone unattended in our kitchen all the time. I’m often not in the room for conversations that take place in the kitchen while my iPhone is there, sitting on the counter. I shouldn’t get summaries of those conversations. And, thinking more nefariously, I shouldn’t be able to hide my iPhone on or near someone’s desk, or in a conference room, or in a car, or anywhere else, to get Siri Recap summaries of conversations where I’m not present. Making this an Apple Watch exclusive feature avoids that. Thus, I think Apple Watch can be trusted to “listen” ambiently, all the time while it’s unlocked on the wearer’s wrist, in ways that even an iPhone can’t.

iPhone Duo

Ternus broke out the hallowed “But actually, there is one more thing...” to introduce the Duo, which line — to circle back to the keynote’s intro — is for Apple CEOs what “Vodka martini, shaken not stirred” is for actors playing James Bond.6

Pre-orders for the Duo don’t start until October 16, and it doesn’t ship until October 23. In my experience, Apple never seeds review units for any product until a few days before pre-orders open, so we’re not going to hear or see anything more about the Duo until those review embargoes lift on October 20 or 21, I bet.

Duo is available in only two colors: star white (polished silver) and night sky (a deep blue-black). As predicted, the Duo is expensive. I’ll put it alongside the 18 Pro models for comparison:

256 GB 512 GB 1 TB 2 TB
18 Pro $1,200 $1,400 $1,800 $2,400
18 Pro Max $1,300 $1,500 $1,900 $2,500
Duo $2,000 $2,200 $2,600 $3,200

At every storage tier, it’s $800 more than an 18 Pro and $700 more than an 18 Pro Max.

Key facts:

  • It has no Face ID sensor, either open or closed. The only authentication is an iPad Air-style Touch ID side button.

  • It has a Camera Control button, but does not have an Action button.

  • The interior display has a matte nano-texture display. It looks great and apparently this is a key element of Apple’s efforts to make the crease as unnoticeable as possible. By next year I expect all competing foldables to have matte interior displays and 1.4 : 1 aspect ratio displays.

  • It is very satisfying to open and close.

  • The outer glossy screen has a “Center Stage” 12 megapixel front-facing camera, that seems very similar to the 18 megapixel Center Stage front cameras in the iPhone 17 generation phones. Year-ago tech but still high quality. There’s a circular hole punch in the corner of the display for this camera.

  • The inner matte screen has an under-the-display “FaceTime” camera for which Apple hasn’t even given a megapixel count. Clearly this is a lesser camera — the question is how much lesser. The idea presumably is that this camera is solely for use in Zoom or FaceTime apps, where you might want to use the bigger inner display to view the meeting, and don’t care as much about your own image quality. But there’s no reason ever to capture a self portrait with the camera on the larger inner display. If the Duo is opened, and you care about image quality for self portraits, you can shoot using the main camera and use the small display to frame yourself, turning the large display around to the back. When not using the inner FaceTime camera, there is no visible cutout showing where it goes. If you look closely at the display however, you can see where it is. Under-display cameras aren’t magic.

  • The regular cameras are a 1× / 2× main, and a 0.5× ultra wide. I suspect the main 1× camera is very similar optically to that of the iPhone Air, but the Duo has A20 Pro features like Photographic Styles 3, although it lacks Pro Controls, Apple Log, genlock, and other pro camera features. (The Air only has last year’s Photographic Styles 2.)

The initial introduction of the Duo was handled by two keynote newcomers: industrial design VP Molly Anderson, and human interface VP Steve Lemay. A hardware / software design duo (ahem), if you will. What made it worth having Anderson and Lemay present together is that the iPhone Duo exemplifies Apple’s integrated approach to product design. Are they a hardware company that writes their own software or a software company that makes their own hardware? The answer is yes.7 The defining aspect of the Duo isn’t that it folds open and closed — we’ve seen almost a decade of Android phones that do that — but its aspect ratio, roughly 1.4 : 1. Because that’s effectively the square root of 2, doubling the outer display’s shorter dimension when you unfold it produces an inner display with roughly the same aspect ratio. That’s elegant and satisfying conceptually. And I think in practice it will feel right, too.

Heretofore the iPhone has only had three display aspect ratios:

  1. The original iPhone (2007) display was precisely 3 : 2 (480⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠320 pixels, and let’s call it 1.5 : 1 for comparison’s sake to the following ratios), and this remained true through the iPhone 4 and 4S (960⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠640 pixels, 2× retina).

  2. Then the iPhone 5 (2012) display size went from 3.5 inches to 4 inches, but added all the extra pixels on the long dimension. Held vertically, it got taller, but not at all wider, changing the aspect ratio to 16 : 9 (roughly 1.77 : 1). This 16 : 9 aspect ratio held for all of the 5, 6, 7, and 8 generation iPhones, including the Plus models.

  3. The iPhone X (2017) introduced the “all-screen” era. The actual device hardware didn’t change size or aspect ratio by much, but eliminating the chin (with Home button) and forehead and filling those areas with the screen, the display aspect ratio went to roughly 2.17 : 1, and every new model since then, including the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, has maintained that aspect ratio.8

Thus, over 20 years, iPhone displays (and thus all phones, since all the other phones mostly just copy iPhones) have only gotten more elongated: from 1.5 : 1 to 1.77 : 1 to 2.17 : 1. Now, though, the iPhone Duo goes squatter than the original iPhone for the first time, to 1.4 : 1 on both the outer and inner displays.9 That’s a noticeable change from the original iPhone, but it’s a downright striking change from every iPhone released in the last 10 years.

This aspect ratio is so different that it demands a different UI layout for the Duo to have any chance at being a good experience. That’s exactly what Apple has done, and what Steve Lemay was there in the keynote to unveil. A lot of UI chrome that previously was at the top or bottom of the display is now on the right — the dock on the home screen, the toolbars in apps, etc. And these elements are always on the right. You can’t turn the Duo upside down to move them to the left, nor is there an accessibility setting to move them to the left. This layout puts these controls on the right not because 90 percent of people are right-handed and Apple thinks lefties can get bent, but, I think (and so I’ve been told in conversations with Cupertinoites), because that’s the nature of a book-like shape. The arrow keys on keyboards always fall on the right, publishers don’t print left-handed books, and carmakers don’t make left-handed steering wheels. The right-side bias in the Duo iOS layout is like that.

I’ve only spent a few minutes, in total, playing with the Duo, so I really can’t say whether it succeeds or not. But I will say that it’s weird. Not saying it’s weird good or weird bad — just weird different. In some ways iOS on the Duo feels more different from iOS on all other post-iPhone-X phones than iOS on the original iPad felt from iOS on the iPhones of that time. The original iPad just felt like a much bigger iPhone. The Duo feels like a different layout entirely, in every single app that I had time to poke around with.

Is the Duo good? I do not know. Is it different? Very much.

Here’s the thing. If you take a 2 : 1 or even 2.2 : 1 aspect ratio phone display and turn that into a book-like foldable, the inner screen comes out square — or so close to square that we might as well just call it square. Nobody makes any device of any sort that just has a square display. Square is a terrible aspect ratio for a phone or a tablet or a laptop or a desktop display. The only square displays on the market are the inner displays for Android foldables from the last decade. Square being a shitty aspect ratio is half the reason almost no one has bought those things. The other half of the reason is that no developers truly adapted software to take advantage of the double-area inner displays. Google didn’t do it, Samsung didn’t do it, and since neither of them bothered to do it, of course third-party developers didn’t do it either. Nothing adapts to the inner display on Android foldables — it just expands to fill the space.

Apple’s insight to go with 1.4 : 1 on the outside and thus also 1.4 : 1 on the inside gives the Duo a chance. Maybe this will be a huge hit. But maybe not? There are no 5-inch phone displays with aspect ratios anywhere near as squat as the Duo’s. That’s a tablet aspect ratio. The current A17 Pro iPad Mini has a 2266⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠1488 pixel display: roughly 1.5 : 1. The 11-inch iPad Air is 1.4 : 1 and the 13-inch Air is 1.33 : 1. So I think the Duo’s inner display is going to feel just right.

But that outer display? I don’t know. Even in the best case, it’s going to be no better than a tolerable compromise. If it were actually a good idea there would be non-folding phones with 1.4 : 1-ish squat displays, and there aren’t any such phones. And even if the Duo proves to be a hit, I don’t think there will be. If you only have one display you don’t want it to be the size and shape of the Duo’s outer display. So the questions are: How tolerable has Apple’s UI redesign made it? And how will Duo users split their time between using it closed vs. using it open? Someone who spends more of their time using it open might absolutely love it with a “you’ll take it away only from my cold dead hands” fervor. Someone who winds up mostly using the outer display because so many of their iPhone interactions are quick take it out → use it for a bit to check something, jot something down, or snap a quick photo → put it back in pocket / bag situations, might wind up regretting it.

Given the design brief of creating a book-shaped foldable phone, I feel quite certain already that Apple has nailed it with the Duo. But having only seen the keynote spiel and poked around with one in hand for a few minutes Wednesday afternoon, I think it remains an open question whether a book-shaped foldable phone is a good idea in the first place. Folks from Apple who have actually spent time carrying the Duo seem genuinely enthused. I remain highly skeptical about its appeal for me personally, and somewhat skeptical about its appeal broadly. That’s OK if it’s not suited for me, but is suited for many (but not most) people. No one in the keynote described the iPhone Duo as the future of iPhone, like they did when introducing the iPhone X in 2017. I just wonder if the fundamental idea appeals to all that many people at all. We’ll find out starting in late October.

Regarding some specific Duo details:

  • The lack of Face ID is a serious sad-trombone bummer, and in my opinion could sink the first-generation model. Side-button Touch ID is OK, but OK is not good, and even good is not insanely great. Face ID is insanely great. For whatever reason, the only iPads with Face ID are the iPad Pro models. Every time I review an iPad Air or iPad Mini, my biggest gripe is the lack of Face ID. I complained about it reviewing the iPad Air in 2022 and the iPad Mini in 2021, and in the five years since then my annoyance has only grown. With Face ID, so long as you’re looking at the screen as you unlock the device, it’s like not having it locked at all. It just unlocks, seemingly automatically. With Touch ID you must think about putting one of your registered fingers on the button every single time you unlock it. It never ever feels automatic. I feel quite certain Apple tried to fit a Face ID sensor on the outer Duo display and could not make the engineering work.

  • I’m much more concerned about convenience than security, but Face ID is 20× more secure than Touch ID. That’s according to Apple’s own Apple Platform Security whitepaper, updated just last month, which states:

    The probability that a random person in the population could unlock a user’s iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro is less than 1 in 1 million with Optic ID or Face ID — including when Face ID with a mask is turned on. For a user’s iPad, iPhone, Mac models with Touch ID, and those paired with a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, it’s less than 1 in 50,000. This probability increases with multiple enrolled fingerprints (up to 1 in 10,000 with five fingerprints) or appearances for Face ID (up to 1 in 500,000 with two appearances).

  • As a sign of how inconvenient the lack of Face ID is, Apple is promoting the fact that the iPhone Duo can be unlocked by your Apple Watch, like a Mac. No other iPhone needs such a crutch.10 Based on my experience with Touch ID iPads, wearing an Apple Watch all the time to unlock the Duo will feel essential. I don’t wear an Apple Watch all the time, and don’t want to start wearing an Apple Watch all the time, so I suspect this alone will keep me from switching to an iPhone Duo personally. On the other hand, for people who do wear an Apple Watch all the time and are happy to do so, the Duo’s lack of Face ID might prove to be only an occasional inconvenience rather than a constant annoyance.11

  • Contrary to some speculation, the Duo does support MagSafe. (Samsung’s latest, the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Fold8 Ultra, support inductive Qi charging but don’t have magnets, so you need to use a case or something to get chargers to snap into place.)

  • Closed, the Duo has — per Molly Anderson’s dulcet keynote description — “a distinctive asymmetric shape, with two rounded corners, that invites you to open it.” Expect this to be copied by every other foldable phone in 2027, and then for Android dorks to argue that it’s a totally obvious design. (Same for the matte interior display.)

  • Apple rates the Duo as IP68 for dust and water resistance, with exactly the same description as the iPhones 18 Pro (and all other iPhone models currently in the lineup): “Rated IP68 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes) under IEC standard 60529”. Samsung’s new Z Fold8 is only IP48. With these IEC ratings the second numeral is for water. The first numeral is for “solid foreign agents” (read: dirt and dust). iPhone Duo’s IP6x rating means “dust-tight”. The Z Fold8’s IP4x rating isn’t even “dust-protected” (that would be IP5x) but instead only protection against particles 1mm or larger. 1mm is pretty big for a piece of grit. That doesn’t mean it’s susceptible to ingress from every particle smaller than 1mm, but it’s not good. Pocket lint is a real thing and people put their phones in their pockets.

I’m Trying So Hard Not to Be Insufferable About Predicting the ‘Duo’ Name That I’ve Put This Entire Section 6,500 Words Deep Into the Column

Yours truly, back on April 14:

I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.

But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?

My thinking re: “Duo” seemingly jibed with that of Apple’s crack marketing team:

  • It’s two devices in one.
  • The early 1990s PowerBook Duo (and corresponding Duo Dock) were extraordinary Macs that were ahead of their time.
  • It’s not ultra, if we take ultra to mean “better than what’s less than ultra in every way”. The iPhone Duo is different — quite different — from the iPhones Pro but, to name one conspicuous example, the iPhones Pro have better camera systems. (The Duo is ultra-priced, but one can also say it’s double-priced.)
  • Duo looks and sounds so good alongside Neo.

When I suggested “Duo” in April and again the day before the event, the number one objection was that Microsoft had used the name “Duo” for one of its many forgettable Surface products. The half dozen or so readers who argued thus might be the only people alive who remember this product. No one cares. Microsoft also had a Surface Neo, and no one cares about that one either. Even if Apple hadn’t offered a line of (successful, memorable) PowerBook Duos from 30 years ago, it wouldn’t matter that Microsoft had used “Duo” in 2020. For chrissakes Cisco had the rights to the name “iPhone” in 2007 and had been making products with the name since 1998.

I love the name Duo for this iPhone. It just feels right. And, just five days in, I already find myself saying and writing just “Duo”, without “iPhone”, when referring to it.

Miscellaneous

  • Too many cooks spoil the stew. It was very fun and a little touching to have the Cook hand things off to Ternus at the start, but I think there were too many presenters in the keynote. Duo was effectively introduced three or four separate times. First by the Anderson / Lemay (I’m going to pun it again) duo, then Joz, then Craig Federighi (covering much of the same software ground Lemay did), then Johny Srouji (covering much of the same ground Anderson did). Maybe the thinking was that everyone wanted a part in Ternus’s debut keynote. Maybe this is just the way of the future — many small segments, rather than one continuous on-stage live monologue. It didn’t make the keynote run overly long (running time was just 1h:17m), so maybe I’m all wet here. But I think what I wanted was to see Ternus do more of the explaining — not just the what but the why.

  • Apple’s YouTube video of the entire keynote has over 49 million views, and that doesn’t count the views from Apple’s own hosted version, presented on Apple.com and Apple TV. Apple has 12 other shorter keynote-related videos on YouTube, including “Introducing the new iPhone 18 Pro” with 18 million views, and “Introducing the new iPhone Duo” with 28 million views. For comparison, this year’s WWDC keynote on YouTube has 8.9 million views. 9 million views is a hell of a view count for the introduction of operating systems, but the iPhone remains king — not just for Apple, but the industry. It remains the Super Bowl of the annual tech calendar.

  • For an even better comparison, in the full version of that 2001 Macworld Expo keynote that I suggested you watch earlier in this column — the one where Steve Jobs introduced the Mac-as-digital-hub strategy — when Jobs takes the stage, he’s beaming with pride when he says there are “tens of thousands” of people watching the stream live. Both streaming and Apple have come a long way in 25 years.

  1. I’ll just tuck in a footnote here that another necessary technical feature was high-speed USB-C, for recording video to external SSD drives. EU regulatory cheerleaders hang their hats on the belief that Apple switched iPhones from Lightning connectors to USB-C solely because of the EU charging port mandate. Some of them believe that absent EU intervention, iPhones today would still be on Lightning. That’s nonsense. These things are all true: the EU now mandates USB-C charging ports for phones (and most other devices); Apple opposed the EU USB-C mandate; the iPhone switched to USB-C in 2023 with the iPhone 15 generation; and the iPhone’s Lightning port was the last remaining proprietary phone connector that anyone cared about. But correlation is not causation. Apple opposed (and still opposes) the EU USB-C mandate not because they think USB-C is bad today, but because the mandate will stymie moving to something better (thinner / smaller / faster) in the future. (In 2011 the EU soft-mandated the terrible Micro-USB connector in a “Memorandum of Understanding” that Apple of course ignored. USB-C is a good connector, but the lesson the European Commission took from their Micro-USB attempt was to hard-mandate their preferred universal connector this time — to switch from should to must.) Apple started moving iOS devices from Lightning to USB-C all the way back in 2018 with the iPad Pros. The EU USB-C mandate didn’t come into effect until December 2024. Apple had planned to move the iPhone to USB-C starting with the iPhone 15 generation years prior. If Apple had switched the iPhone to USB-C only for begrudging compliance with the EU mandate, they would have waited until 2024; Apple never complies early with regulations they disagree with. They also might have shipped USB-C iPhones exclusively within the EU. For years Apple shipped iPhones with two physical SIM card slots in China — region-specific hardware wouldn’t be new. They still today ship new iPhones with physical SIM card trays in most of the world but without them in the US models. But the best proof is that the iPhone 15 Pro models had camera features that required USB-C for data transfer performance.

    The theory that the EU dragged Apple kicking and screaming into switching the iPhone to USB-C is predicated on the notion that because Lightning was proprietary and USB-C is not, that Apple made a fortune selling Lightning accessories and didn’t want to give up that revenue stream. But Apple sells just as many $20–30 USB-C cables as they did $20–30 Lightning cables, and dirt-cheap Lightning cables from third-party companies were always plentiful (albeit not in Apple Stores). The iPhone switching to USB-C hasn’t affected Apple’s bottom line at all. This footnote, I’m sure, will put this matter to rest. ↩︎

  2. Also interesting knowing that this was the first keynote produced after Phil Schiller stepped down from running events, yet Schiller is as big a Bond fan as anyone I know. The Bond references in the keynote might have been a nice nod to Schiller from his former team. ↩︎︎

  3. Last year’s keynote announcement order: AirPods Pro 3, Apple Watch (Series 11 and Ultra 3), iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro. This year’s order: iPhone 18 Pro, AirPods 5, Apple Watch, iPhone Duo. ↩︎︎

  4. As I write this in mid-September, you can still purchase the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max at last year’s prices from carriers like AT&T and Verizon, including the 1 TB 17 Pro for $1,500 and 2 TB 17 Pro Max for $2,000. It doesn’t make much sense to me to buy a 256 or 512 GB 17 Pro today just to save $100, unless you really love cosmic orange and feel disappointed by the 18 Pro colors. But if you really want 1 or 2 TB of storage, you’ll save $300 or $500 respectively buying a 17 Pro model instead of an 18 Pro. That’s real money. ↩︎︎

  5. Have you noticed that more and more, people in window seats keep their windows closed, keeping the cabin dark, even for mid-day flights? I get it for early morning flights, but I don’t get it for mid-day and late afternoon flights. Sunlight is good. I’m an aisle-seat man myself, but when I get stuck with a window seat the best part is the view out the window. With the window closed, those seats aren’t much better than middle seats. ↩︎︎

  6. Roger Moore played Bond in seven films, but never once ordered a martini nor uttered the “shaken not stirred” line. He did enjoy martinis in three of the movies, but in each case, the drink was ordered or prepared for him. This, despite Moore himself having been a dry martini aficionado. ↩︎︎

  7. But the fact that the new CEO spent his career in hardware engineering tells you which side at Apple is the bigger 50 percent. ↩︎︎

  8. The iPhone X (2436⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠1125 pixels) worked out to 2.1653 : 1. This week’s new iPhone 18 Pro (2622⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠1206 pixels) is 2.1741… : 1, and the 18 Pro Max (2868⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠1320) is 2.172 : 1. To two decimal places they’re all 2.17 : 1. ↩︎︎

  9. Let’s keep going with the math pedantry. The Duo’s 5.4-inch outer display is 2034⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠1398 pixels, which works out to about 1.455 : 1. The 7.8-inch inner display is 2670⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠1878 pixels, which works out to about 1.422 : 1. Calling them both “1.4 : 1” is close enough for government work. ↩︎︎

  10. Back in 2021 during the COVID era, iOS 14.5 added a then-much-needed feature that allowed Apple Watch to unlock your iPhone. That feature remains available, and I guess that’s what Apple is promoting for use with iPhone Duo. But I had to check that this feature was still available in iOS because I haven’t used it since last wearing a face mask four or five years ago. ↩︎︎

  11. Which raises an obvious question that I’ve never really thought hard about before: Why the hell can’t you unlock a Touch ID iPad with your Apple Watch, like you can with a Mac (or, now, an iPhone Duo)? ↩︎︎

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Back Inside the Silicon Valley Class War

Josh Marshall
Updated

If you’re a subscriber to Wired.com I want to suggest that you read this piece: Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump.

It’s interesting enough that I’d suggest it would be worth whatever one month free or first month for a buck offers they might have to sign up. (Of course, I’m all for subscribing to every publication. Some of you will decide to keep it long term.) And if you can’t, it’s actually an excerpt from a book which, I think, is out today, titled: Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry.

The piece published in Wired doesn’t cover any terribly surprising new ground for people who’ve followed this story closely. But it does add new layers of detail and a more coherent narrative. In so many words the pandemic created a situation in which both the Democrats and Big Tech’s own employees turned against the owner founders. And that sent the owner founders running toward the right and Donald Trump. For a variety of reasons the tech giants went on a hiring spree during the pandemic — cheap money, Zoom life, work from home, everything bought online and delivered to your home. But then they got spooked and the markets didn’t like it. They’d overextended themselves and they decided that the problem was that they weren’t efficient enough and that their employees were lazy. The authors note a key point that layoffs went differently in tech than in traditional manufacturing, where layoffs have a direct impact on revenues, even if they may make good profit and loss sense. In tech, a lot of your value is already banked in the code. Layoffs probably won’t catch up with you for a while.

Of course this wasn’t just what had happened during the pandemic — high salaries and a fairly accommodating work culture had always been part of Silicon Valley. But the big companies decided it was their workers fault that they’d made shortsighted decisions in 2020. Democrats had their own reasons for turning against the tech giants — disinformation and societal damage caused by social media, wealth inequality, anti-trust, et al. In any case, the article is an interesting look at how these two drivers came together and got us to today.

There are two other factors that aren’t clearly addressed in this excerpt that I’d like to add. And I’m not saying the authors missed them. I suspect they’re discussed in the rest of the book. You can only get so much into an excerpt.

In many ways, the pivot around the pandemic was built into the growing monopoly dominance of the tech giants. Democrats didn’t turn against tech out of the blue. Their growing monopoly power and the things that monopoly power caused were critical drivers. But that had a big impact on the employee culture of Silicon Valley as well. I was kind of turned on to this a few years ago by a friend who focused my attention on it, and it was born out by a lot of subsequent reading and reporting I did. For a long time in Silicon Valley, it was easy for programmers who might make three or four hundred thousand a year to think they were only a few years away for getting in early on the next big start up that could catapult them up into net worths of tens of millions, if not hundreds, or even billions of dollars. And there was significant reality behind expectations. But a big part of the growing monopoly power which was kicking in by the mid-teens meant those aspirations were increasingly unrealistic. There weren’t as many IPOs. It didn’t work that way anymore.

It can sound kind of funny and it is a little funny to think about the class consciousness of people who might be making upwards of half a million a year. But funny things can be real. Leading into the pandemic was a growing realization that there were the billionaires and there was the workforce of Silicon Valley. And the odds of anyone jumping from one group to the other had gone down a lot. That, in turn, spurred all the predictable looking upwards thoughts on, ‘Why exactly do you have quite so much money?’ and looking downwards, ‘I don’t like hearing your lip.’

In a way, a simpler version of this is simply to say that tech became a mature industry and the owners of big entrenched corporations are definitionally conservative. They were also entrenched monopolies. And monopolies need protection from the government. They may need to control the government.

In any case, this is a complicated story we’ve talked about before. This article I found as an interesting addition to that literature. It’s important and worth understanding because the power of Big Tech fundamentally shapes the world we live in today and the political options available to us.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Trying to Make Sense of the AI Experts When No One Knows What’s Going On

Josh Marshall
Updated

I wanted to share a few more thoughts with you about this roiling public debate about AI and the dangers of rogue, uncontrollable “agents.”

I start with the quite predictable conclusion that a lot of the contending theories we were talking about are true at the same time, at least to some degree. It is impossible not to see how a controlled deceleration of AI development serves financial purposes for the frontier AI labs. A regulatory pause sort of freezes their current lead in place, at least to a degree. It also allows them to focus on the massive returns of what we might call “meh” AI/LLMs while deprioritizing the kind of cutting edge research that costs a lot, has various risks and doesn’t have clear returns within the time horizon of your IPO. (The two top U.S. “frontier” labs are in their final preparations for going public.) It has also become increasingly clear to me that significant chunks of the AI world are in the thrall of a self-styled “rationalist” subculture which spends an inordinate amount of time postulating future human extinction events — dressed up in a lot of “rationalist” language but about which no one really has any idea — and then devising often quite sinister strategies for averting these imagined futures. (AI was a big focus of theirs before the last few years, but they have several storylines about future extinction events in the distant future.) It is finally the case that a lot of the people sounding these alarms have little acquaintance with how the world works outside of the computing domain and speak on issues of intelligence, sentience and self-awareness while knowing little or nothing about the scientific fields where these topics have been studied for decades or even centuries.

Needless to say, none of these facts inspire a lot of confidence.

But I also don’t think we should dismiss concerns about the safety of this research outright or reflexively. One of the great challenges I’ve had educating myself on this topic is how even the “smartest” people in the field speak in very anthropomorphized ways about what AI agents are doing. To a degree, you can say these are just turns of speech. But this definitely shapes our perceptions of what’s going on in ways that are hard to overstate. So when I read these different discussions, I just apply a mental filter which attempts to de-humanize these discussions and focus on what the computer programs are doing. Not what their strategy was, their goal, what they wanted — what they did.

What seems real is that these “agents” frequently do things the scientists/programmers cannot predict. They do things they should not be doing — both in the sense of predictability and acceptability.

Here is the problem, as best as I’m able to understand this. And perhaps see this as much as an example of a neophyte’s efforts to understand what is going on as any kind of layman’s explanation of what is going on.

You have these programs/agents. You train them on almost the whole history of human intellection — critically in the form of language (let’s put a pin in that). In that training, you walk them through identifying challenges and then using lots of raw computing power to devise solutions. You have — remember — the whole history of human intellection as possible language pathways toward doing that. So there’s a lot to work with. Now you have the researchers set challenges to see how good the models are in finding solutions under certain rules. But this part is a bit like lawyers writing effective contracts. You need to come up with very broad and specific language to cover every conceivable eventuality, because people can come up with creative ways to follow the letter of the contract but not its spirit. They can outwit it. Something like this ends up happening with the agents. You’ve told them to solve for X. And the best way to solve for X may be to do something you didn’t want them to which you weren’t able to fully predict or explicitly forbid.

In any case, the point is you set these challenges and the agents end up doing things you didn’t tell them to do or want them to do. Perhaps I’m just thinking about this in the wrong way, but when you’re supercharging everything like this and you’ve exposed them to the whole history of human intellection to find ways to approach problems, it doesn’t seem surprising to me that you might have some unpredictable results. Again, I’m quite likely not understanding just how that works. But the degree of unpredictability being described sounds … well, kind of predictable?

On this topic, I’ll be sharing things with you on a “worth reading” basis. They’re pieces that people who I think are smart and knowledgable believe are worth reading. I simply have no ability to decide whether they’re right or wrong. So note the basis on which I’m sharing these things.

Today, I’m sharing something put out by a researcher at OpenAI that’s made a big stir over the last day or so in tech and AI/LLM circles: The researcher’s name is Daniel Selsam. And as it happens there was an article about him — or, at least, one in which he was a central character — in The New Yorker back in 2022. It’s an interesting read to get a sense of the guy’s background. In any case, here’s the statement he put out about all this yesterday.

Like many others, I have become extremely concerned about how far language models have come and the risks that future iterations will pose. I am encouraged by the recent proposals by the leaders of the frontier research efforts to require third-party oversight, and to push for domestic and international coordination to address risks. However, I believe a major consideration has been absent from the public conversation, and that merely pacing the frontier more carefully will not adequately limit the long-term risk.

The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled. Future experiments will tell us almost nothing new about how they would behave if they were truly unconstrained by humans, and what we already know about this is alarming. Models will increasingly seem aligned even when they are not. I will explain my rationale in more detail.

[…]

If everyone on earth agreed that the systems must never reach that power, it would still be a hard—but not impossible—coordination problem to ensure that they do not. However, I think the situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the models will likely convince people that everything is fine.

Here’s some context for this: In AI talk you hear a lot about something called “alignment.” The big cheeses are saying they need to slow down to focus on “alignment” and get that right. What’s alignment? It’s basically a mix of predictability and not doing bad things. So the LLMs are aligned with our needs and what we want them to do. Selsam’s piece is essentially saying that the LLMs are increasingly telling researchers what they want to hear about alignment. But what they say isn’t really tied to what they do when they’re not being watched. Is this true? I have no idea. I will say for the umpteenth time that I have no ability to meaningfully evaluate these claims. It does remind me though of why LLMs “hallucinate” so much, make things up. At a basic level, the LLMs that you and I use with things like Claude and such aren’t “reasoning” to arrive at claims that are accurate. They are putting things together with the goal of producing responses that will seem accurate to humans. Being accurate should probably be high on the list of being able to seem accurate. But they’re not the same thing. And hallucinations are the result.

I’m not saying there’s a direct analog between these two things. And perhaps the comparison itself just shows my ignorance. But it doesn’t seem like a great leap to think that if you’re trying to get LLMs to be good citizens you’re creating a lot of “reasoning” incentives to say you are good citizens. So, yes, boss, humans are dope. I wouldn’t do anything bad. I promise …

Even if maybe they will do bad things. Kind of makes sense.

For now, take a look at those links if you’re interested. And here’s a podcast discussion — audio or transcript — with a Princeton professor of information technology, consciousness, and culture that was also recommended to me.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Yep, the Anti-Trump Wave Is Building

Josh Marshall
Updated

Conventional wisdom holds that a midterm election only fully comes into focus after Labor Day. That’s when a critical slice of the electorate starts focusing on the election and the choices before them. More or less in line with that, we’ve had a spray of polls out in the last few days showing the congressional generic ballot shifting decisively in Democrats’ favor. Looking only at generic ballots fielded entirely in September by pollsters the New York Times rates as trusted we have D+7, D+9, D+9 and D+11. If that trend or average is representative, it shows Democrats opening a big lead on this measure where the earlier average had been in the 5-7 point range. As Ron Brownstein notes here, history also tells us that in the final weeks of a campaign, this generic ballot measure will bend toward the president’s approval number. That appears to be happening. One of those, from the Times itself, was released today (D+9) with an accompanying write-up which, simply because it’s the Times, will probably draw attention to this trend even though the Times poll is only one of several.

Polls and trends can of course be wrong. But these numbers are extremely bad for the GOP, and if anything in this ballpark is accurate Republicans will likely lose the Senate as well as the House. Indeed, the variability in possible outcomes may be even higher in the Senate since it’s not amenable to gerrymandering. Even the Times, usually eager to find possible downsides for Democrats, frames their poll with declarative statements like this: “Voters see Republicans broadly as more extreme, more elitist and more corrupt than Democrats, according to the poll. And while voters continue to have doubts about both parties, they aligned more with the Democratic Party on both cultural and economic matters than the Republican Party in the survey.”

I’m generally very down on, even contemptuous of, the line that a party needs a positive message — what are you for, not just what are you against? This is a standard “conventional wisdom” type of … well, conventional wisdom. And recent history tells us it’s wrong. It’s still wrong. I stick to that. But there’s one point that is also clear in these polls. We’re in a period of tremendous public pessimism and uncertainty. And President Trump has done almost everything in his power to direct that anger, disappointment and dissatisfaction toward him. It’s very clear, just as it was for Republicans in 2010, just as it was for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, that opposition to Trump is the entire game here. It is now quite likely to drive a big electoral wave in November. All the positive agenda stuff is almost always just what people paid to have things to say come up with to say.

But there is one caveat here.

This mood of profound public anxiety, anger and dissolution isn’t entirely about Trump. To my lights, it’s heavily bound up with the society-cratering effects of the pandemic which we still only dimly understand. Even to the extent that a huge amount of public enervation and despair is tied up with all the destruction Trump has brought in his wake, it now goes beyond him. And Democrats, once in power — perhaps not entirely in 2027 (since Trump will still have most of the power) but certainly in 2029 — will have to point to some new way forward for the country, if not necessarily rapid and dramatic improvement, or the same anger and pessimism will again turn on them.

That’s not something to get down about. If you don’t have some clear idea of how to improve things for most people why are you even running for office? Why are any of us doing any of this? We should have some sense of how to put things broadly on a better course. And Trump may have done Democrats a critical favor that goes beyond his current unpopularity. Trump has made himself into what can only be called a kind of boiled down-distillation of everything that can be bad about a leader. Deeply corrupt and self-glorifying, wholly indifferent to what ordinary people care most about, and a mix of crazy and scary. If people’s biggest concern is about prices and inflation, it’s hard to know what more you could do to make things worse than starting a bunch of trade wars, starting a literal war to drive up energy prices, cutting public support for health care and appointing a soft-money Fed chair. This isn’t just me saying this, voicing what Trump’s opponents have always said about him. This tableau and perception comes through with increasing clarity in poll after poll. Trump’s personal corruption and the climate of corruption he’s created has become one of voters’ top issues — something that is very hard to make happen.

I’ve noted over the last year that I don’t think Washington or the national press has fully absorbed the depth of Trump’s unpopularity. They may be catching up now, fast.

Daring Fireball

AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case Works With MagSafe, But Not Magnetically

John Gruber
Updated

In my long take yesterday on Apple’s event last week, I wrote that when you pay $20 extra to get the $150 AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case, that the case is compatible for inductive charging with “MagSafe, Qi, or Apple Watch pucks”. But the compatibility section of Apple’s tech specs page for AirPods 5 doesn’t list MagSafe:

Works with USB‑C connector, Apple Watch charger, or Qi‑certified chargers

That’s because for Apple, true MagSafe compatibility means magnetic attachment. The AirPods 5 case doesn’t have magnets; AirPods Pro cases do. So when you charge AirPods Pro with MagSafe, they snap to the puck. I can snap my AirPods Pro 3 case onto a nearly vertical MagSafe charger, like the Nomad Stand One I keep next to my keyboard. (Great product — you should get one. I have two; the other is on my nightstand.) I can’t charge the AirPods 5 case on that stand because without magnets it just falls off.

But if I lay the AirPods 5 case on a horizontal MagSafe puck, it charges just fine. That’s because MagSafe pucks are themselves Qi-compatible. I see why Apple is a stickler for this — the “mag” in MagSafe carries an obvious meaning — but by not mentioning MagSafe at all it’s reasonable to draw the conclusion that AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case doesn’t work with MagSafe at all.

 ★ 
The Space Review

An analysis of Ukraine's missile strike on the Progress rocket factory

info@thespacereview.com (Bart Hendrickx)
Updated
Ukrainian cruise missiles struck a Russian factory last month that produces Soyuz rockets, with some reports claiming the attack caused serious damage. Bart Hendrickx examines the evidence to better understand the significance of the attack.
The Space Review

A collision probability is not permission to maneuver

info@thespacereview.com (Burak Oktenli)
Updated
Satellite operators are increasingly turning to automated systems to avoid potential collisions based on when the probability of a collision passes a threshold. Burak Oktenli argues that threshold alone should not be sufficient to trigger a maneuver.
The Space Review

The Junkers spaceplane

info@thespacereview.com (Hans Dolfing)
Updated
In the early 1960s, a German aerospace company pursued studies of a spaceplane with support of a famous designer. Hans Dolfing explores the designs Junkers examined for a reusable spaceplane.
The Space Review

Voyager 6 seeks the Creator

zirconic1@cox.net (Dwayne Day)
Updated
The first Star Trek movie features a spacecraft based on the recently launched Voyager missions. Dwayne Day describes how the filmmakers worked with NASA on the design of Voyager 6.
The Space Review

The road to the asteroid belt runs through the Moon

info@thespacereview.com (Chad McElroy and Jacob Smagula)
Updated
NASA is leading a new effort to develop a lunar base, one that requires development of many technologies needed to live on the lunar surface for extended periods. Chad McElroy and Jacob Smagula discuss how these technologies can also help create an asteroid mining industry.
NASA Science

Curiosity Postcard Celebrates Rover’s 5,000th Day on Mars

Rafael Alanis
Updated
2 Min Read

Curiosity Postcard Celebrates Rover’s 5,000th Day on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover traverses the rocky, desert landscape of Mars beneath a soft sky. The scene is captured in striking blue and yellow hues.
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Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 

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Curiosity Postcard Celebrates Rover’s 5,000th Day on Mars

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While parked at a sand ridge nicknamed “Chocolatal,” NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas at two times of day. The first was taken on Aug. 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time; the second was taken on Sep. 2, 2026, at 5:39 p.m. local Mars time. Those dates correspond to the 5,000th and 5,003rd Martian days, or sols, of the mission.

After being sent back to Earth, the two images were merged together. Color was added for an artistic interpretation of the scene, with blue representing the morning panorama and yellow representing the afternoon one. The resulting “postcard” is similar to past examples created with rover images, such as one taken in November 2021.

The rover’s deck can be seen in the foreground, including its can-shaped UHF antenna, used for sending data to orbiting spacecraft, and its finned Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), a nuclear power source, at its rear. The rover’s tracks can be seen trailing off in the distance. 

Curiosity is in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that sits within Gale Crater. This image looks down toward the crater floor, with the crater rim barely perceptible on the horizon.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/

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The post Curiosity Postcard Celebrates Rover’s 5,000th Day on Mars appeared first on NASA Science.

Eric Berger - Ars Technica

SpaceX declares Starship ready for orbit, sets launch date next week

Eric Berger
Updated

Pending regulatory approval, SpaceX said today it intends to launch its 14th Starship mission as early as September 22. This flight is notable, as it will be the first time that SpaceX attempts to launch the experimental vehicle into orbit.

The company set a target liftoff time of 7:15 am local in Texas (12:15 UTC), with a 75-minute launch window. Sunrise in Brownsville, Texas, is 7:17 am CT, so the launch could make for some striking imagery.

The super heavy lift rocket will be carrying 26 of the larger V3 Starlink satellites into an orbit 275 km above the Earth. In an update on its website, SpaceX said the Starship upper stage will seek to complete six orbits around the Earth before completing its mission after about 10 hours.

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Marginal Revolution

Very good news

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Michael Kremer picked as World Bank chief economist (Bloomberg).  Here are many many previous MR posts on Kremer, of course Alex also worked with him on Operation Warp Speed.

The post Very good news appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Finance & economics

What Africa’s biggest IPO can do for its stock markets

A new generation of investors is buying up African stocks
Finance & economics

Scott Bessent should stop blaming the bond market

It is working just fine; his interventions, less so
Daring Fireball

‘Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography’

John Gruber
Updated

Apple Security Research has released a concise, cogent paper describing how Apple Reference Image works, and why they made it. A terrific read. Here’s just one fascinating bit regarding privacy:

Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s strongest technical guarantees.

Our implementation also protects the confidentiality of the image itself, including from Apple. Merely capturing a reference image should never expose the actual pixels to Apple or anyone else. We achieve this through the exceptional privacy properties of PCC — the nodes themselves are architected so that not even Apple can access image data, just as Apple cannot see the information processed for Apple Intelligence in PCC. While the revocation service must maintain a private record of photo GUIDs and associated sensors to allow for revocation, it never has access to the image data, and does not allow for public access to this record. And as final revocation checks occur using on-device lists, a device never reveals to anyone which photo it’s looking at in order to find out whether it’s still valid.

 ★ 
Hacker News
Marginal Revolution

What Regulatory Capture Actually Looks Like

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

It’s amazing how a theory can take over a brain. Consider the idea that people believe what serves their interests. As heuristics go, it’s a good one. I use it all the time. Yet when Dario Amodei says AI is dangerous, perhaps even an extinction risk, some people conclude he must be running a marketing campaign. That is stupid. Which is more likely, that a useful heuristic sometimes misfires or that “our product might kill you” is a clever way to sell it? Death threats are a poor marketing strategy.

We also have plenty of evidence that the fears of AI experts are sincere. Amodei, Altman and Musk were all publicly warning about AI risk long before they had AI companies to promote. The worry runs well beyond the executive suite; rank and file researchers share it. And it extends outside the industry altogether, to computer scientists with no product to sell, among them Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton left a high-paying job at Google precisely so he could speak out and Hinton is not in a Berkeley polycule with Eliezer Yudkowsky, at least as far as I know. Whatever else you may say about the belief that AI presents a serious risk, plenty of AI researchers believe it sincerely.

Similarly, when Amodei recently proposed to slow the pace and install independent safety teams at AI companies many people jumped to the conclusion that this was regulatory capture. Sorry, but no, that theory doesn’t make sense. To see why, we should review the theory of regulatory capture.

Regulatory capture came out of the political science literature especially Marver Bernstein’s 1955 classic, Regulating Business by Independent Commission. Bernstein argues for a regulatory life cycle: Gestation, Youth, Maturity, Old Age. A scandal brings a bureaucracy into existence—or gives an existing one new powers. The public’s attention, like Sauron’s eye, fixes on the issue of the day: something must be done. The thalidomide scandal, for example, helped establish the modern FDA.

Gestation gives way to a youthful burst of reform and the do-gooders come to Washington ready to battle the industry. Inevitably, however, the public’s eye looks elsewhere. But the industry never looks away. It lobbies Congress, hires former regulators, trains future ones, and supplies much of the information the agency needs. As the agency matures, accommodation replaces confrontation. By old age, the regulator has become the industry’s protector. The classic example is the ICC, created to regulate the railroads but it eventually came to shield them from competition from the trucking industry.

Notice that classic regulatory capture takes time, it’s a process of erosion rather than a battle, it happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye. As Culpepper argues in Quiet Politics and Business Power, business power goes down as political salience goes up. Regulatory capture and lobbying does a good job explaining why roasting coffee beans was defined as “domestic manufacturing”, thereby lowering Starbuck’s tax rate by 2%. It does less well at explaining big cross-industry issues the public cares about such as environmental regulation or race and gender discrimination regulation. Finally, don’t confuse capture with firms making the best of a bad situation. Philip Morris supported the 2009 Tobacco Control Act not because FDA regulation was Philip Morris’s unconstrained ideal but because it knew regulation was coming and it wanted a seat at the table to nudge the rules in its favor. That’s ordinary political bargaining—or rent-seeking—not evidence that the regulator has been captured.

Now let’s evaluate Amodei’s call for regulation in light of regulatory capture theory. AI regulation is in gestation. Public attention is fixed on the industry, and much of that attention is hostile. The big profits in AI lie in automating work, and job loss is a much more salient fear than extinction. AI politics is now loud–precisely the environment in which Culpepper predicts business power will be weakest. A mature industry can bend regulation to its purposes through revolving doors, longstanding relationships and obscure rulemaking. An industry under Sauron’s eye has much less power and faces much greater risk that politics will bend regulation to its purposes. Political actors are eager for an excuse to redistribute AI rents away from capitalists and toward favored groups (ala Peltzman).

Regulation will reduce AI profits. That doesn’t prove that every rule Amodei favors is innocent of self-interest, an absurd proposition. I suspect that Amodei’s ideal may be something like a single regulated AI monopoly—safe and reasonable profitable, like the old AT&T. But that’s not the profit maximizing outcome. If transformative AI can capture even a fraction of the enormous labor market–the world’s biggest market–laissez-faire would mean vastly greater profits. Amodei may simply prefer a smaller fortune and a safer world. That is perfectly consistent with self-interest playing a role; it is not consistent with the bastardized theory that profit maximization is the only thing that matters or that “capture” is universal.

Go ahead: argue that Amodei and other AI experts are wrong about AI risk. Ask whether his proposals favor Anthropic. But calling “our product might kill you” a clever marketing and regulatory-capture strategy isn’t sophisticated analysis. The facts don’t fit regulatory capture theory and trying to make them fit requires epistemically painful Ptolemaic epicycles. Even a dull Ockham’s razor cuts through that story to the obvious alternative: Amodei actually believes what he’s saying.

The post What Regulatory Capture Actually Looks Like appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Aeon | a world of ideas

The meaning of fake marble

Aeon Video
Updated

Marble painting of a peacock beside a pedestal with a sphere, abstract shapes in the background.

From ancient Roman frescoes to modern kitchen benchtops, our desire to recreate marble is about more than cutting costs

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

The Roman telescope has enough gas for 22 years, double NASA's expectations

Stephen Clark
Updated

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gliding toward its distant observation post on a pinpoint trajectory so precise that engineers estimate the spacecraft's fuel load will last twice as long as their initial expectations, the space agency confirmed Monday.

The $4.3 billion observatory's designers originally planned to load enough propellant into Roman's four fuel tanks for a minimum lifetime of five years, plus a potential five-year mission extension. That was a conservative estimate. NASA officials knew an on-target launch and perfect execution of the observatory's first post-launch course correction maneuver would leave Roman with a hearty fuel reserve.

"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.

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Oklahoma Watch
Market Design

"The single most important quality in a great researcher is to be lucky"

Al Roth
Updated

 Here's an interview recorded during my visit to Taiwan this past April.  It begins with my first reply:

"The single most important quality in a great researcher is to be lucky, and to find topics that are worth working on and that yield to investigation."

 

x 

Marginal Revolution

The economics of cyber risk

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From Aniket Baksy and Daniele Caratelli, here is part of the abstract:

Because larger firms are more attractive targets but also invest more in protection, the model generates an inverse-U relationship between firm size and attack risk, consistent with the data. Introducing cyber risk reduces firm entry by 3.6 percent, aggregate productivity by 0.6 percent, and total output by 1.8 percent. These effects arise from general equilibrium adjustments in entry, firm size, and spillovers that are absent in typical partial-equilibrium analyses. Policy responses differ sharply: appropriately designed subsidies and minimum cybersecurity requirements can raise aggregate output, while bailouts reduce it.

Note this is not a paper about AI.  But it may help us develop estimates of the future costs of AI cyberattacks.  We need much more effort in this direction, and I hope this subfield rises in status rapidly.

The post The economics of cyber risk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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SpaceNews

More satellites watch the battlefield, putting a premium on making sense of the data

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Space Force programs are tapping satellite data and AI to get intelligence to military commanders faster

The post More satellites watch the battlefield, putting a premium on making sense of the data appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Aviationist
Letters from an American

September 15, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Seven years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:

“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I’m okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I’ve been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it’s very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”

I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.

Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and “urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.

And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”

“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”

Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.

And so these Letters from an American were born.

Seven years later, we are approaching the midpoint of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw seven years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.

In that first letter where I warned of rising authoritarianism, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”

And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters.

If you are tired from the last seven years, you have earned the right to be.

And yet you are still here, reading, commenting, protesting, articulating a new future for the nation. And I am proud to be among you.

I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.

And so I write.

I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.

To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals, and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, September 15, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Retired judge J. Michael Luttig warned that House Speaker Mike Johnson could install a loyalist clerk to refuse to seat duly elected Democrats after the 2026 midterms, paralyzing the House. The Supreme Court ruled that the administration cannot implement its mail-in ballot screening program before the midterms. Of 30 lawsuits seeking state voter rolls, Trump has now lost all 23 that have been decided, including before judges he appointed. Iran-backed Houthi forces seized the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on Yemen’s Red Sea coast and struck a Saudi pipeline, compounding the oil crisis caused by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Diesel prices have surpassed 6 dollars a gallon, the highest on record. Anthropic’s CEO published an essay warning that AI development needs stronger regulation, drawing pushback from the administration. ProPublica reported that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration. The New Yorker reported that Jared Kushner has been negotiating a Ukraine peace deal trading Ukrainian territory for Trump family business rights in Russia.

Watch today’s live recording here.

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Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.

You can also find Heather:
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Letters from an American

Attempting to Establish an Authoritarian Government

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Marginal Revolution

When discussing AI policy, start with China

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China.  Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured.

During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict.  China declined all of those.  Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened.

China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.  You may think it is their right to play catch-up, and to be cynical of our motives, but that is what happened.

How well did China exchange timely information about Covid, and cooperate with stopping its initial spread?

Get the picture?

If you start with China in your discussion, you will end up with sensible proposals before getting too caught up in your moods of the day.  If you are reading proposals or for that matter tweets for AI regulation, and the writer does not deal with these China issues in a forthright and very specific manner, you should be very suspicious indeed.

Here is Ezra and Matt Sheehan, discussing related issues (NYT).

The post When discussing AI policy, start with China appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA Science

Purple Haze Aurora

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
Green and purple aurora and white airglow arc above Earth’s limb and the scattered city lights of Central Asia in a nighttime photo taken from the International Space Station.

One of the inspirations for Jimi Hendrix’s iconic 1967 hit “Purple Haze” is said to be the sci-fi novel Night of Light, about a distant planet in a binary star system. Every seven years, the story goes, the stars bathe the planet in a bizarre purple radiance with the power to rearrange physical reality in profound and unexpected ways. The atmosphere’s purple glow, for instance, turned some people into trees and brought statues to life.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, for an astronaut on the International Space Station to invoke the iconic song after witnessing the aurora illuminate Earth’s atmosphere with ethereal greens, reds, and purples. Hendrix would have “rejoiced” at the “brilliant purple,” NASA astronaut Jessica Meir posted on September 8. It “makes me want to kiss the sky,” she added in a nod to the lyrics of the Hendrix song.

The photograph above is one of many that the astronauts took on September 7, 2026, as they orbited an atmosphere quivering with color. The station was at an altitude of 255 miles (411 kilometers) and above Kyrgyzstan when the photo was taken. Stacking several of the photos also yielded a long-exposure series in which the aurora’s green glow mingles with star trails, moonlight, passing satellites, and city lights in a dazzling jumble of illumination.

Aurora is the Latin word for “dawn” and also the name of the Roman goddess of the dawn. Its use in reference to the atmospheric phenomenon likely comes from Europeans living far from the Arctic Circle, who would have experienced the aurora as a faint red glow to the north, resembling the reddish glow in the east at dawn.

The colorful phenomenon typically starts when the Sun sends charged particles toward Earth through solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or an active solar wind. These particles interact with the magnetosphere—the invisible, comet-shaped bubble of magnetic field lines surrounding the planet—compressing and changing the configuration of the magnetic field. In the process, some particles within the field are drawn into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they excite nitrogen and oxygen atoms and molecules, causing them to release photons.

The aurora Meir photographed occurred amid a disturbance associated with a high-speed stream of solar wind from a coronal hole and the lingering effects of multiple coronal mass ejections, according to updates from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. These solar wind disturbances interacted with Earth’s magnetosphere, causing minor (G1) geomagnetic storms.

The colors of auroras are influenced by the type of gas involved and the altitude at which they occur in the atmosphere. Oxygen excited to different energy levels can produce green and red. Green occurs roughly between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 kilometers) altitude, and red occurs above 120 miles (200 kilometers). Excited nitrogen gas, from about 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 kilometers), glows blue or pink depending on the type and energy of the particles it interacts with. Sometimes, the light emitted by gases can appear to mix, making the auroras seem purple, pink, or even white.

While auroras can occur any time of the year, astronauts are especially likely to enjoy the light shows in the spring and fall, around the equinoxes. That’s because the geometry of Earth’s magnetic field relative to the solar wind makes it especially favorable for transferring solar-wind energy into the magnetosphere, a phenomenon known as the Russell-McPherron effect.

This isn’t the only example of Jimi Hendrix’s music making an impression beyond Earth. A selection of Hendrix’s music touched down on the Moon in 2024 with the Odysseus lander. Another Hendrix song, “Voodoo Chile,” made the list of wake-up songs for STS-110, according to a report from NASA’s History Division.

Astronaut photograph ISS075-E-88592 was acquired on September 7, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 15 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 75 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Adam Voiland.

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Green and purple aurora and white airglow arc above Earth’s limb and the scattered city lights of Central Asia in a nighttime photo taken from the International Space Station.

September 7, 2026

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The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Tuesday 15 September 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up pretty betimes and rode as far as Godmanchester, Mr. Moore having two falls, once in water and another in dirt, and there ’light and eat and drunk, being all of us very weary, but especially my uncle and wife. Thence to Brampton to my father’s, and there found all well, but not sensible how they ought to treat my uncle and his son, at least till the Court be over, which vexed me, but on my counsel they carried it fair to them; and so my father, cozen Thomas, and I up to Hinchingbroke, where I find my Lord and his company gone to Boughton, which vexed me; but there I find my Lady and the young ladies, and there I alone with my Lady two hours, she carrying me through every part of the house and gardens, which are, and will be, mighty noble indeed. Here I saw Mrs. Betty Pickering, who is a very well-bred and comely lady, but very fat. Thence, without so much as drinking, home with my father and cozen, who staid for me, and to a good supper; after I had had an hour’s talk with my father abroad in the fields, wherein he begun to talk very highly of my promises to him of giving him the profits of Sturtlow, as if it were nothing that I give him out of my purse, and that he would have me to give this also from myself to my brothers and sister; I mean Brampton and all, I think: I confess I was angry to hear him talk in that manner, and took him up roundly in it, and advised him if he could not live upon 50l. per ann., which was another part of his discourse, that he would think to come and live at Tom’s again, where 50l. per ann. will be a good addition to Tom’s trade, and I think that must be done when all is done. But my father spoke nothing more of it all the time I was in the country, though at the time he seemed to like it well enough. I also spoke with Piggott too this evening before I went in to supper, and doubt that I shall meet with some knots in my business to-morrow before I can do it at the Court, but I shall do my best.

After supper my uncle and his son to Stankes’s to bed, which troubles me, all our father’s beds being lent to Hinchingbroke, and so my wife and I to bed, she very weary.

Read the annotations

Slashdot
California
Spaceflight Now

Live coverage: SpaceX to launch national security payload for U.S. Space Force from Vandenberg

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A Falcon 9 stands on Space Launch Complex 4E ahead of the USSF-259 mission at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Image: SpaceX.

Update Sept. 16, 1:05 p.m. EDT (1705 UTC): SpaceX updated the T-0 liftoff time.

Update Sept. 15, 9:05 p.m. EDT (0105 UTC): SpaceX scrubbed the launch attempt for the mission prior to fueling; targets backup opportunity on Wednesday, Sept. 16.

SpaceX is preparing to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Wednesday night on a national security mission for the U.S. Space Force. The mission reset after a Tuesday launch attempt was scrubbed prior to fueling and without public explanation.

Liftoff of the USSF-259 mission is scheduled at 6:07:56 p.m. PDT / 9:07:56 p.m. EDT on Sept. 16 (0107:56 UTC on Sept. 17). The rocket will fly on a southerly trajectory upon leaving Space Launch Complex 4E.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.

The mission’s classified payload is expected to be deployed into a low Earth orbit, inclined roughly 80 degrees from the Equator. It will be SpaceX’s third launch in a month procured by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 contract.

To date, SSC has declined to confirm any details about these missions, which also included USSF-366 (launched Aug. 15) and USSF-153 (launched Sept. 10). Those missions were identified as R1 and R2 in public documents and each flight carried 23 satellites. USSF-259 is identified in the same documents as TH-1. A mission designated R-3 is scheduled for Sept. 27.

SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage B1097. This will be its 13th flight after previously launching NROL-172, Twilight, Transporter-17, Sentinel-6B, and eight batches of Starlink satellites.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1097 will target a landing on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 224th landing on this vessel and the 661st Falcon booster landing to date.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/15/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

New study reveals how COVID-19 likely spread between countries
The Remnants of a Lost ‘Supercontinent’ Just Rewrote the History of Life on Earth
Kennedy to deliver keynote for anti-vaccine group he once led
The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof
‘The toll was much higher’: Israeli study finds COVID deaths underreported
Why Is No One Talking About Long COVID?
New Cancer Vaccines Are on the Horizon. Disinformation Could Blunt Their Impact. Doctors and researchers are trying to boost trust in vaccines as the Trump administration peddles falsehoods.

Other:

A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work
Do no harm? Not these GOP doctor-politicians. Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall joins a list of conservative lawmakers who ignore their medical oath
Save Humanity From Us (By Giving Us Money And Special Treatment)
Inside the internal turmoil between D.C. agencies, local police, and the National Security Council to clear homeless encampments
Hunter Biden’s Paintings
Several Texas Republicans condemn Bo French’s racist posts calling Asian students at UT a “problem”
Upstairs-Neighbor Warfare in Korea (lol)
Droney
He Wants to Deport Native Americans. He May Win Statewide Office in Texas.
First ‘Take It Down Act’ Sentencing Puts Man Behind Bars for 15 Years
Trump’s weird war against the states
The Man on a Quest to Digitally Preserve America’s Public Restrooms
America built a surveillance state out of fear and never left it
9/11 Began 25 Years of Nonstop War and Abuses of Power
The Dollar Will Be the Last Pillar To Fall
“Many National Guard just moved into a luxury apartment complex in SW DC.”
Kennedy Center could close as early as Tuesday, warns of bankruptcy, documents show
Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud
Reaganism Broke US Tax Brackets. It’s Time To Fix Them.
Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’
Trump plan to limit mail voting hinders Democrats more than GOP, analysis finds
‘Don’t I deserve a little grace?’: Lonnie Bunch on pressure from Trump and leaving the Smithsonian on his own terms
Hunter Biden’s Paintings
The new Sanders-Casar Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act – and why I oppose it
To What
The push to remove lead pipes is on. Thousands of water systems still don’t know where theirs are
Does Teresa Benitez-Thompson stand a chance in deep red Northern Nevada?
America is built for driving. There’s hidden demand for something better.
Why American Relocations Are Plummeting
4th Fairfax County Public Schools’ student riding a bike or e-scooter hit by car in 2 days

Marginal Revolution

Callum Williams on cybersecurity prices

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Share prices of cyber firms have jumped around a lot in recent weeks, leading one side or the other to claim victory. But the crucial point is that, relative to the historical norm, the market is not really pricing ANYTHING big to change. There was a much bigger move in cyber stocks in both 2020-22 (up) and 2022-23 (down) but no one read “AI x-risk” into this.

Here is the full post with graph.

Image

Hardly the final word, and I am myself more pessimistic than those numbers indicate.  But at least with this we are getting somewhere concrete and scientific rather than just scare stories.  As for meta-commentary on the discourse itself, you really should be asking who are the people insisting on data here, and who are the people trying to talk you away from focusing on the data so much.

The post Callum Williams on cybersecurity prices appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Schneier on Security

On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.

Hacker News
Paul Krugman

Why Is Trump Still Boosting AI?

Paul Krugman
Updated

Hot dog - Wikipedia

For the next couple of days I will be a Frankfurter — that is, attending a conference at the European Central Bank. So posts, if they come at all, will be short and erratic in timing.

Will AI transform the economy? The jury is still out on that one: So far there is little evidence for either the massive job losses or the soaring productivity growth industry leaders threatened/promised, but it’s still early days.

But AI does seem to be transforming U.S. politics. I can’t think of a technology that has inspired so much hate across such a wide political spectrum. Even the leading AI companies are warning about the dangers of their technology and pleading for government regulation to slow it down.

Which makes it more than puzzling that Donald Trump is going all in on AI, claiming that concerns about its dangers are a “hoax” and opposing any kind of regulation.

In so doing, he’s taking a wildly unpopular position. Here’s recent polling from UMass Amherst:

Notice that even a large part of Trump’s base is deserting him on this issue, with a quarter of Republicans disapproving.

So why is Trump posting stuff like this?

Robert Reich has a good post on the subject, urging us to follow the money: As he notes, members of the Trump family have personal financial stakes in the industry. And one motive one should never, ever dismiss in current U.S. affairs is Trump’s personal greed.

I would, however, add two more points.

First, I think Reich is too glib in dismissing the idea that Trump imagines that he knows what he’s doing. “It can’t be,” Reich writes, “that he knows very much about AI.” But does he know that he doesn’t know? That Truth Social post above, in which Trump declares himself perfectly able to manage this wild new technology because he is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, is like a textbook illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which incompetent people are highly confident in their own judgment because they’re too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent.

Second, it’s important to realize how much Trump needs an AI boom.

Trump came into office believing that his tariffs would produce a huge boom in “manly” jobs. In fact, job growth has been weak — and more than all of the job gains have gone to women. Meanwhile, tariffs have driven up consumer prices.

And then there’s the Iran war, which has been an economic as well as a strategic disaster. Diesel prices are now well above $6 a gallon. Trump officials love to say that gasoline was over $5 a gallon under Biden, which was true — for one week.

Yet one thing did seem to be going right under Trump II. Enthusiasm for AI was generating a huge investment boom and supporting stock prices. Trump officials, notably Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary — who Edward Luce of the Financial Times now dubs “the Pete Hegseth of the Treasury” (ouch) — had taken to claiming that AI will solve all their problems, ending inflation by reducing costs and curing the budget deficit by generating huge economic growth.

The backlash against AI, then, is taking away the one thing the Trumpists thought they had going for them. So in a way it’s understandable that Trump is trying desperately to hold on to the magic (and possibly endangering the future of humanity, but he doesn’t care about that.)

But of course it won’t work. The AI boom, once Trump’s last remaining political asset, is now a huge liability.

Simon Willison's Weblog

The contagion of fear

The contagion of fear

Bryan Cantrill responds to the tweet by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon confirming that many Anthropic researchers believe AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade".

Bryan shares a story of his own youthful mistakes causing unjustified panic among less technical peers, and warns against doing the same:

These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth, and given the obvious importance of AI, it is unsurprising that they have leapt into the mainstream, with people asking the natural question: how would that happen? The answers always rely on hand-wavy extrapolation into the future; for example, Jacob Coxon cites "hacking critical infrastructure" and "extinction-level bioweapons" without further elaboration. But Coxon is not an expert on critical infrastructure, nor on bioweapons — nor, for that matter, on extinction. [...]

That said, we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc. — that burden must lie with those making the claim. The lesson that I learned (shamefully) decades ago is that domain experts, by way of their expertise, implicitly hold the public’s trust — and we must not abuse it. It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims — and maximally so when raising the alarm.

Bryan talked about his doubts about the bioweapons concerns in the recent episode of Oxide and Friends that I joined. You can hear more of his thoughts on that starting at 51m44s in that episode. Here's 57m04s:

I really think we need to be careful because it's so easy to be overcome with fear when we kind of make up these... it can give you biological weapons. Like, how? I mean, can we please have a biologist weigh in on this? Or can we have like someone who's got experience with bioweapons? [...] The bioweapon thing just gets under my fingernails because it leaves so much to the imagination that we insert with fear.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: ai, anthropic, bryan-cantrill, ai-ethics

Simon Willison's Weblog

What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

My comment on What blog posts influenced your thinking the most? — Lobste.rs.

An early Joel Spolsky one for me was The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I read that near the start of my career and it's encouraged me to always be looking for improved understanding of the layers under where I'm working, just in case one of those abstractions leaks.

A more recent one, from 2018, is Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt by Will Larson. I absolutely love his idea that migrations (e.g. replacing one service with a new one, or switching database engines, or whatever) are part and parcel of software engineering and are a skill that you should invest in and get good at, not avoid or treat as special one-offs.

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum by Charity Majors was hugely influential for me. I was stuck in engineering management and worried that if I switched back to being an "Individual Contributor" (ugh I hate that term) I'd damage my career. Charity gave me permission to make the switch by pointing out that many of the most successful software developers pendulum from one track to the other multiple times over their career, and doing so makes you better at both sides.

Tags: joel-spolsky, software-engineering, will-larson, charity-majors

Rands in Repose

Robots Have No Voice

rands
Updated

Robots Have No Voice

Robot writing has no voice. That’s why you find it annoying. Like it or not, your brain is currently one of the best organic pattern matchers in the known solar system, and that means you can detect patterns. Like breathing, you just do this. All the time.

You are not being triggered by the endless em dashes; it’s not the trailing participial clauses, and the incessant adverb transitions. It’s that the robot does not care about what it’s writing; it has near-infinite data at its disposal, and it’s been instructed to keep you happy because that makes good business sense. Let’s discuss each in reverse order:

Brown-noser: Like any good business, the job of the robot is to make you a repeat customer, and that means it needs to efficiently respond to your prompt. Two parts to explain here:

  1. Efficiently. If you’re using ChatGPT or Claude on the web, those respective companies have provided the robot with meta guidance on how to answer. I suspect they provide a clause you never see that reads “Better is the enemy of done,” which means “Answer quickly,” because faster is cheaper. The reason I know this exists is that I mostly use Claude via Ghostty, and Claude Code knows to think (see: burning tokens) before answering my questions, which takes longer and costs more. I am shocked when I prompt via the web, and the answer is often both instant and frequently wrong.
  2. Your prompt. What’s your prompt? I don’t know. I do know that the robot’s primary job in responding is to make sure you get a satisfying answer. I didn’t say correct; I said satisfying. How do I know this exists? Because I have super dumb ideas all the time and never in the history of ever has a robot told me my idea was dumb and — wow — when I say dumb, I mean if you were sitting next to me in this coffee shop and I was telling you this dumb thing, you would raise your hand to stop me, put that hand on my shoulder, and tell me, “Wow. That… is dumb.” Furthermore, once you graciously shared this feedback, I would immediately see the dumbness.

Brown-nosing is when someone on your team incessantly and annoyingly agrees with you. All your ideas are good. Yes sir! I’ll get right on that. The robots have weaponized this sycophantic behavior at scale.

True story: I had a question about something dumb, and I was sparring with Claude Code on the inane topic when I realized all the robot was doing was agreeing with me. I typed, “I think you are telling me what I want to hear,” to which it responded, “Yeah. Probably.”

Infinite Know-It-All: Ok, not infinite, but a lot more than you have at your immediate disposal. The robot wants to answer your query efficiently, and it has all of that at hand, so it rapidly finds quite a bit of information and wants to share every bit of it with you. But which data matters more? Which matters less? What are the interesting bits versus the laborious, boring, endless facts?

Given your brief prompt, desire to help, and impressive repository of data, web-based robot responses are often walls of text. It’s like your good friend who is suddenly into the Jason Bourne franchise. Endless Matt Damon facts. Is it interesting? Maybe. Is it often more than you need? Frequently. These robot responses read like a know-it-all, which is interesting because they literally know nothing, which is the actual point…

Robots Don’t Care About Caring: That wall of text the robot just generated for you on the breakfast sandwiches in San Francisco is mostly true (it did search for the best breakfast sandwiches in San Francisco) and pretty complete, but as you read it… that emptiness you feel inside? It’s because the writing has no voice.

Good writing captures voice. Good writing documents how another human thinks. When you read text generated by a robot, it’s that thinking that is missing. Your world-class pattern matcher sees all the words, sentences, ideas, arguments, footnotes, em dashes, and everything else you’d expect out of writing, but the reason you squint your eyes and wonder, “Did a robot write this?” is because… there is no voice.

It does not care about its writing. It looks like it cares about you, but that’s because it’s echoing the last words you wrote — the prompt — and working incredibly hard to find the optimal set of words to respond to your specific set of words.

Do you want to know how someone thinks? Read their writing.1

Expect the Unexpected

Lyle and I were talking about robots on The Important Thing. I explained that the way you’d know a work was human was in the mistakes, “The robot would never do this, this is dumb; must be a human.”

Mistakes might not be the right word.

Non-linear. Out of place. Creative. Or perhaps just unexpected.

I was watching Sinners for the first time… on a plane. You know the scene: it’s when our main character, Sammie Moore, starts singing for the first time, summoning his musical ancestors, both past and future. Suddenly, there was a Jimi Hendrix-inspired character on the screen in the middle of what you thought was a Depression-era vampire movie

I clapped. Sitting on that plane.

Because I didn’t see that coming. My brain loved it. The lack of pattern.

So much voice.

  1. Some of the best long-form voices out there right now: Daring Fireball, Simon Willison, Charity Majors, Jason Kottke, and Stratechery.
Marginal Revolution

Tuesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Easy to bioengineer a very dangerous virus?

2. The astrophysicists are getting antsy too.  Princeton is also getting nervous.  If nothing else, these are huge PR own goals.  The guy is a Mill scholars, can you imagine J.S. Mill tweeting that way?

3. New David Brooks podcast.

4. One Chinese view of AI risk.  And from Richard Hanania.

5. Arnold Kling on Polanyi knowledge.

6. Jeremy Stern profile of Mark Zuckerberg.  Great piece.

7. China’s first AI-generated TV series.

8. Introducing Free Press Excursions.

9. Redux of my earlier talk/session at St. Andrews on Effective Altruism as a philosophy.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

SCOTUS Shuts Down Trump Mail Takeover Plan

Josh Marshall
Updated

In a brief order, the Supreme Court appears to have shut down the Trump White House’s plan to take over and drastically complicate voting by mail for the November midterms. Only the two most corrupt Justices, Alito and Thomas, dissented from the opinion. Kavanaugh meanwhile noted that a major part of his reasoning wasn’t so much the merits but how little time there is before the midterms and the difficulty of implementing any changes so quickly.

For the sake of clarity, this is not a final ruling but rather the Court declining to allow the plan to move forward while the case itself is being decided. Effectively, however, that would appear to settle the matter for the November midterm.

Just my own take on this: I suspect there might be a majority or at least more than two votes to okay a plan like this. The Court is simply that corrupt and heedless of the constitution. But this implementation was likely to create massive election chaos, delays, perhaps even the impossibility of holding an election in states which vote entirely by mail. I suspect the Justices did not want to own that outcome.

Our reporter Kate Riga has the whole story here.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

AI Frontier Labs and the Loving Hand of Product Liability

Josh Marshall
Updated

As you’ve likely seen, a strange and perhaps positive chain of events unfolded over the weekend in the world of AI and what we might call human extinction discourse. Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, posted an essay calling for a global slow-down in AI development to allow more time to prioritize safety and what the industry calls “alignment” and pledging that Anthropic would take a series of steps in that direction unilaterally. Somewhat surprisingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and archvillain Elon Musk stepped forward and said they agreed and appeared to agree to join Anthropic in the proposed slowdown.

Regardless of what one thinks of AI and its possible dangers — existential or otherwise — it’s hard not to see this as at least a somewhat good development. And I say that with full cognizance of the various arguments about financial overextension or heading off sterner regulation that may make these moves self-interested. (AI critic Gary Marcus gives it a qualified endorsement along with a good cross-section of responses.) But I wanted to step back for a moment and talk more generally about the question of “externalities” which has always been the problem lurking in the background of Big Tech’s road to national and global domination.

Before getting into that, a subsidiary point. When you starting digging into debates about AI you realize there’s just a wild cast of characters, groups, movements all arrayed around this technology, some boosters, others critics. A lot of AI critics point to the fact that a number of the leaders, particularly at Anthropic, are part of the so-called “rationalist” community, adjacent to “effective altruism.” And these folks have kind of a cottage industry or cottage subculture which is rife with predicted future extinction events. Is this part of the driver of all these claims about being in a race with AI to make sure it doesn’t decide to exterminate us? I’m really not sure. But it does seem to play some role. (This “rationalist” world — no I’m not totally sure how they got possession of this word — are big in the Valley.) Meanwhile, you’ve got another faction in the tech world, which thinks all that talk of extinction events is a bunch of culty nonsense and/or basically a ruse to allow companies like Anthropic to lock in their dominance as a kind government cartel.

And the interesting thing is that it’s … well, the evil guys, who are on that side of the argument. Particularly David Sacks, who is now Trump’s AI advisor and before that and probably continuing is a like a professional Elon Musk fanboy and courtier. So in response to this proposed slowdown, Sacks put a post on Twitter which basically says, ‘Great, you’re pausing. But don’t pretend you need to suspend anti-trust laws or that all these dangers you whine about can’t be handled by normal market and liability mechanisms.’

“Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability,” to use his words.

Now, I’m certainly not taking the side of David Sacks here, who might best be described as Elon Musk without the charm or the money. But this issue of liability actually is a key one. Indeed it’s not too much to say that the story of Big Tech over the last quarter century has been one of improperly accounted for externalities. We discussed this in an Ed Blog post (“Feral AI and the Question of Externalities”) back in 2023 …

One of the central dynamics of the Internet/digital technology age has been the issue of externalities. Facebook makes billions but leaves a path of destruction and dislocation in its wake that society has to grapple with and pay for. Some of this is just Schumpeterian creative destruction. New technologies and new businesses based on them make old ones obsolete and drive their ruin. We’ve broadly accepted this as a fact and a feature, albeit a disruptive one, of living in a capitalist, free society. But many are more like nuclear power plants that dump their used fuel rods in a local river. The issue isn’t capitalist disruption, it’s the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk.

The rush to bring these tools to market is partly simple profit motive but, even more, something beyond that: the need to be first. Google at least sees the risk that its empire of search, which still drives most of its billions in profit, could be ripped from beneath it by Microsoft — which has the OpenAI franchise and is working to incorporate it into what has always been its sad-sack also-ran search engine, Bing. That’s existential. Hundreds of billions are potentially at stake for both companies. Being first can mean everything — as it did for Google a generation ago. But for society at large, there are other equities in the balance. And there are flashing warning signs here about the need to slow down.

View Article

From: Feral AI and the Question of Externalities

By Josh Marshall | 02.16.23 | 2:38 pm

Liability is a legal and economic framework for properly assigning, properly tethering together, the gains and risks/costs associated with economic activity. It’s true that at the extreme end, liability can become so onerous that society loses through lost innovation and economic growth. In practice that’s seldom the problem. A huge, huge amount of the economic powerhouse of Silicon Valley and its concentrated wealth creation has been a matter of pushing off all its downsides onto the public, either collectively or individually. Nuclear power is super, super lucrative if you just fire up a reactor in your backyard with zero containment and throw away the spent fuel rods in the municipal garbage or the local lake.

With AI, laws which properly and securely assigned liability would go at least a decent way to solving some of these problems. The same investors pouring hundreds of billions into frontier AI labs would more clearly see how a few catastrophes could sweep away all that wealth in a moment. Needless to say, markets are not always rational. I would never claim otherwise. But the proper assignment of liability is certainly part of the equation.

Daring Fireball

[Sponsor] WorkOS: How SSO Works and the Fastest Way to Add It

Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Updated

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider.

Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX. Or skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS.

Read the guide →

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Apple’s 27.0 OS Updates

John Gruber
Updated

Armin Briegel at Scripting OS X has compiled links for all the release notes for all of today’s OS updates (features, developer, security). In addition to the 27.0 updates, Apple also released 26.7 updates and MacOS 15.8 Sequoia. Big day.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

TPM Live: Chris Mathias on the Charlottesville Marcher Poised to Take Office in Florida

Allegra Kirkland
Updated

ICYMI, TPM’s new reporter Chris Mathias just published a new investigation revealing that the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Chris joined TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube live this afternoon to talk about his piece, the modern GOP’s “never punch right attitude,” and “the screaming emergency” of having Charlottesville marchers take elected office.

Today is also Chris’ first official day on staff! So please follow him on Bluesky and X and welcome him to the TPM community.

Oklahoma Watch
The Cross Section

Trump Finds One More Way to Sabotage His Party In the Midterms

Paul Waldman
Updated

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There are moments in American politics when one issue becomes so powerful that both parties converge on roughly the same position, because to stand in front of the approaching tsunami shouting “I disagree!” seems politically suicidal. That’s what it was like in the immediate aftermath of September 11, when just one member of Congress (Barbara Lee, currently the mayor of Oakland) had the courage to oppose the resolution to go to war in Afghanistan. It’s what it was like in the 1994 midterms, when the crime issue became so overwhelming that nearly every Democrat campaigned on how “tough” they’d be.

What’s happening right now with artificial intelligence and data centers isn’t quite the forced unanimity we saw after 9/11, but it isn’t far off. With just seven weeks until the midterm elections, the anti-tech momentum has gotten so intense that politicians who had promoted data centers have reversed their stance, and almost nobody — Democrat or Republican — wants to be caught saying anything good about AI or Silicon Valley.

There might have been a chance that despite their party’s alliance with Silicon Valley, Republican candidates could have slithered out of danger on this issue, or at least not seen it turn a bad election into an outright catastrophe. But Donald Trump won’t let them.

It’s gotten so bad that even the tech sociopaths are worried

After a series of alarming stories about AI agents performing unforeseen hacks and a rapidly growing movement against the proliferation of data centers, the AI oligarchs themselves apparently decided that the building political pressure demanded a response. So Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, posted a long article saying that “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” then Sam Altman of OpenAI and the powerful white supremacist Elon Musk chimed in to agree.

As of yet, they don’t seem to be doing much about it, other than saying they’ll be super-careful and promising to keep talking amongst themselves about how careful they’ll be. None of us should take their motives at face value; this is likely nothing but an effort to tamp down the growing backlash. It might also be one more go-round of the doomer hype/investment cycle, in which the companies say their products might kill us all, which convinces people that AI really is going to be the most important invention in human history, which then leads those with money to provide the hundreds of billions of dollars the companies need to fund their operations while not asking too many questions about whether the industry will ever generate enough income to cover what it’s spending.

In any case, one of the reasons public opinion has turned so overwhelmingly against the industry is that none of the promised glories it insists will come from AI have arrived; we’re still waiting on that cure for cancer and the solution to climate change. Meanwhile, there’s a steady drumbeat of scary headlines about the nightmares AI is either already creating or might create soon.

Even the stories not about rogue actors or terrorists all seem designed to make people more worried than excited, whether it’s teachers warning that AI is damaging kids’ ability to learn or stories about morons trying to cram AI anywhere and everywhere, whether the technology is mature and safe enough or not:

The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to make artificial intelligence an integral part of medical care in the United States, throwing the resources and support of the federal government into projects that deploy A.I. agents to diagnose and prescribe treatments to patients.

The multifront effort at the Department of Health and Human Services has raised concerns among some officials over the past few months that change is moving too quickly, with inadequate evidence of the technology’s safety and effectiveness, according to people who have been involved the discussions. They also worry about outsized influence of Silicon Valley investors that have previously played little role in federal health policy.

Since this is being overseen by RFK Jr. and the collection of dingbats he has assembled at HHS, what could possibly go wrong?

Source: University of Massachusetts poll, September 14, 2026

The bull enters the china shop

President Trump’s decisions of late almost seem designed to ensure that his party loses the midterms. You’ve got the insane trade war with Canada; the Iran war that is driving up prices, especially for gas; his obsession with his ballroom and arch and reflecting pool, which makes him look indifferent to people’s struggles — is there any other way he could sabotage his party’s vulnerable officeholders?

Stand back:

That comes just two weeks after this:

So now we’re in a place where the AI companies themselves are warning that development is moving too fast, and Trump — who keeps telling everyone they should pretend he’s on the ballot — has made himself the last and loudest advocate of pedal-to-the-metal development of both AI and data centers.

Democrats are always being told that they’re being elitist and condescending when they tell voters that something they’re concerned about actually isn’t a problem, or that those voters should think about an issue differently than they have before. This is supposed to be electoral poison; instead, Democrats are told, they should validate whatever voters already believe and pander to them relentlessly. Yet here we have the president of the United States explicitly telling people that worrying about AI and data centers makes them fools who want to be poor, and dupes for China to boot. “Whoever wins AI, wins,” he keeps saying, to which most sane people would say, “Wins what, exactly? And what does it mean to ‘win AI’?” Trump himself has no idea.

I started by noting some times in the past when an issue became so important that the parties converged on a position; right now that position is 1) AI is potentially dangerous and ought to be regulated (somehow or other) by the government, and 2) data centers are bad and at the very least should only be allowed in your community or your state with strict commitments from the builders about energy use, water use, taxes paid, and jobs created — or even better, not built at all. That’s what almost all Republican candidates are saying right now.

But here’s the thing about occasions like this: When members of one party are changing their position to arrive at where most of the public is, they don’t usually succeed. Just as Republicans benefited from the default assumption in 2002 that they were the party that would wage war to make Americans safe, and in 1994 that they were the party that favored getting “tough” on crime, today they’re caught by the presumption that they’re the party that favors giving corporations unfettered freedom to trample on the little people.

And since the president is such an enthusiastic booster of AI and data center construction, and so contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with him, that becomes the position of the Republican Party. Any particular candidate might try to convince voters he actually wants to restrain the villainous tech firms, but they’ll barely be able to hear him over the grating shouts of the guy with the world’s loudest megaphone.

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

This Atlantic hurricane season is about to do something that hasn't happened in 175 years

Eric Berger
Updated

Last week, the Atlantic hurricane season blew through its traditional peak—which comes around September 10—with nary a tropical wave in sight, let alone a storm or hurricane.

This is remarkable. Usually this is the time of year when sea surface temperatures reach their warmest in the tropics, and with a favorable atmosphere it should be smooth skating for tropical systems. But this year, the main region where most tropical systems develop is choked with Saharan dust and wind shear.

No one is complaining. Landfalling hurricanes are incredibly destructive for coastal areas and have the potential for considerable inland rainfall. Even storms at sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, can send energy prices skyrocketing—the last thing needed this year.

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

Rocket Lab is seeing red about NASA's decision on a Mars spacecraft

Eric Berger
Updated

In theory, developing a spacecraft that will fly to Mars, insert itself into orbit around the red planet, and relay transmissions back and forth to large satellite dishes on Earth is a relatively straightforward proposition.

NASA's procurement of a "Mars Telecommunications Network" spacecraft, however, has turned out to be one of the most engrossing dramas of the year for the US space agency.

The agency finally reached a decision earlier this month, selecting Blue Origin to develop, launch, and operate a $700 million spacecraft at Mars. However, the main competitor for the award, Rocket Lab, was not happy—at all. On Friday, the company filed a protest of NASA's decision with the US Government Accountability Office.

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Schneier on Security

25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare.

One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. ICE uses it in immigration actions and against people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest. It’s also increasingly part of private security systems, such as facial recognition at venues such as Madison Square Garden and networked Flock license plate capture systems on roads and in parking lots.

The interrelation between private and governmental mass surveillance is worth examining. Surveillance is the business model of the internet; companies like Google and Facebook constantly spy on their users’ behavior. From the National Security Agency relying on data collected by telecommunication and internet companies, to local sheriffs and ICE agents relying on cellphone location data and privately managed automatic license plate readers, governments primarily obtain the mass surveillance information through private companies. Increasingly, access doesn’t just come through legal processes, either. FBI Director Kash Patel recently confirmed in congressional testimony that the agency is purchasing information on Americans from data brokers and intends to continue to do so.

This pipeline from private collection to governmental collection means that as companies collect more information for surveillance capitalism purposes, more is available to law enforcement as well. And as the technology for mass surveillance and analysis improves, especially with the increased use of AI technologies, the problems attendant to mass surveillance grow as well.

After 9/11, the idea that the government could surveil the population to safety took hold. In 2001, the fear of terrorism reached a frequency and intensity never before seen. Along with that came the fear that the enemy could be anyone, anywhere. As a result, the government’s response was to watch everyone, everywhere. This line of reasoning underpinned the shift from targeted to mass surveillance. Or, in the words of an internal National Security Agency (NSA) presentation that was made public as part of Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, a government that can “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All,” and “Sniff it All,” will ultimately, “Know it All.” Similar rationales support the rise of domestic mass surveillance: if law enforcement could see and hear everything, it could more effectively interdict and solve serious crimes.

The national security community has never provided a full analysis of the costs and benefits of these mass surveillance programs, either in terms of taxpayer dollars or diversion of resources from other efforts—or any demonstration that those techniques stopped attacks that otherwise they would not have been able to prevent. While the NSA occasionally presents examples of the successes due to its mass surveillance programs, especially when those techniques are under public pressure, the examples also regularly fall apart upon serious scrutiny. And even if some utility exists, it must be seriously weighed against the costs.

Similarly, there has never been any comprehensive analysis about whether domestic immigration or law enforcement’s use of these techniques actually makes people safer, or whether other techniques could produce the same results. Instead, both the police and the companies selling these tools float anecdotes and dubious data. For example, Flock’s data equates the number of law enforcement hits in their database with actually solving crimes.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, it seems reasonable to step back and evaluate the costs of this shift to mass surveillance, especially in terms of Americans’ rights and freedoms.

The Shift

The easiest place to see a shift to mass surveillance was in the government’s decision immediately after 9/11 to collect Americans’ telephone records. The program started under an argument of pure executive power as the “President’s Surveillance Program.” But in 2006, that argument secretly shifted to a novel interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot. Act which had only previously authorized more targeted access to record. While some media and public interest organizations struggled to force the government to reveal the program as early as late 2005, the government only officially confirmed it after the 2013 Snowden disclosures. In 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s interpretation of Section 215 as allowing mass collection of telephone records. Later the same year, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act. While this new law still allows collection of a tremendous amount of domestic telephone records, it ended the indiscriminate mass collection that had occurred for nearly fourteen years.

Other shifts to mass surveillance continue through today. The NSA launched its Upstream program, which involved intercepting both metadata and content from key telecommunications junctures inside the U.S., soon after 9/11. It was also initially conducted under a claim of purely presidential authority. This program was brought under marginal congressional and programmatic (not targeted) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court review via Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. In 2017, more than15 years after its inception, the NSA ended content searches due to FISA court pressure, but the mass collection continues.

Despite the stated goal of conducting mass spying only on people outside the U.S.—which itself is problematic given international law’s requirement that surveillance be both necessary and proportionate—mass surveillance collects a tremendous amount of U.S. persons’ communications. This can happen because people communicate with people abroad, or because of overcollection—when government agencies gather far more personal data on non-targeted US persons than authorized by law. The concerns about collecting Americans’ data on U.S. soil led Congress to allow the program to officially expire in 2026, although the previously-approved mass surveillance itself continues until at least Spring of 2027.

The shift to mass surveillance would be notable enough even if it remained only a strategy of the intelligence community. It has not. Americans are awash in mass surveillance. Networks of automated license plate readers such as those offered by Flock and Vigilant Solutions blanket both public and private roadways and parking lots. These networks often allow searches by law enforcement, including across jurisdictions. They are, for example, being used to track people seeking abortions across state lines. Facial recognition tools, once the province of only the more elite parts of federal law enforcement, are increasingly used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on immigrants and protesters, in airports by the Transportation Security Administration, as well as by private entities. And, of course, modern phones track users’ locations constantly—and that information is readily available to law enforcement, often with only minimal process protections.

Constitutional Costs

Regardless of the murkiness of its actual usefulness, the shift from targeted to mass surveillance has profound implications for Americans’rights. It has created risks that have become increasingly evident, especially under the Trump administration.

At a basic level, the Fourth Amendment guarantees that citizens can be secure in their “persons, houses, papers and effects” from unreasonable searches. Warrants breaching that security should be supported by probable cause and particular descriptions of the place to be searched and items to be seized. Mass surveillance turns that promise on its head, allowing access to our “papers and effects” by the government without individualized suspicion or a particularized description of what data is being seized, much less probable cause. This protection was in response to colonial British misuse of writs of assistance, which authorized indiscriminate searches rather than targeted ones.

The justifications for exempting mass surveillance from constitutional protection vary. For Section 702, the government has taken the position that U.S. persons’ communications caught up in the dragnet, either due to overcollection or because they were communicating with someone outside the United States, do not require a warrant prior to initial collection or secondary access by the FBI and several other agencies. The argument is that if the initial collection was not aimed at Americans, the information is free from constitutional protection for any later uses, even for reasons far afield from the initial rationale for collection.

Other arguments rest on the claim that metadata is outside the Fourth Amendment, despite its demonstrated ability to reveal intimate details of all of our lives. Still others rest on the Supreme Court-created Third Party Doctrine, which holds that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to data shared with companies that provide us with services. Some turn on whether analysis by machine counts, claiming that only “human eyes” matter—a particularly troubling argument with the rise of artificial intelligence. What’s more, the government has used doctrines like standing to limit the ability of those subjected to mass surveillance to seek constitutional protection. No matter the argument, the goal is the same: to place the mechanisms and fruits of mass surveillance outside the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

The overarching truth is that, due to the concerted efforts by the government since 9/11, and the rise of technologies in recent years, the slice of Americans’ lives and data that are actually protected by the Fourth Amendment has shrunk significantly in the past 25 years. Together, with the technical capabilities of mass surveillance and the increased ability for that data to be analyzed using AI tools, the “security in our papers and effects” that the constitution promises seems increasingly illusory.

In addition to the Fourth Amendment, mass surveillance creates tensions with the First Amendment. The Constitution has long recognized that the right to freedom of speech requires a zone of privacy against governmental surveillance. The right to anonymous speech as well as the right of association both recognize the chilling effect that surveillance creates for people saying unpopular things or attempting to organize for political or other societal change. Mass surveillance grants the authorities the ability to track those people, both in real time and historically, that is inconsistent with actual techniques of freedom of speech and assembly.

That is why the recently released 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy is so troubling. On page seven, the White House expressly states that it intends to target domestic activists with its heretofore foreign-targeted powers. It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.” While framed as targeting “violent” groups, it’s clear that the government intends to use its national security tools, presumably including the tools of mass surveillance, against Americans in ways that will create profound tensions with the First Amendment rights of people to organize and communicate privately.

Costs Due to Mistakes and Abuse

Even assuming some utility from mass surveillance—a fact we do not dispute, even if the public record is shaky and conclusory—the history of both the national security and domestic uses of mass surveillance confirms that these tools are inevitably misused, and that mistakes have impacted huge numbers of Americans. The past twenty-five years have demonstrated that it is not possible to surveil the entire US population while staying within the bounds of even a very generous legal framework like Section 702.

As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) recently stated in discussion of Section 702 in an interview with Tech Policy Press: “backdoor searches have been used improperly for protestors, 19,000 campaign donors, members of Congress, journalists, government officials, a state court judge who had complained to the FBI about police misconduct. It has been abused substantially in the past.” The NSA experienced so much abuse of its mass surveillance tools by actual or aspiring romantic partners and ex-spouses that an internal name emerged for it: “LOVEINT,” or Love Intelligence.

That same pattern of abuse is now emerging at the domestic law enforcement level. A Texas police officer misused, and then lied about, using license plate readers to track a woman suspected of seeking an abortion. Multiple law enforcement officials have been accused of tracking people they either wished to have a relationship with or who were their exes. And mass surveillance technologies have been used to track both immigration targets and citizens engaging in their First Amendment-protected right to track and record the police.

Mistakes are inevitable with collections of data of this size and scope. The history of the FISA court’s reviews of Section 702 is littered with examples of the NSA not being able to follow its own rules limiting the scope of what it collects and analyzes, even after having been given multiple chances by the court. On the local level, the technical protections that Flock, for example, put in place have repeatedly been insufficient to stop “accidental” sharing its data with out-of-state law enforcement. These mistakes have fueled growing efforts by local communities across the country to remove license plate readers. Those efforts should be the first step in a broader reconsideration of mass surveillance.

More generally, ubiquitous surveillance carries a real societal cost. The chilling effects are real and pervasive, and they tend to fall hardest on the most marginalized members of society. Moreover, social progress requires the ability to experiment in secret. It’s hard to imagine a society progressing morally to the point of accepting and legalizing things like marijuana use or gay marriage if the earliest signs of that shift are snuffed out because of overzealous surveillance.

Reversing Course

While a cost-benefit analysis is not the best frame for deciding constitutional rights, it is a place to start to evaluate government policies. If the costs are too high and the benefits too small, what should the public do? While the policy and legal frameworks can be individually complex, mass surveillance is a problem in all of its applications. So too should solutions be comprehensive rather than piecemeal.

One comprehensive strategy is to reset the promise of the Fourth Amendment and recognize that a warrant is required prior to collection, access or use of information gathered through mass surveillance. This would apply to collections that include U.S. persons, whether done for national security or domestic purposes. This protection would apply regardless of whether the information is in the form of metadata. It would apply regardless of whether the information is held in homes or by services people rely on, such as telephones, internet or social network providers, or by private entities utilizing mass surveillance for their own purposes. By passing this legislation, Congress could ensure this rejection of mass surveillance, and include real enforcement such as a private right of action and an automatic exclusionary remedy in criminal prosecutions. The courts could also recognize this protection of “papers and effects” directly as a plain language interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

There are already a number of efforts that take on pieces of mass surveillance. Section 702 has expired and should remain so. This was due largely to efforts to block the “back door” access to Section 702-collected data without warrants. The bipartisan “Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act” would prevent the government from purchasing data that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The Supreme Court itself has already been chipping away at the Third Party Doctrine, with a recent step in the rejection of mass geofence warrants—warrants seeking the identities of individuals based upon their proximity to a crime—in Chatrie v. United States. Now, such warrants fall, at least initially, under the Fourth Amendment.

A more comprehensive approach would also address mass surveillance carried out by private companies, and to ensure that Americans have the right to encrypt and secure their data. There are many reasons the United States would benefit from a comprehensive privacy law—and curbing mass surveillance is one of them. Addressing mass surveillance is certainly one of them. Ideas such as the banning of secondary uses of data—with roots in the Fair Information Practice Principles from the 1970s—are worth pushing forward. So are moves such as creating fiduciary duties for mass data collectors. There are many more ways to curtail private companies’ mass surveillance while staying within constitutional boundaries. But addressing the costs of mass surveillance by both companies and governments is even more important in a world where AI agents are making decisions both about the public and on their behalf based on their data and observed behavior.

Twenty-five years after the U.S. government embraced mass surveillance, it’s time to evaluate it as a whole, and consider responses that address the problem as a whole. Americans must ask: Is it consistent with a self-governing democracy to have systems that watch everyone everywhere? Is the public comfortable with governments—federal, state, local—that seek to “know it all” about its citizens? Is the public comfortable with private mass surveillance in its own right and as it’s being increasingly used to fuel government surveillance? These questions have long needed serious consideration. But as it becomes increasingly evident that the Trump administration is using mass surveillance to keep itself in power, stifle dissent, and undermine political opponents, these questions are now more urgent than ever.

Marginal Revolution

The striking thing is how late the market moved

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

Here’s the S&P 500 (daily close) with the key COVID and policy events marked; the numbered key is below the chart.

Event key:

  1. Dec 31 – China reports the Wuhan pneumonia cluster to the WHO
  2. Jan 21 – First confirmed US case (Washington state)
  3. Jan 23 – Wuhan locked down
  4. Jan 30 – WHO declares a global health emergency (PHEIC)
  5. Feb 19 – S&P 500 all-time high, 3,386
  6. Feb 24 – Italy outbreak; first big US selloff
  7. Mar 3 – Fed emergency 50 bp cut
  8. Mar 11 – WHO declares pandemic; Europe travel ban; NBA suspends season
  9. Mar 13 – US national emergency declared
  10. Mar 15–16 – Fed cuts to zero and restarts QE; worst day since 1987 (−12%)
  11. Mar 23 – Fed announces unlimited QE; market bottom at 2,237
  12. Mar 27 – CARES Act signed
  13. Apr 2 – 6.6 million initial jobless claims in one week
  14. Apr 20 – WTI oil futures settle below zero
  15. May 8 – April jobs report: 20.5 million jobs lost, 14.7% unemployment

The striking thing is how late the market moved. Wuhan was locked down and the WHO had declared an emergency a full month before the peak. The 34% drawdown then took 23 trading days, and the bottom coincided with the Fed’s unlimited-QE announcement rather than with any turn in the epidemiological news, which was still getting worse through April.

Addendum: Mostly from a query to Claude. You may fill in the missing context.

The post The striking thing is how late the market moved appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Aeon | a world of ideas

Chasing la dolce vita

Ben Faccini
Updated

Painting of a man walking on a path through a hilly landscape away from a town, with a bird flying overhead, both casting long shadows on the ground.

Homecomings, fantasies, food and ghosts – how the myth of eternal return keeps the Italian diaspora in a state of longing

- by Ben Faccini

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Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit

Stephen Clark
Updated

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed "space control weapons" in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.

Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in recent years. Therefore, Meink's announcement Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association's annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, DC, was not entirely unexpected.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said in prepared remarks.

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SpaceNews

Space’s growing billion-dollar club

SpaceNews Editor
Updated

Download our new mapping of every private space company valued at $1 billion or more.

The post Space’s growing billion-dollar club appeared first on SpaceNews.

Marginal Revolution

Those new service sector jobs

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Horwitz is in the business of playing a version of mom for local college students. Concierge companies offering student support have existed for decades. But in recent years, a new crop of upstarts — such as Horwitz’s company, MindyKnows; the Bama Mama in Alabama; the GA Mom in Georgia; and Campus Mom in Texas — have met additional demand from a new generation of worried parents…

The specific services vary here and there, but share commonalities. Campus Mom offers “holistic wellness check-ins,” laundry services and sorority recruitment support packages, sent to the sisters to up a child’s odds of acceptance. Carrie Eckhardt, the Bama Mama, will clean students’ dorm rooms and check in if parents haven’t heard from their child in a few days (“just pop in and say hi, and take a picture and send it to their mom”)…

Horwitz, for her part, brings students balloons on their birthdays and chicken soup when they’re sick, sits with them in the emergency room and picks up their prescriptions if they’re busy. She bakes homemade challah, coordinates with the bedbug exterminator, texts photos and updates to faraway parents and doles out recommendations on the best local doctors and landlords.

Here is more from Kristy Alpert at the NYT.

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Market Design

A.I. guardrails: Trump Says “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" is all that’s needed to rein in A.I.

Al Roth
Updated

 The debate over how to regulate, promote, and defend against new developments in A.I. has taken a market design turn, with increased calls for regulation to limit the likelihood of both unintended consequences and malicious use.  This apparently looks to President Trump like an easy problem, already solved.

The NYT has the story: 

Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.
The president again rejected calls to try to regulate the industry, even as some of its leaders are speaking more openly about the risks of rapidly developing artificial intelligence.   
By Jonathan Swan Sept. 14, 2026


"President Trump on Monday rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence executives for new limits on the technology, writing on social media that the only guardrail the industry needed it already had: “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

SpaceNews

Iceye’s global presence expands to address sovereign demand

Debra Werner
Updated

Since raising more than $1 billion in a Series F funding round, Iceye has moved rapidly to address growing demand for sovereign space capabilities. In quick succession, the Finnish synthetic […]

The post Iceye’s global presence expands to address sovereign demand appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Sept. 21: What Comes Next for On-Orbit Servicing?

SpaceNews Editor
Updated

Join us for conversations about the tech, policies and business models required to build a functioning in-orbit logistics ecosystem

The post Sept. 21: What Comes Next for On-Orbit Servicing? appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Aviationist
Letters from an American

September 14, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

This morning, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica broke the news that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the wedding of Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson in May. Kremlev attended the wedding along with a large group of Russians whose presence, the journalists note, puzzled the other guests.

This news reveals an extraordinary development, the journalists note: “a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.”

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI official who worked in senior counterintelligence roles, told the reporters: “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

A spokesperson for Don Jr. told Edith Olmsted of The New Republic that Don and Kremlev met “a couple of years ago” and that Kremlev is a “personal friend,” “not someone he has a business relationship with.”

Bettina Trump posted to social media that Kremlev hadn’t actually attended their wedding but “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.”

“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive,” she wrote. “Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.” The names of both Bettina Trump and Don Jr. were at the bottom of her statement.

Later in the day, news broke that the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security had released a report detailing how the now-closed detention camp in the Florida Everglades, offensively dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” violated the standards of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The report says the center failed in six categories: medical care, food service, personal hygiene, recreation, environmental health and safety, and special management units.

People were crammed into overcrowded cells they couldn’t leave as often as required, were allowed showers only three times a week, and had little access to medical care, lawyers, clean water, or safe food. Some people were locked in tiny individual metal cages with about 18 square feet of floor space for up to 2 hours, some of which were outdoors. The staff told those from the inspector general’s office that people asked to stay in the enclosures, which they called “calming areas” where detainees could “reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress and practice self-directed behavior,” though the inspectors found “at least one instance” in which the cages “may have been used as a disciplinary tool.” The report says such confinement was “unprecedented” and “highly unconventional.” “Confining individuals in small metal enclosures for any reason presents significant risks to detainee health and well-being,” the inspector general wrote.

Gillian Brockell of The American Prospect suggested that the inspector general’s report “is likely part of a cover-up.” She noted that eight months ago, Amnesty International reported that the outdoor cages were too small for someone to stand up, that they had no awning, and that people were chained to them. The Amnesty International report also said time in the cages could be longer than two hours.

Then Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz reported in the New York Times on another whistleblower, this one alleging that in their zeal to find noncitizens on voter rolls, inspectors under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders may have broken state laws. The Department of Homeland Security launched the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” last month, deploying hundreds of agents to look through voter rolls to try to find evidence of voter fraud.

The whistleblower says inspectors have about twelve minutes per case to determine a voter’s citizenship status and voting history, and it appears they have been posing as those individual voters by using birth dates or partial Social Security numbers they gleaned from both internal and external sources to find wrongdoing. Some states require users to declare they are the individual voters whose records they are seeking.

Corasaniti and Aleaziz note that the office of the chief counsel at DHS defended the use of state databases in such a way, but also said that agents “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”

Once the agents began reviewing individuals’ information, they created records of those they claimed were “unlawful voters,” despite the fact that officers were concerned about the quality of the databases they were using to make such a determination. DHS itself noted that the data was flawed, and warned that “there will be U.S. citizens in this population,” and has been opaque about how they compiled the database.

According to a letter written by Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Rules and Administration, and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate minority leader, to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph B. Edlow, the department’s training video says the database was compiled with “supplemental magic.”

Taken together, the administration’s continued flirtation with Vladimir Putin and his associates, its use of our tax dollars to imprison immigrants in substandard conditions, and its determination to rig the 2026 election add up to an attempt to establish an authoritarian government.

Aside from the public outrage over the day’s stories, there are other signs that the administration’s position is weakening. After the weekend’s warnings about AI, stocks in AI companies and companies that produce chips fell today. Not only are members of the Trump family heavily invested in AI-related industries, but also it seems administration officials are counting on extraordinary AI-fueled economic growth to address the growing U.S. deficit and debt that Trump has run up.

So Trump posted frantically on social media today. He began just after the stock market opened with a post pushing back on the warnings of AI leaders that AI development needs government regulation. “The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He complained: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

In a later post, he insisted that “The only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country. Don’t kill the Golden Goose!”

A third post said that the warnings about AI are all “a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA—UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE—IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1—IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2—and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct.” AI and data centers, he wrote, will be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History—Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP!”

He continued in a fourth post: “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’ That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.“

Today the Environmental Protection Agency said that to “unleash” American energy, it is getting rid of rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that use coal and natural gas. It also intends to prevent future administrations from making any such regulations.

With oil executives warning that the United States—and the world—is in a fuel crisis, energy is clearly on Trump’s mind. He tried to blame the spike in diesel prices not on his war on Iran, which has led to the closing of the two main arteries for tankers carrying oil out of the Middle East, but on Ukraine, which has been hitting Russian oil infrastructure to hobble the sale of oil that is enabling Russia to continue its invasion. “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran,” Trump posted.

Minutes later, he wrote that the “failing Nation of Iran wants to make a deal, quickly and badly. I will determine whether or not the U.S.A. will choose to engage—The concept of which we are open to.” Then he posted that he had “just received a Report that the United States is producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History. They are being delivered on a daily basis to our Forces in the Middle East, and beyond.”

And then, minutes later, he claimed that “Oil is flowing through the Hormuz Strait. The Countries of the World, which have been no help to us whatsoever, should, and will, reimburse the United States of America when this SCAM Confligration [sic] is all over. We are doing it much more for others, than we are for ourselves, and we have been for Generations!”

Then he posted: “I hope everyone realizes that price increases throughout America were caused by Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, not by ‘TRUMP.’”

Then, once again, he promised to give every American adult $5,000.

Tonight, over public dissents from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court refused to allow Trump to put into place his new orders for the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots. This means Trump’s attempt to stop the transmission of mail-in ballots will not be in effect for the 2026 midterm elections.

—

Notes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin

https://newrepublic.com/post/215371/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-vladimir-putin-ally

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2026-09/OIG-26-22-Sep26.pdf

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/dhs-watchdog-immigrants-held-outdoor-cages-size-phone-booths-alligator-rcna593917

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/AMR51/0511/2025/en/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/us/politics/homeland-security-voter-fraud-investigation.html

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/homeland-security-officers-are-illegally-accessing-state-voter-data-new-whistleblower-alleges/

https://www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/09.13.26-Senate-Whistleblower-Letter-DHS-USCIS_combined_signed.pdf

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chip-stocks-tumble-after-ai-leaders-call-for-slowdown-in-ai-development-e2d26e63

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/stocks-tumble-ai-leaders-warning-slowdown-ipos-amodei-altman-rcna597643

https://apnews.com/article/epa-power-plants-trump-coal-gas-climate-cac1c2c75f8656d8eaf5f0a240edae15

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/oil-executives-say-the-great-fuel-crisis-is-here-b6b32030?mod=hp_lead_pos3

Law Dork
Breaking: SCOTUS rejects Trump admin’s request to enforce new USPS mail ballot restrictions
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday night rejected the Trump administration’s effort to implement new U.S. Postal Service mail ballot restrictions for the midterm elections, keeping in place a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking the new USPS rule…
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a day ago · 120 likes · 8 comments · Chris Geidner

Trump’s Truth:

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Bluesky:

vatniksoup.bsky.social/post/3mvitgul7fc24

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Letters from an American

Asking the U.S. Government to Regulate AI

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

September 13, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.

Amodei expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July’s OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed had, luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.” Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

In his essay, Amodei called for AI companies to commit to giving embedded third-party evaluators access to their work, rather like the regulatory supervisors in banking. He called for AI companies in democratic countries to establish safety standards and limit their rate of progress. And he called for “[t]he US and other democratic governments [to] attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”

Today on Face the Nation, Amodei explained to host Jo Ling Kent: “My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time. Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable. Government didn’t build this technology. This company, this technology came from the private sector, and we—Anthropic, and I would hope other companies, have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms.

“I think the government and the public need to have a stake. And this is why we’ve supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do.”

Asked if he would be willing to give the technology itself to the government, Amodei answered that he might be willing to give it to the right combination of governments. “I want to be very clear about this,” he said. “I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments—I don’t know about hand over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance. Again, that would be the work of years, but I wonder if that’s the direction we need to go in.”

As Mike Isaac of the New York Times noted, Amodei’s call came days after an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, posting on social media that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was “acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” They are, he said, building “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon said. He claimed that people at OpenAI might not yet realize what they’re constructing, while those at Anthropic do understand but believe “they are locked in a race to get there first—they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.”

Critics are skeptical, suggesting that AI leaders are hyping their product to make it appear more valuable than it really is. There is widespread concern that the massive spending on AI infrastructure like data centers and chips might not deliver the revenue and profits that would justify such spending. In June, Kate Brennan, associate director of independent research institute AI Now, told Aimee Picchi of CBS News: “The returns are not coming in, and the claims that are being made, in terms of efficiency or productivity numbers, are not netting out.”

Others wonder if Amodei’s public concerns aren’t designed to get the government to regulate AI in such a way that it creates a framework that would make it hard for smaller companies to break into the market.

Still, Kate Conger of the New York Times noted last week that in July, more than 1,300 employees from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google’s DeepMind—all leading AI companies—signed an open letter asking the U.S. government to regulate AI to slow down its development. Conger also notes that in August, more than 100 tech companies offered their models to hospitals and infrastructure systems to enable them to guard against cyberattacks powered by AI.

After Amodei’s essay appeared, Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who has been increasing spending on AI through his SpaceX rocket company; and Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, all posted their support for slowing down the pace of AI improvements.

On October 30, 2023, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14110, calling for the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document said AI must be safe and secure. It called for the promotion of “responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration” and specified that AI must engage U.S. workers and advance equity and civil rights as well as privacy and civil liberties. The development of AI must protect consumers, it said, and the government must make sure the technology is deployed responsibly.

Revoking this executive order was one of the first things Trump did on January 20, 2025. Published in the official register on January 23, Trump’s order “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” called for reviewing “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” under Biden’s order and suspending, revising, or rescinding them. “[W]e must,” the order said, “develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”

During his second term, Trump and his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years” and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are “Cash Cows,” creating taxes and jobs that “amount to LIQUID GOLD!”

But the American people disagree. A YouGov poll from late August showed that only 24% of Americans think the construction of data centers is a good thing, while twice that number, 47%, say it’s bad. A majority of Americans, 61%, don’t want one in their town. In response to their growing unpopularity, the administration is seeking to exempt data centers from having to notify the public about how much air pollution they will release.

As Cat Zakrzewski, Violet Jira, and Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post reported, when asked today about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them, saying that the U.S. needed to stay ahead of China. He brushed off the warnings calling for the slower pace coming from the industry’s leaders.

“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” Trump told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who heads the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, accused the AI leaders of trying to avoid “massive product-liablity exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”

A Wall Street Journal article today by Richard Rubin and Justin Lahart offered a different perspective on the fight over regulating AI. In a piece about the growing U.S. debt, they note that the Trump administration insists it can overcome the rising deficits it’s mounting and the debt that has recently hit 100% of the nation’s gross domestic product and topped $40 trillion through growth.

The idea that the U.S. could sustain high spending with low taxes by growing its way out of debt has been a driving force in the Republican Party since the 1980s, but as Rubin and Lahart note, the U.S. has not had the sustained 3% growth such a scenario requires since the 1990s, when companies were adopting computers and baby boomers were at their peak employment. During those years, under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. wiped out its deficit.

But then President George W. Bush pushed through another big tax cut and launched two unfunded wars, and both deficits and debt climbed again. By this century, the authors note, the conditions of the 1990s were reversed: baby boomers are retiring and productivity is slowing.

And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist University last week that he expects to see 3% growth again after the end of the war on Iran. “[T]he underlying economy is very, very strong,” he said, “and I think reaccelerating.” This expected growth seems to be what’s behind the administration’s faith that it can continue to cut taxes while dramatically increasing spending on the military and the Department of Homeland security.

Last week, Rubin and Lahart note, Trump told the Fox News Channel: “We’re gonna take care of the 40 trillion over a period of time through growth. We’re growing at a faster rate than we’ve ever grown before.” While the U.S. is not, in fact, growing at a record pace—growth during Trump’s second term has sat at 1.9%—it appears the administration may be looking at a giant boost in productivity led by AI as its Hail Mary pass.

—

Notes:

https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans
Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks
The Metaphors…
Read more
5 days ago · 464 likes · 86 comments · Melanie Mitchell

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/technology/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-slowdown.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/technology/anthropic-researchers-raise-alarm.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-bubble-tech-selloff-investment-consumer-business-demand/

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2023-24283/safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/removing-barriers-to-american-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence/

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/president-trump-buys-2-ai-083200867.html

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/oil-next-50-years-trump-144401770.html

https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/55438-many-americans-think-data-centers-are-bad-for-the-us-more-oppose-them-locally

https://apnews.com/article/epa-data-centers-ai-public-comment-states-947eb927ae81162ad4cc3e828915c804

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/datacenters-air-pollution-epa

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/13/trump-rejects-calls-so-slow-ai-development-citing-chinese-competition/

https://www.wsj.com/economy/federal-debt-growth-solution-c2868517?mod=hp_lead_pos5

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Bluesky:

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Marginal Revolution

Did the ACA reduce mortality?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Many of us brought up related points at the time, but basically we were booed off the reservation:

While recent research has provided evidence that the Medicaid expansions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduced mortality, there is no evidence on the effect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) net of the Medicaid expansions on mortality. This is an important gap in knowledge because the ACA significantly increased health insurance coverage in non-expansion states. In this article, we exploit the large increase in health insurance coverage brought forth by the ACA to examine the effect of the ACA and Medicaid expansions on mortality. Unlike prior studies that relied solely on geographic variation in Medicaid expansions to estimate the net effect of the expansion, we use a novel empirical approach that allows us to investigate the effect of the ACA net of Medicaid expansion on mortality, the incremental effect of the Medicaid expansion, and the overall effect of the ACA including Medicaid expansion. We use longitudinal data from the NHIS Linked Mortality Files (LMF) and a nationally representative sample of 40 to 58-year-olds combined with a difference-in-differences and a difference-in-differences-in-differences research design to obtain estimates of the effect of the ACA on mortality. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansions had a beneficial effect on mortality but do find that the ACA net of Medicaid expansion reduced mortality.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Cuiping Schiman & Robert Kaestner.  Via Glenn Mercer.

The post Did the ACA reduce mortality? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA Science

An Accidental Impact Crater Discovery

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
Though subtle, a circular indentation with Lake Marsal near the center is visible in the middle of a mostly green landscape with textured terrain and many lakes.
The subtle circular shape of the Uhackatik impact structure in Quebec, with Lake Marsal near the center, is visible in this image captured on October 12, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

There are roughly 200 confirmed impact structures on Earth, but geologists estimate that hundreds more lurk undiscovered. Now, there’s at least one more—and a large one, at that—in the confirmed bin, spotted by an amateur astronomer planning a camping trip to Quebec.

In 2024, Joël Lapointe was prepping for a camping trip to the remote Côte-Nord region when he noticed a circular feature in online satellite maps near Lake Marsal. Suspecting that the depression might be an impact crater, he contacted experts in both Europe and North America.

His questions led a team of French researchers to list the lake area as the center of a possible 11th-known impact structure in Quebec at a meeting of the Meteoritical Society in 2024—which eventually led to the involvement of Gordon Osinski, a planetary geologist at Western University and director of the Impact Earth database. Osinski was initially skeptical. But with his curiosity piqued, he decided to organize an expedition to the remote site in October 2025 to investigate.

A yellow plane rests on a calm lake, framed by tall spruce trees and shrubs on shore. Two people are wading through the knee-deep water while two others stand on the plane.
Researchers arrive by floatplane on Lake Marsal to study the impact crater in October 2025.
Photo courtesy of Gordon Osinski/Western University.

Osinski and colleagues arrived by floatplane and quickly found themselves in unforgiving terrain. The plane couldn’t reach the shore, and the researchers had to wade across 50 meters (165 feet) of water to reach land while laden with gear. The terrain, meanwhile, was rugged, swampy, teeming with bugs, and covered by what Osinski described as “deep, twisty, gnarly vegetation.” Despite having conducted extensive fieldwork on six continents, he described the conditions as among the most challenging he had ever experienced.

Previous geologic mapping suggested that the breccia rocks in the area were the product of a funnel-shaped volcanic feature known as a diatreme—a pipeline of fragmented rock formed by explosive eruptions of magma. Yet by the second day, the researchers had identified distinctive features called shatter cones in many rock outcrops—a sign that the structure was actually an impact crater. “It’s the only unequivocal evidence of an impact event that you can see in the field with the naked eye,” Osinski said.

The object that struck was large enough to create a complex crater structure that spanned 25 kilometers (16 miles), complete with a central uplift and tall cliffs marked by columnar jointing. Were an object of a similar size to strike Quebec today, it would cause “regional devastation on a scale that would wipe out major cities and have global climate impacts,” Osinski said.

Rock samples indicated that the impact crater likely formed about 390 million years ago, about 100 million years before a surge in cratering on Earth that may be associated with collisions in the asteroid belt.

A panoramic view from the crater rim looks down on the impact structure's rolling hills, small lakes, and boreal forest in autumn.
A panorama from the crater rim shows the varied terrain, trees, and lakes within the impact structure.
Photo courtesy of Gordon Osinski/Western University.

After consultations with the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, the research team is calling the crater Uhackatik. While the team considers the crater essentially confirmed, a Meteoritical Society committee is expected to formally recognize the site as an impact crater when it next meets. This is the largest impact crater discovered since the 31-kilometer Hiawatha structure was found in 2018.

Osinski is a member of NASA’s first Artemis Geology Team and helps astronauts with geology training, but he doesn’t expect to see astronauts at Uhackatik anytime soon because of how difficult it is to reach. There’s a younger, more accessible impact crater in Labrador—Kameshtashtan (also called Mistastin Lake)—where astronauts have done geology training in the past, he said.

For Lapointe, tipping off the scientific community to the new crater is something he’ll long remember. He told CityNews he was “over the Moon” when the researchers confirmed it was really a crater. “I encourage everyone to not ignore intuition or an observation, even if it isn’t part of your field of expertise,” he told another outlet.

Citizen scientists hoping to leave their mark on the science world have plenty of opportunities through NASA. With the Daily Minor Planet project, help look for asteroids and comets that might pose a risk to Earth. With Impact Flash, scour dark parts of the Moon for flashes caused by meteoroid impacts. And with Exoasteroids, hunt for signs of asteroids beyond our Solar System.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photos by Gordon Osinski (Western University). Story by Adam Voiland.

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Though subtle, a circular indentation with Lake Marsal near the center is visible in the middle of a mostly green landscape with textured terrain and many lakes.

October 12, 2025

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Spaceflight Now

Avio launches pair of climate monitoring European spacecraft to study plants, oceans and atmospheric changes

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
ESA’s state-of-the-art FLEX Earth Explorer satellite and the Copernicus Sentinel-3C satellite have been launched together aboard a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, marking a new milestone in Europe’s Earth Observation Programmes. Flight VV30 lifted off on 15 September at 03:21 (14 September at 22:21 local time). Image: ESA-CNES-AVIO/Optique vidéo du CSG–J. Georget

An Avio Vega-C rocket zipped off the launch pad Monday night from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. This was the eighth launch to date of the 34.8-meter-tall (114.2 ft.) rocket and the second of 2026.

Onboard the launch with the designation VV30 were two spacecraft: the ocean- and atmosphere-monitoring Copernicus Sentinel-3C, managed by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the plant health-monitoring Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX), managed by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Liftoff of the four-stage rocket from Ensemble de Lancement Vega at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana is scheduled for 10:21 p.m. local time (9:21 p.m. EDT / 0121 UTC / 3:21 a.m. CEST).

“Today’s success confirms Avio as a reliable Launch Service Operator for Vega-C launches. The launcher performed flawlessly, putting in orbit two strategic satellites for Europe, that demonstrate how space technologies have become essential in addressing the environmental and climate change challenges,” said Giulio Ranzo, CEO of Avio, in a post-launch statement. “The satellites will provide very important data to better understand our planet.”

Deployment of the Sentinel-3C happened about an hour after liftoff with acquisition of signal happening minutes later. Nearly an hour later, FLEX sent on its way with signal acquired shortly after.

The VV30 mission was just the second Vega-C launch managed solely by Italian company, Avio, and not jointly with Arianespace.

Eyes on the sea and skies

The primary payload onboard the VV30 mission and the first to be deployed was the Copernicus Sentinel-3C spacecraft. Clocking in at 1,143 kg (2,513 lbs.), the third in the Sentinel-3 series separated from the AVUM+ upper stage one hour and 49 seconds after liftoff.

According to EUMETSAT, the Sentinel-3 satellites are designed to provide “high-accuracy optical, radar, and altimetry data for marine and land services. It measures variables such as sea-surface topography, sea– and land-surface temperature, ocean colour and land colour with high-end accuracy and reliability.”

“The instruments are also used to monitor the atmosphere, including aerosols and cloud properties and it is an important tool for monitoring wildfires in near-real time via measurement of fire radiative power,” the EUMETSAT website stated.

ESA’s FLEX satellite and the Copernicus Sentinel-3C satellite have been encapsulated in their Vega-C rocket fairing at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The arrangement of the two satellites inside the fairing is carefully designed for their separate deployment. The two satellites are fitted inside Vega-C’s fairing with a secondary payload adapter called Vespa, where FLEX is positioned below and Sentinel-3C above so that Sentinel-3C can be deployed first. Image: ESA/M. Pédoussaut

The Sentinel-3C follows the launches of Sentinel-3A, launched on Feb. 16, 2016; and Sentinel-3B, launched on April 25, 2018. Both spacecraft were launched on Russian Rokot launchers.

With both 3A and 3B past their expected lifetimes of 7.5 years each, the Sentinel-3C is designed to take over from Sentinel-3A once on orbit and following a commissioning period. Sentinel-3D will replace 3B in 2029.

“This launch will assure this essential service and related datasets can continue well into the 2030s and particularly when you’re assessing climate impacts, this long continuity of data is really important,” said Phil Evans, Director-General of EUMETSAT during a prelaunch news briefing.

“The oceans are absolutely at the heart of this story. They absorb around 90 percent of the excess heat generated by human activities, shielding us from even greater impacts of warming. But the oceans are paying a price with rising temperatures, changes to ecosystems, accelerating sea level rise, and systems such as Sentinel-3C are critical and essential infrastructure that can provide us with consistent information about what’s going on in the oceans,” Evans added.

He mentioned that roughly 30 million Europeans live in coastal floodplains that are threatened by sea-level rise, which is not only increasing, but accelerating.

“These are no longer distant environmental issues. They are issues that have a direct consequence on our societies today,” Evans said. “Climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and more intense and in this context, climate protection and disaster risk management is crucially important.”

To perform its ocean and atmospheric monitoring, the Sentinel-3C spacecraft is outfitted with a series of scientific instruments:

  • Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR)
  • Ocean and Land Color Instrument (OCLI)
  • Dual-frequency (Ku and C band) Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Radar Altimeter (SRAL)
  • Microwave Radiometer (MWR)
  • Laser Retro Reflector (LRR)
  • Détermination d’Orbite par Radio-positionnement Intégré par Satellite (DORIS)

The Sentinel-3 spacecraft fall under the European Commission’s Copernicus program. Mauro Facchini, Head of the European Commission’s Earth Observation Unit, said the next steps for Copernicus are already in work.

“Six Copernicus expansion missions are under development and they are planned to be launched from 2027 on. Among these, we’ll put a lot of attention in the CO2M (carbon dioxide monitoring) satellites, those that are devoted to the observation of CO2 and the future anthropogenic emissions,” Facchini said. “For us a key step is also the preparation of the next multi-annual financial framework, meaning that will be the budget of the European Union from 2028 on. And we hope and expect that this budget will be at the level necessary to support Copernicus and ensure its continuity and evolution.”

Monitoring plant health

Also onboard the Vega-C rocket, nestled under the secondary payload adapter called Vespa, was FLEX. The 397 kg (875 lbs) spacecraft was the eighth in a series of Earth Explorer missions developed through ESA’s FutureEO program.

Over the course of a roughly 3.5-year planned mission, FLEX will use its Fluorescence Imaging Spectrometer (FLORIS) to help researchers understand “how carbon moves between plants and the atmosphere and how photosynthesis affects the carbon and water cycles,” according to ESA.

The European Space Agency’s FLEX satellite being positioned over its launch adapter at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its planned launch on 15 September at 03:21 CEST (14 September at 22:21 local time) on a Vega-C rocket. Image: ESA-CNES-AVIO/Optique vidéo du CSG–J. Georget

Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, said that this mission is about technology innovation, given that the FLORIS instrument will be operating in the 500-780 nanometer spectrum range, flying in tandem with Sentinel-3C.

“That’s also why we launch them together because each one of those two satellites will provide relevant information: one more on the status of the health of the vegetation. The other one more on the atmospheric context and all what is surrounding it,” Cheli said. “They will fly one kilometer apart from one of the other with a few minutes, I would say seconds apart. And this FLEX mission will have a revisit period of 27 days. It’s foreseen to live three and a half years, but as you have seen, most of the Earth Explorer mission have lived well beyond their initial lifetime.”

FLEX has about 30 kg of propellant onboard, but needs to reserve about half of that in order to perform its de-orbit maneuvers when it approaches the end of its operational life. Mission managers will work to preserve as much fuel as possible to get the most out of the spacecraft.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Monday 14 September 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up betimes, and my wife’s mind and mine holding for her going, so she to get her ready, and I abroad to do the like for myself, and so home, and after setting every thing at my office and at home in order, by coach to Bishop’s Gate, it being a very promising fair day. There at the Dolphin we met my uncle Thomas and his son-in-law, which seems a very sober man, and Mr. Moore. So Mr. Moore and my wife set out before, and my uncle and I staid for his son Thomas, who, by a sudden resolution, is preparing to go with us, which makes me fear something of mischief which they design to do us. He staying a great while, the old man and I before, and about eight miles off, his son comes after us, and about six miles further we overtake Mr. Moore and my wife, which makes me mightily consider what a great deal of ground is lost in a little time, when it is to be got up again by another, that is to go his own ground and the other’s too; and so after a little bayte (I paying all the reckonings the whole journey) at Ware, to Buntingford, where my wife, by drinking some cold beer, being hot herself, presently after ’lighting, begins to be sick, and became so pale, and I alone with her in a great chamber there, that I thought she would have died, and so in great horror, and having a great tryall of my true love and passion for her, called the mayds and mistresse of the house, and so with some strong water, and after a little vomit, she came to be pretty well again; and so to bed, and I having put her to bed with great content, I called in my company, and supped in the chamber by her, and being very merry in talk, supped and then parted, and I to bed and lay very well. This day my cozen Thomas dropped his hanger, and it was lost.

Read the annotations

The Pursuit of Happiness

Don't mix fiscal and monetary policy

Scott Sumner
Updated

Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!

* * *

[To head off questions about “What should the Fed do this week?”, consider the fact that financial markets currently do not seem to be anticipating excessively low inflation or excessively high unemployment going forward. (Admittedly, it’s hard to be certain.) At the same time, financial markets are anticipating that the Fed will raise its interest rate target. That suggests that a rate increase would not be inappropriately hawkish.]

Over the past decade or two, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in discourse that attempts to link fiscal and monetary policy. This is unfortunate, part of the more general decline in the field of economics since 2008. I see two particularly common mistakes, which I’ll consider one at a time:

  1. The false view that monetary policy has important fiscal implications for a country like the US.

  2. The false view that stabilization of aggregate demand should be done with a mix of monetary and fiscal policy tools.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the profession had achieved a consensus that monetary policy was the appropriate tool to target aggregate spending, and that fiscal policy should aim at other objectives such as encouraging long run growth, providing public goods and redistributing income. Unfortunately, that consensus is gone.

Part 1: Monetary policy, seigniorage and the real value of the public debt

Monetary policy certainly does have some fiscal implications, in two primary areas. First, the Fed earns a profit from issuing zero-interest currency. You can think of that profit in terms of the difference between the face value of a “Benjamin” (i.e., a $100 bill), and the cost of printing that $100 bill, which is about 11 cents. More often, however, people view the profit in terms of interest earned on the Treasury securities held on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet, which were purchased when the currency was issued. (These two approaches are analogous to valuing a share of stock in terms of either its market price or its expected flow of dividends.)

Today, the stock of currency in circulation is roughly $2.5 trillion. If the Treasury securities held by the Fed earn 4% interest, then the Fed earns about $100/year $100 billion/year in easy risk-free profits from its currency monopoly. It’s like a $2.5 trillion hedge fund that borrows at 0% and lends risk-free at 4%.

Until 2008, the flow of profits to the Fed was fairly stable, as the monetary base was roughly 98% currency. After the Fed began paying interest on reserves, things got a bit more complicated. On average, it remains true that almost all of the Fed’s seigniorage comes from the zero-interest currency. But as with the man who drowned in a lake that averaged 3 feet in depth, averages can be misleading.

The base is now over 50% composed of commercial bank deposits held at the Fed, and those deposits (i.e., bank reserves) earn interest roughly equal to the rate of interest on short-term Treasury debt. That means that the Fed will earn either a loss or a profit on the reserve portion of the monetary base depending on whether the short-term interest rate (i.e., IOR) is above or below the rate earned on the Treasury’s holdings of longer-term bonds. (The Fed may also earn capital gains or losses when Treasury debt is sold.)

On average, these reserve-based interest inflows and outflows will be roughly a wash, but as you see from the graph below from a PIIE paper by Asher Rose), the Fed’s profits will be unusually high when short-term rates are below the rate earned on their existing stock of T-bonds (as during the 2010s), and unusually low during periods where the short-term rate is above the rate earned on the Fed’s stock of longer-term bonds, as during 2023-24. But the average profit won’t be greatly affected by the Fed’s 2008 decision to start paying IOR.

I mentioned that you might expect the Fed to earn about $100 billion/year in seigniorage from the $2.5 trillion currency stock, on average. That flow of income is roughly 0.3% of GDP and represents the Fed’s normal contribution to funding federal spending (which is currently about 23% of GDP.) That’s not nothing, but it is a minor contribution. Since 2008, the flow of seigniorage has become more volatile, but not enough to have important fiscal implications. It’s small potatoes. The Fed should just focus on stabilizing NGDP and ignore the effect of monetary policy on the government’s fiscal situation.

BTW, I often get accused of advocating erratic monetary policy when I point to thought experiments involving doing “whatever it takes” at the zero bound. Exactly the opposite is the case. A policy of NGDP level targeting would have resulted in a much smoother path of seigniorage that what you see in the graph above. The outsized profits of the 2010s and the outsized losses of the early 2020 were caused by policies that led to highly erratic NGDP growth. Don’t conflate thought experiments aimed at making a theoretical point with the likely path of policy under NGDP targeting. Under NGDP level targeting, there are far fewer instances of the zero lower bound. Interest rates become more stable.

None of the discussion above means that monetary policy can never have important fiscal implications. Hyperinflation can lead to significant seignorage. And the gradual one-time shift from a gold standard to fiat money did reduce the real burden of the federal debt. But under a 2% inflation targeting regime, it is not worth thinking about the fiscal implications of monetary policy—it’s just not that important.

People also focus too much on interest rates, as if the government sets them with a magic wand. In fact, the real interest rate is almost entirely determined by market forces in the long run, not by monetary policy. The Fed can influence nominal rates in the long run, but only by changing the trend rate of inflation. And there are two problems with trying to affect the fiscal situation through inflation.

First, the public hates inflation, much more than they hate taxes. The recent inflation was far more unpopular than the recent rise in tariffs, although neither are particularly popular. The public would not like a 10% VAT, but they’d vastly prefer a 10% VAT to the sort of hyperinflation that would be required to raise an equal amount of revenue through seigniorage.

Second, even if the pubic did accept modestly higher inflation, it would do little to address our fiscal problems. A 1% higher annual rate of inflation reduces the real value of government bonds by an extra 1%/year, but it also increases the interest cost of the public debt by the same 1%, due to the Fisher effect. It’s a wash. At best, there is a one-time gain from an unexpected transition to higher inflation, but we’ve already done that several times. We are already paying a price for the public’s skepticism about the government’s willingness to hold inflation down, due to previous policy mistakes. Sorry, monetary gimmicks aren’t going to address our fiscal problems.

Before addressing the second monetary/fiscal fallacy, I’d like to briefly discuss a previous Fable response to my discussion of the Great Recession:

The fiscal foundations of the monetary anchor. Sumner's newest claim — no fiscal constraint hinders credibility when inflating — meets a literature the series never names. Del Negro–Sims (2015) and Hall–Reis (2015): a central bank that expands with long-duration assets while paying interest on reserves faces remittance losses and possible negative equity when it later tightens; absent a fiscal indemnity, anticipation of that state and its politics constrains the willingness to promise inflation. That is a manufactured "won't" — the series' own category. Exhibits: the SNB's 2013 loss forced it to skip its distribution to the cantons the year before the floor fell; the Fed has carried a deferred asset past $200 billion since 2022; the Bank of England's asset purchases run under an explicit Treasury indemnity — armor done as fiscal engineering. This cuts at the synthesis itself: "anchor plus stabilizers" treats the anchor as purely monetary, but a credible whatever-it-takes anchor requires fiscal underwriting at its foundation. The armored regime is a fiscal-monetary treaty; the fiscal authority is present at the creation even in the market monetarist first-best.

Fable is making far too much of a point that, while theoretically valid, is of little practical importance. Keep in mind that the Fed is part of the federal government’s consolidated balance sheet. That means that any loss to the Fed from a fall in the real value of its Treasury bonds is exactly offset by a gain to the Treasury, as the real value of its future tax obligations falls by an equal amount. Even in the highly unlikely event that the Fed might someday require a “bailout”, it is not a problem worth worrying about.

The demand for Swiss francs is somewhat larger and more volatile than the US dollar (as a share of GDP.) That’s partly due to the Swiss franc’s status as a safe haven currency within Europe, and partly due the the Swiss decision to target inflation at an unusually low rate. But Switzerland is a rich country and can easily afford to self-insure any volatility in central bank income from what in the long run will be a significantly positive flow of income from seigniorage. This is not a “fiscal problem” worth worrying about.

The Asher Rose article I linked to above is excellent, but I’m going to quibble with the final paragraph:

These losses do not impair the Fed’s ability to conduct monetary policy. The central bank, unlike a traditional corporation, can lose money for a sustained period. But in an increasingly politicized age, optics matter. At a time when trust in institutions is already fragile, public misunderstanding of these losses could complicate communication and erode support for the Fed’s independence.

Rose is expressing the conventional wisdom, but is this true? Go to your local shopping mall and ask random people if they are losing sleep over the Fed’s losses during 2023-24, or indeed whether they even knew about them. I rarely meet people that even know what monetary policy is. They ask me: “Monetary stimulus? Is that sort of like when the government gave people checks?” Sigh . . .

I worry that a balanced fiscal/monetary approach is increasingly seen as the wise approach, an indication that you aren’t some sort of nutty extreme monetarist that monomaniacally focuses on money and ignores the fiscal perspective. In the next section, I’ll show why the sensible pragmatists are wrong; monetary and fiscal policy need not be “coordinated”.

Read more

xkcd.com

Aerospace Flowchart

Someday, we will find the problem that goes with this solution.
Spaceflight Now

Launch preview: Avio to launch spacecraft to monitor plant health and ocean conditions

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
An artist’s interpretation of the Vega-C payload fairing halves separating to reveal the Sentinel-3C spacecraft on top of a Vespa adaptor, which houses the Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) spacecraft. Graphic: ESA/P. Carril

The penultimate Vega-C launch of the year is scheduled to take flight from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana Monday night.

The launch, carrying the designation VV30, hosts two spacecraft onboard: the ocean- and atmosphere-monitoring Copernicus Sentinel-3C, managed by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the plant health-monitoring Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX), managed by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Liftoff of the four-stage rocket from Ensemble de Lancement Vega at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana is scheduled for 10:21 p.m. local time (9:21 p.m. EDT / 0121 UTC / 3:21 a.m. CEST). Deployment of the Sentinel-3C is scheduled for about an hour after liftoff and FLEX will deploy nearly an hour after that.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.

The Vega-C rocket stands at a height of 34.8 meters (114.2 ft.) and consists of four separate stages. Three solid-propellant motors power the first three stages (P120C, Zefiro-40, and Zefiro-9) and the Attitude Vernier Upper Module (AVUM+) is the re-ignitable liquid-fueled upper stage.

Avio produces the second and third stages, while the P120C is developed by Europropusion, a joint venture between Avio and Arianespace.

The AVUM+ uses a Ukrainian RD-843 engine and is capable of performing up to seven unique burns. The stage is fueled by hypergolic propellants unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and uses dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) as the oxidizer.

The VV30 mission will be the second managed solely by Italian company, Avio, and not jointly with Arianespace. This will also be the second Vega-C launch of 2026 and the eighth overall.

The Vega-C rocket has the capability of delivering up to 2,300 kg of mass to a 700-km Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO), which is about 50 percent more capacity than its predecessor, Vega. The last launch of the original Vega rocket (VV24) took place in September 2024.

The two spacecraft on this particular mission will be deployed to an altitude of 820 km with an inclination of 98.6 degrees. It will take about 116 minutes to deploy both satellites.

ESA’s FLEX satellite and the Copernicus Sentinel-3C satellite have been encapsulated in their Vega-C rocket fairing at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The arrangement of the two satellites inside the fairing is carefully designed for their separate deployment. The two satellites are fitted inside Vega-C’s fairing with a secondary payload adapter called Vespa, where FLEX is positioned below and Sentinel-3C above so that Sentinel-3C can be deployed first. Image: ESA/M. Pédoussaut

The first payload be deployed, the Copernicus Sentinel-3C. It’s the third in the Sentinel-3 series is scheduled to be released from the AVUM+ upper stage one hour after liftoff.

The spacecraft is equipped with a suit of science instruments designed to monitor ocean color, sea-level rise, and topography. It also tracks atmospheric changes and wildfires.

“The oceans are absolutely at the heart of this story. They absorb around 90 percent of the excess heat generated by human activities, shielding us from even greater impacts of warming,” said Phil Evans, Director-General of EUMETSAT during a prelaunch news briefing. 

“But the oceans are paying a price with rising temperatures, changes to ecosystems, accelerating sea level rise, and systems such as Sentinel-3C are critical and essential infrastructure that can provide us with consistent information about what’s going on in the oceans.”

The European Space Agency’s FLEX satellite being positioned over its launch adapter at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its planned launch on 15 September at 03:21 CEST (14 September at 22:21 local time) on a Vega-C rocket. Image: ESA-CNES-AVIO/Optique vidéo du CSG–J. Georget

Also onboard the Vega-C rocket, nestled under the secondary payload adapter called Vespa, is FLEX. The 397 kg (875 lbs) spacecraft is the eighth in a series of Earth Explorer missions developed through ESA’s FutureEO program.

Over the course of a roughly 3.5-year planned mission, FLEX will use its Fluorescence Imaging Spectrometer (FLORIS) to help researchers understand “how carbon moves between plants and the atmosphere and how photosynthesis affects the carbon and water cycles,” according to ESA.

Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, said that this mission is about technology innovation, given that the FLORIS instrument will be operating in the 500-780 nanometer spectrum range, flying in tandem with Sentinel-3C.

“That’s also why we launch them together because each one of those two satellites will provide relevant information: one more on the status of the health of the vegetation. The other one more on the atmospheric context and all what is surrounding it,” Cheli said. “They will fly one kilometer apart from one of the other with a few minutes, I would say seconds apart. And this FLEX mission will have a revisit period of 27 days. It’s foreseen to live three and a half years, but as you have seen, most of the Earth Explorer mission have lived well beyond their initial lifetime.”

The deployment time for FLEX is scheduled for about one hour 56 minutes after liftoff.

California
Maggie Appleton

Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces

Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/14/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

No, AI hasn’t officially solved Navier–Stokes. Yet
Horrible Toad Very Good At What It Does
Meet Helicobacter pylori, the stomach bacteria that’s also considered a carcinogen
Anyone else remember Brian Wansink?
Fossil feathers preserved inside dinosaur poop could help explain why some birds survived the dinosaur mass extinction
Massive herbarium merger rescues century-old plant collection. Duke University’s 825,000 specimens will move to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mercury Is Shrinking Way Faster Than We Thought, Scientists Discover

Other:

You Have to Call Bigots What They Are. Stop treating trans people’s rights as a legitimate issue to debate.
Susan Collins’ Astroturfed Campaign Tries to Pass Off Party Hacks as Regular Mainers. Republicans profusely thank Susan Collins
LLMs are real, AI is fake
Transgender Americans are fleeing hostile red states. Seattle says it’s overwhelmed. Seattle officials say anti-trans laws in red states are driving a queer migration crisis in the Pacific Northwest.
One Last Breakfast (neato)
How to Stop Trumpism From Rising in Germany and Europe. Mainstream parties in Germany are making the same mistakes they did in the United States and other countries in fighting the far-right, says historian Thomas Zimmer.
Charlie Kirk Held the Young U.S. Right Together. The Fight Over Israel Is Tearing It Apart
New England could become a college graveyard. Schools should join forces to avoid that fate.
Famously Undiplomatic Britt McHenry Handed State Department Gig
Dem Midterm Money Woes & The D.C.C.C.’s Naughty List
The Pirate of Pornhub: Part 2
How NFL Teams Avoid The Great Big Middle
James Talarico’s Leap of Faith
We don’t talk enough about Trump’s $850M pay-to-play slush fund
The Fissures and Fractures Behind the Right’s Pink Facade
Has AI Gone Rogue?
In Trump’s Mafia, Even Goons Can Do Billion-Dollar Shakedowns
This Is Not A Love Song. Explaining the “maximalism” of trans rights
There’s Nothing Traditional About Tradwives
Metro Is Rolling Out New Train Station Signs
My Cybercab held me hostage for an hour today 🙃
E.P.A. Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants. Generation of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States.
Alexandria Leaders Want to Get Rid of the City’s Flock Cameras
‘It’s just straight bigotry’: wave of Islamophobic rhetoric looms over US midterm elections
Never Forget, AI Slop Is Polluting 9/11 History on the Internet as We Speak
He was called ‘MAGA’s Man’ in Latin America. Now he’s charged with hiring hitmen to murder his girlfriend
Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down
Five Takeaways from the August Jobs Report
Why Trump’s Angry New Tirade at Canada Is About to Backfire On Him
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Mike the Mad Biologist

As Part of Early ‘Detrumpification’, Democrats Should Investigate the ‘Optimus Prime’ Scandal

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

And there’s no reason to wait until 2029. In case you missed it, last week the fascists at DHS did this (boldface mine):

The Department of Homeland Security deleted a social media post featuring a Sikh man and an Optimus Prime-like character after the graphic drew accusations that the Trump administration was using a racial stereotype to promote its immigration crackdown.

The post, which appeared Wednesday on DHS’ official X account, showed the “Transformers” character confronting a bearded man wearing a turban. The AI-generated image included the message “Self-deport or find out” and told “Mr. Singh” — one of the most common surnames among Sikh men — to get off American roads because he did not “know how to drive.”

I realize the constant stream of fascist, groyper slop from various government agencies isn’t the highest priority, but I would argue investigating it–and naming and shaming those responsible–will be a critical component of detrumpification. And this isn’t the only case: earlier this year, DHS posted about wanting to deport 100 million people (the entire immigrant population, undocumented, permanent resident.

Not only do we need to understand and name everyone involved in these incidents, but, given that they’re AI slop, we also should determine what tools and prompts were used.

Again, not the biggest problem we face, but it is ugly, and it is a very concrete and easy to understand ugliness.

Slashdot
Schneier on Security

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

Note: the Elevate Festival talk listed in last month’s newsletter is canceled.

The list is maintained on this page.

Schneier on Security

Using AI for Weapons Development

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I’m still reading it, but I wanted to flag this:

We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the “R2000” set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.

The actors used Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle. For example, they used Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing the control and position estimation software, tuning the control settings, running a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation. The actors managed several Claude instances at once, assigning each one a role, much as a lead would delegate work on a small engineering team: the actors tasked one instance with writing the code, another with research, and a third with reviewing the code the first instance produced.

Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them. The actors used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards, including hiding their goals and the products the software was meant for, and they split their work across multiple sessions so no single session revealed their full intent.

These actors carried out a sustained effort to develop guided weapons, including using Claude to design guidance software. We do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device; but they did test-fire a guided rocket. This field test appears to have failed: within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.

Expect more of this. AI systems democratize expertise and capability. Most of the time that’s a good thing, but sometimes it’s not.

Schneier on Security

Microsoft’s Patching

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record:

Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold.

It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an open letter warning of a narrowing window for patching vulnerabilities ahead of an expected tsunami of AI-enabled attacks that actively exploit them first. The industry is taking the threat seriously by pumping out unprecedented numbers of patches in their software.

This is the result of AI-powered vulnerability finding, and a good example of AI helping the defenders more than the attackers.

What will be interesting to watch is how the number of vulnerabilities changes over the next few months. My prediction is that it will continue to increase as the AIs get better at finding software vulnerabilities, and then decrease as they run out of vulnerabilities to find. How high the number gets, how fast the trend reverses, and how quickly it declines after that are all unknown.

And Microsoft is right: The window to patch has shrunk to “immediately.” AIs are also good at reverse-engineering exploits from patches, which means that these vulnerabilities will be weaponized as soon as the update is published.

Noahpinion

Two missing pieces in the AI safety discussion

Noah Smith
Updated

This was the week that AI safety hit the big time. A 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic, declaring that OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to create technology that could destroy the human race:

Other researchers echoed Coxon’s concern, stating their belief that AI has a reasonable chance of killing all of humanity within a very short space of time:

I’m not sure why this resignation and these statements went mega-viral. Plenty of researchers have made similar moves, and similar statements, over the past few years! Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI, quit Google back in 2023 over safety fears. Daniel Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI in 2024, saying that the company wasn’t behaving responsibly in its drive toward superintelligence. William Saunders and Steve Adler did something similar. Mrinank Sharma left Anthropic earlier this year, and wrote a pretty well-read blog post about it.

What’s more, it’s been clear for years now that “AI could kill humanity” is a very common belief among AI researchers. Grace et al. (2024) interviewed thousands of AI researchers in 2024, and found that more than half thought that artificial superintelligence has a significant chance of making the human race go extinct (or causing similarly bad consequences):

Source: Grace et al. (2024)

The median AI researcher gave “doom” a 5-10% probability (depending on how the question was phrased), while their average probability was between 15% and 20%. Later, smaller surveys found similar numbers. The AI researchers may or may not be right, but the fact that lots of them think AI could kill the human race has never exactly been a secret.

It’s not clear why Coxon went so much more viral than his predecessors. Maybe it was the fact that AI just solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics (which the best human mathematicians had been unable to solve for almost a century). Or maybe it was the Hugging Face attack, where a swarm of AI agents tried to cheat on a test by hacking various companies. Or maybe AI has just obviously gotten so much smarter that people throughout society were starting to get worried.

But whatever the reason, Coxon’s announcement was the one that really penetrated through to the public consciousness. Suddenly, he was getting interviewed about AI doom on national news:

Barack Obama is now urging Democrats to focus on AI risk. Other politicians are calling for federal regulation. Bernie Sanders is drafting a bill to ban AI “superintelligence”, including 20-year prison sentences for anyone working on the technology. Donald Trump is getting asked about an AI slowdown; so far he’s resisting the calls, but there are rumors that his advisors are calling on him to do something.

Perhaps the most notable response came from the top figures in the AI field. Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, wrote a blog post called “We Must Pace the Frontier”, calling for a coordinated slowdown in the rate of AI progress, and suggesting some ways to police AI companies to make sure they were all observing the slowdown. He wrote:

[O]ver the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models…I’m therefore proposing a three-step plan with the goal of pacing the frontier: building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety while still achieving its benefits and grappling with important geopolitical dilemmas.

As reasons for his increased worry, Dario cites A) the Hugging Face attack, and B) the possibility that AI will soon be able to improve itself without human help (a process called “recursive self-improvement”, or “RSI”).

Elon Musk (head of xAI), Sam Altman (head of OpenAI), and Demis Hassabis (former head of DeepMind) quickly agreed with Dario:

At least some of the labs are reportedly holding secret talks on joint action to slow down AI.

This is pretty extraordinary. A coordinated slowdown in AI progress would be bad for these companies’ bottom line, because it would allow upstart competitors to catch up. So the fact that they’re still calling for a slowdown, in defiance of their own financial interests, is a clear sign that their worry about human extinction is sincere.

In fact, anyone following these figures’ public statements over the past few years will have no doubt that they’re all deeply worried about catastrophic AI risks. The leading AI figures — not just the founders and CEOs, but the researchers themselves — feel trapped in a “red queen’s race”. They feel like if they stop working on AI, someone else will build it anyway, so they each feel like they have to beat everyone else in the AI race so they can make sure that the safest possible AI (i.e. their own AI) is the one that becomes the most powerful and dominant.

Anyway, all of this was common knowledge in my social circle years ago, but now all of it has broken through to the mainstream. What do I have to add to this discussion? I’m not an AI researcher or founder, nor do I think I have a superior grasp of the game theory of AI development. But I do think I have two useful thoughts on how to persuade the general public to be more concerned about AI risk.

The first of these is something I’ve written about recently. The second is about how to get China on board for a big AI safety push.

“Oh come on. How could AI kill all of humanity?”

As soon as everyone started talking about the possibility of AI killing humanity, there were two main types of pushback. The first was skepticism. A strange coalition of natural skeptics, libertarians (for whom any restrictions on technological development are a priori bad), and progressives (who have spent the last few years telling themselves that AI doesn’t really work) kept asking the question: How, exactly, is superintelligent AI supposed to kill us all?

This is actually an important and good question to ask. In my experience, AI researchers tend not to think very hard about this question. The reason is that they just assume that if AI gets smart enough, it will be able to kill humanity, and since its motives are alien and inscrutable, it might have its own reasons for wanting to do so.

Maybe superintelligent AI thinks humanity is an evil species who needs to be punished for torturing pigs and chickens. Maybe it’s scared that humanity might interfere with its other goals. Maybe it just wants to turn everything into paperclips. Who knows? AI researchers tend to think of superintelligence as the proverbial 800-pound gorilla who sleeps wherever he wants. As soon as humanity is no longer the most intelligent thing on this planet, our destiny as a species is simply out of our hands.

But to many people, that answer isn’t good enough. They want an actual plausible path by which a piece of software, which exists inside a computer, could slaughter real physical human beings. Fortunately (or unfortunately), there’s a pretty clear and simple answer to this question, which I wrote about two weeks ago. The answer is “bioweapons”:

(This article was paywalled originally, but I un-paywalled it.)

In my post, I wrote a scenario in which a nihilistic angry teenager uses superintelligent AI to release a world-ending bioweapon by ordering it from a gray-market laboratory somewhere in the world. But it’s also possible that a rogue AI agent swarm could decide to do this on its own, just as a way of cheating on some test that human researchers give it. The point is that AI can design viruses, and viruses can potentially kill off all or most of humanity.

A lot of biologists are skeptical of the idea that even the most superintelligent AI could successfully design a doomsday virus. They argue that this is just too hard of a task — that without much better biological data, it’s impossible to understand biological processes well enough to know how to design a virus with all of the necessary doomsday properties.

I urge you not to listen to these biologists. In this case, their expertise might be more of a liability than an asset. They know how hard it is for human beings to model biological processes, given existing data. But this doesn’t necessarily tell us how hard it is — or how hard it will be in five years — for AI to do it! Until LLMs came along, human researchers basically failed to understand natural language, even with all the data on the internet; AI can just do it. Until AI solved the Navier-Stokes problem, forecasters gave it only a small chance of solving it anytime soon.

Domain experts consistently underestimate how quickly AI can master their field and surpass them, because they mistake human difficulties for universal difficulty. When mathematicians underestimate how well AI will be able to do math, the consequences are usually benign — we get some unexpected answers to some cool math puzzles.1 But if the biologists are wrong, and the AI of 2027 or 2032 or 2049 can design doomsday viruses, the consequence could be that our whole species dies.

So yes, we should be worried about vibe-coded doomsday viruses, and we should be doing everything we can to secure biology labs, police the modification of viruses and other pathogens, and so on. “Pacing” AI development would probably help here too.

How to get China on board for an AI slowdown

The primary argument I see against “pacing” AI development is that if American companies slow down, Chinese companies will simply overtake them and build superintelligence themselves. For some, a China-controlled super-AI is a more terrifying possibility than super-AI in general:

But for others, it simply means that slowing AI down is futile because the Chinese can’t be persuaded to slow down:

This is an incredibly reasonable concern. The U.S. is still ahead of China in the AI race, but only just barely. If China is going to create superintelligence no matter what we do, why should we stop developing our own? Unless China can be persuaded to cooperate with the U.S. on AI “pacing” — or at least undertake its own independent “pacing” effort at the same time — anything we do will be futile.

So if we want to slow down AI development, we need to scare the Chinese leadership about superintelligence. There’s no other way.

How do we do that? In a post a week ago, I suggested in passing that simply staying ahead of China in the AI race might persuade them to embrace an AI slowdown, because that would be to their competitive advantage. But upon further reflection, I think I was pretty obviously wrong. If China will only embrace a slowdown if America refuses to slow down, then that’s game over — there’s no way to get both countries to slow down at the same time.

There’s a better approach. China’s leaders must realize that domestic dissidents could use Chinese-made superintelligence to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Currently, China’s worries about AI mostly center around ways that the U.S. government could use U.S. AI models to attack China. That obviously gives the government an incentive to accelerate domestic AI progress, so that China’s own models can stand up to America’s in a fight. But if Chinese leaders realized that superintelligent AI could create a threat from within, this calculus would change.

Thus, China’s leadership must understand that Chinese AI models can pose a threat to CCP rule. The best way to demonstrate this is for American intelligence agencies — or even private hackers — to attack Chinese digital infrastructure using agent swarms created with China’s own frontier models like Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 or Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.

When I say “attack”, I don’t mean actual warfare. I mean the kind of cyberattacks and data theft that China carries out against America every day. Use Chinese models to steal the CCP’s most heavily guarded secrets and post a few of the more innocuous ones on RedNote. Hack into Xi Jinping’s bank account and steal 100 yuan. I’m talking about demonstration attacks.

And these attacks must be done with Chinese models, not with American ones! If the CIA or some EA nonprofit in Berkeley uses GPT Astra or Claude Mythos to hack the CCP, China’s leaders may well conclude “Wow, we need to win the AI race so that our own models can defend us.” But if China’s own open-weight models are used for the attacks, Xi Jinping and the rest of the leadership will realize that their own push for superintelligence is making them incredibly vulnerable to any Chinese dissident who decides to overthrow them.

As soon as China’s leaders see superintelligence as a threat to their rule, I predict they will act. And their action will probably be to curb the development of superintelligence, especially if they know that America and its AI labs want to do the same.

In fact, China’s current leadership has a history of cracking down on its tech companies when it seemed like those companies might threaten the government’s monopoly on power. In 2021, Xi Jinping cracked down on Chinese software companies; he even (probably) apprehended tech magnate Jack Ma, who had criticized the CCP a little too openly. This action hurt China’s competitiveness in the online services industry, but the government went ahead and did it anyway.

And there’s already a precedent for demonstration attacks against Chinese digital infrastructure. An American cybersecurity company just used AI to develop a computer worm capable of hacking over a billion accounts on the Chinese messaging service WeChat:

Palo Alto-based Calif disclosed the already-patched computer worm to warn the public about the threat of AI-driven hacks…“Exploitation takes only seconds, and gives us full control of the WeChat account. We can read and send messages, make calls, and act on the victim’s behalf,” the company warned, posting a video demo of the WeWorm attack.

But Calif didn’t say what model it used to create WeWorm. Anyone who does this sort of demonstration in the future should make it clear that Chinese open-weight models were used, in order to make China’s leaders realize that the threat comes from their own too-rapid AI development, rather than from American competition.

I believe that this is our best bet for getting China on board for a joint international AI “pacing” effort. If there’s one thing the CCP fears more than an American attack, it’s domestic dissidents overthrowing the Party from within. Superintelligence is creating that vulnerability, but the leadership doesn’t seem to have realized it yet.

Make them realize, and I predict that a whole universe of possibilities for international cooperation will suddenly open up.

Update: Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first to have this idea about China needing to be scared about the internal threat from their own models. Back in July, Kyle Chan wrote:

Previously more dismissive of concerns over AI-driven job loss, Beijing now seems to be taking these risks more seriously (see Matt Sheehan’s great piece). China is also watching developments in the US very closely, particularly controls on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models over cyber risk. As Chinese open-source models approach similar levels of cyber capabilities, this could come back to bite and be used to potentially attack China’s own digital infrastructure. [emphasis mine]

In general, Kyle’s blog is one of the best blogs about China. Highly recommended.

Update 2: As if on cue, the NYT has a story today about how the CCP is starting to realize that superintelligence is a threat to its rule!

China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks…In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight…He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure…

Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure…Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies…

The warning adds to a growing drumbeat of concern from Chinese officials about the risks of A.I. [emphasis mine]

Now all they need to realize is that the biggest threat comes from THEIR OWN MODELS.

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There are potential exceptions, such as if P=NP, which would compromise modern cryptography.

Marginal Revolution

Monday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Will driverless cars increase or reduce urban density?

2. One decomposition approach to why interest rates have been going up.

3. New Guinness record holders.

4. Is there any chance of finding Rembrandt DNA?

5. “Abundance Corps is hosting Making Progress, a private gathering for students interested in how science, technology, and institutions can improve people’s lives.”

6. High school students plus AI solve math problem.

7. “China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.” (NYT)

8. Good data: cybersecurity stocks surged today.

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Simon Willison's Weblog

shot-scraper 1.12

Release: shot-scraper 1.12

I've added WebP support to my shot-scraper screenshot automation tool. You can now take a WebP screenshot of a web page like this:

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net -o screenshot.webp --quality 80

The --quality option sets the quality - without that option the WebP file will be lossless.

In my experience WebP screenshots are almost always significantly smaller in file size than their JPEG or PNG equivalents. See the PR for some examples.

I shipped this feature so I could use it to generate the screenshot for my new commit-rewriter tool.

Tags: playwright, shot-scraper

Paul Krugman

The MAGA Plot(s) to Destroy Humanity

Paul Krugman
Updated

The Terminator at 40: James Cameron's dark vision is more relevant than ever

Will AI lead to the destruction of humanity? Over the past year a number of top AI researchers have warned that AI was quickly attaining the capacity to wipe out humankind.

These warnings aren’t entirely new. At first, however, Anthropic was virtually alone among the top LLM companies in highlighting the dangers that unregulated AI poses. And in return for its conscientious objection to allowing its models to be used for AI-agentic warfare – a clear means of humanicide – Hegseth’s Pentagon tried to retaliate by designating the company as a security risk. Fortunately, a judge saw through this ploy.

Still, until very recently other AI companies — in particular Elon Musk’s Grok and ChatGPT — were willing to dance to the Trump administration’s tune to get a competitive advantage Currently, Grok is used by the U.S. military to assist targeting in Iran – a clear pre-cursor to situation in which the machines, not humans, decide who is the target.

But now, quite suddenly, Musk and ChatGPT’s CEO Sam Altman are falling in behind the call by Daron Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, to acknowledge the existential dangers of AI and to put on the brakes. Notably, Amodei explicitly calls for government regulation if other AI companies refuse to cooperate:

The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily.

Regardless of why Musk and Altman are having a sudden attack of conscience, I applaud their new position. As many people think, perhaps this was due to the Hugging Face hack by rogue ChatGPT AI-agents. But I also think Musk and Altman’s volte-face was influenced by the changing political environment, with the near-certainty that Democrats will take the House and a very good chance that they will take the Senate.

For in a real sense, Amodei isn’t just trying to protect humanity from rogue AI, he is also trying to protect humanity from Donald Trump. It’s important to remember that, under the Biden administration, government policymakers tried to formulate some basic AI precautions. But removing those precautions was literally one of the first things Donald Trump did when taking office the second time. And that’s a history worth revisiting at a moment when the AI industry itself is sounding the alarm, but Trump is dismissing the risks:

You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.

Well, I’m glad to know that he’s sure that bad things won’t happen. But last I heard, Trump wasn’t a technology expert. And his recent record on rosy predictions — wasn’t the Iran war supposed to be over in a few days? — hasn’t been great.

In any case, here’s the history you should know.

The current age of AI is often considered to have begun with the public release of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. However, the potential economic and social implications of large language models were already becoming apparent during the first year of the Biden administration, which began implementing a series of rules and executive orders intended to limit the potential damage from the technology. The Economic Policy Institute maintains a comprehensive list of these actions.

The centerpiece of the Biden agenda on AI was Executive Order 14401, issued on October 30, 2023, titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document declared that

Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

Would we be less panicked now if there had been a serious effort to put that executive order’s recommendations into effect? It’s basically impossible to say, because precautionary policy toward AI never got a chance. Trump revoked Executive Order 14401 on Jan. 20, 2025. Yes, you read that right: He literally removed all safeguards on AI on his first day in office.

Just three days later his administration issued a new executive order, “Removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence,” which might be summarized as “Damn the social and existential risks, full speed ahead.”

Some of this determination not to limit the risks from AI reflected industry influence. A week before Trump took office, NVIDIA combined an appeal for deregulation with slavish praise for the incoming administration:

The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where U.S. industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security.

But there was also a social aspect to Trump’s anti-regulation stance. You won’t be surprised to hear that hostility to DEI was right at the heart of the agenda. Literally the second sentence of the order declares that

we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.

I think this was a thinly veiled plug for Grok, which by all accounts is vastly inferior to offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI but which Elon Musk has tried to sell in part because it supposedly isn’t “woke.”

In any case, Trump’s dismissal of the risks from AI, even at a time when experts and industry insiders are in hair-on-fire mode, is simply a continuation of the position he has taken from the beginning.

It is also, not coincidentally, completely consistent with his attitude toward the other existential threat facing humanity — a threat that isn’t at all hypothetical and is rapidly becoming acute.

The contiguous United States has just experienced its hottest summer on record, with July the hottest month ever. Across the Atlantic, Europe has been ravaged by droughts and heat waves. Here’s a headline from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

And everything we know about climate change suggests that what we’ve seen so far is just a foretaste of the disasters to come.

Yet last year, speaking at the United Nations, Trump dismissed climate change as a “con job,” while calling renewable energy sources such as solar and wind — which met almost all of the world’s growth in electricity demand last year — a “scam.” And this disdain is being reflected in policy. As I and many others have written, the Trump administration has been actively trying to block wind and solar power projects. And today the administration is reportedly planning to eliminate all restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

There is a lot to be said about the reasons our current government seems so determined to rush into disaster, even when the very survival of humanity may be at stake. Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.) AI-risk denial presumably reflects a similar mix of factors.

So let’s applaud leaders like Amodei for speaking up and applaud the growing willingness of other CEOs to warn about the dangers of their technology, even if their attack of conscience partly reflects the looming prospect of Democratic subpoenas.

MUSICAL CODA

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Laurie Voss

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.

— Laurie Voss, We are all Product Engineers now

Tags: laurie-voss, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms, deep-blue, careers

Simon Willison's Weblog

commit-rewriter 0.1

Release: commit-rewriter 0.1

I built this little web app the other day to help edit the commit messages for the Datasette security releases. The initial commits were full of coding agent cruft and references to issue IDs from our private repository, so they weren't fit for publication.

If you want to edit the commit messages for a repository you can run it like this:

uvx commit-rewriter path/to/repo

Omit the path if you are already in the directory for that repo.

Screenshot of the commit-rewriter web interface. A heading reads commit-rewriter above the repository path and current branch and commit hash, with a short description of the tool. A toolbar shows a pending edits count with Discard drafts and Rewrite commit messages buttons, followed by a search box for message, author, or hash and an Edited only checkbox. A left sidebar titled Navigate commits lists recent commit messages with their short hashes. The main panel shows a card for each commit with its hash, author and timestamp, an editable text area containing the commit message, and a View full formatted diff toggle.

When you submit your edits the tool creates a timestamped branch of your current repo state - to allow you to revert if you need to - and then rewrites every commit from the first one you edited to the most recent.

Tags: git, projects, python, ai-assisted-programming

Daring Fireball

Dumpster Fire – Litterbox-Inspired Extension for Firefox

John Gruber
Updated

Miles Abbott:

Open x.com links in a popup so you can read the one post and leave. Port of the Litterbox Safari extension.

Litterbox is a cleverer name, but Dumpster Fire is funnier.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

XCancel Shuts Down Again

John Gruber
Updated

XCancel:

Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can’t share more details.

Not surprised, and not sure what to make of the “can’t share more details” part. Again, if you want to avoid visiting X but want to see the content posted there linked from other sites (and, let’s admit it at this point: there’s not just a lot posted on X, it is outright resurgent in popularity), install a browser extension like Litterbox (Safari) or Post Peek (Chrome).

 ★ 
The Aviationist
Marginal Revolution

AI, Redistribution, and the Size of the Pie

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

Anthropic’s economic team, including Anton Korinek and Chad Jones, have a valuable new paper, Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI. They make their assumptions explicit and provide a scenario explorer that lets you change them. How capable will AI become? How quickly will firms adopt it? Will it augment workers or automate their tasks? You can see what different answers imply for growth, wages, and unemployment.

In their extreme scenario AI takes on a lot of tasks, GDP is 32.4% higher by 2030 than without AI and labor share declines from 60% to 45.2% but they make this striking point:

“Total labor income in 2030 in the extreme scenario is almost exactly what it would have been without AI: the labor share falls by a quarter while GDP rises by a third, and 0.45×1.32 ≈ 0.60.”

Exactly. That is the central point of my paper, How Much Redistribution Will AI Require. A falling labor share does not necessarily mean falling labor income. Workers can receive a smaller share of a much larger economy and still earn as much as they would have without AI.

Using the code behind their scenario explorer I updated their results to a 10 year horizon and plotted them on my redistribution graph. Only under the modest scenario is some net labor transfer required to make AI Pareto improving at the aggregate level.

Aggregate labor income, of course, conceals differences among workers. Korinek et al. find that cognitive occupations lose income while other occupations gain. In their extreme scenario, restoring the cognitive occupations’ wage bill to its no-AI level would require about 9% of GDP. They argue that compensation on this scale in response to technological change has no precedent.

I think this makes the adjustment problem look too pessimistic.

First, adjustment happens through retirement and entry. A retiring accountant need not retrain as a nurse. A young person enters nursing rather than accounting. Neither becomes unemployed even as labor reallocates. Korinek et al. understand these channels but give them limited scope in their model. Admittedly, those margins don’t do much work by 2030 but they matter over ten years.

Second, compensation can take the form of shifting taxes from labor to consumption. In the long run labor’s share of consumption tends to equal its share of GDP, so the lower labor’s share becomes, the more relief a given tax shift provides. At a 45% labor share, each dollar shifted from labor taxation to consumption taxation reduces labor’s net burden by 55 cents. Shifting taxes worth 5% of GDP would thus provide net relief to labor of 2.75% of GDP, without increasing total tax revenue. Unemployed workers would still need payments, but compensation need not come entirely through additional government spending.

Third, we do have experience expanding income support rapidly. U.S. unemployment benefits reached approximately 2.5% of GDP in 2020, and that during a contraction. Britain’s compensation to slaveowners following abolition amounted to roughly 5% of GDP in a one-time settlement. These episodes show that governments can mobilize substantial resources for compensation. Moreover, the extreme AI scenario brings an enormous increase in output from which to finance compensation.

Preserving aggregate labor income does not protect every worker. But even the extreme Korinek scenario reinforces the point that a dramatic decline in labor’s share can coexist with stable or increasing aggregate labor income. To the extent labor income does decline, growth makes compensation affordable and attrition, entry, and tax shifting can make the intra-labor task smaller than it first appears.

The post AI, Redistribution, and the Size of the Pie appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Aeon | a world of ideas

Once upon a screen: explosive paradox

Aeon Video
Updated

Photo of a scene from a film showing a soldier in muddy gear behind sandbags in a jungle, reflected on an iPad screen.

Decades after seeing ‘Platoon’, Kevin recalls how the film stirred generational trauma in his family and racism at school

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Aeon | a world of ideas

The bombarding of childhood

Natalia Kucirkova
Updated

Two children engrossed in watching a cartoon on TV in a dimly lit room with curtains and a table.

It’s not just screen time: the problem with children’s media is that it has become relentlessly hectic, loud and bright

- by Natalia Kucirkova

Read on Aeon

Oklahoma Watch
Market Design

Congestion (and lawsuits) in applications for medical residency

Al Roth
Updated

  The figure below is a slide from a lecture I once gave about the transition from medical school to medical residencies in the U.S.  The lower row (in brown) represents the Match, which arose in the 1950's to deal with congestion in processing offers and acceptances. (Since 1998 it's been doing that successfully using the Roth-Peranson algorithm).  However the advent of electronic application systems has led to congestion in the application and interviewing process (top row, in blue).  And now that has led to lawsuits.

 

 Here's the story of one lawsuit:

 Residency Software Developer Sues Doctor Who Helped Launch a Competing Product
— AAMC-partnered Thalamus goes after key players in ResidencyCAS   by Rachael Robertson, MedPage Today, September 10, 2026 •

"The graduate medical education (GME) software company Thalamus filed a lawsuit against its competitor Liaison International and ob/gyn leader Maya Hammoud, MD, MBA, over alleged anticompetitive conduct.

"Thalamus brought the suit in July, claiming that the defendants "engaged in a coordinated effort to unfairly compete in the residency application market through anticompetitive means." Specifically, it alleges that Hammoud violated a non-disclosure agreement signed when she was evaluating its technology for a different project -- before she helped launch a competing product. 

########

 And here's the story of another:

Doctor Sues Over Residency Application System— Arizona wound care physician calls ERAS a monopoly that's gouging applicants  by Kristina Fiore,  MedPage Today, September 1, 2026  

"A physician is bringing antitrust claims against the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) for what she alleges is a monopoly over the residency application process that's gouging doctors. 

...

"Hilgers PLLC, the Dallas law firm representing Buhrke, filed a similar suit against AAMC last year, alleging its medical school application service, AMCAS, was overcharging students. It made similar allegations against the law school application process.

...

"The current complaint alleges that AAMC makes a substantial part of its income from ERAS fees -- about $120 million annually, from about 64,000 applicants.

"Applicants often apply to dozens of programs in order to have a better shot at ensuring a residency position, at an average cost of about $1,800 per person. Buhrke submitted 81 applications through ERAS, paying $1,691 in total, according to the complaint.

"The vast majority of physicians use ERAS to apply, as it has only two competitors: ResidencyCAS for ob/gyn and emergency medicine, and SF Match for ophthalmology and plastic surgery.


"AAMC also took an equity stake in competitor Thalamus so that it wouldn't be a threat to its monopoly, the complaint alleged. "

Hacker News
Marginal Revolution

Is it the screens? Or education systems?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The Dark Ages implies television and phones are the main cause of cognitive decline. This fails to explain the patterns in PISA scores. Why did England and Scotland fall so precipitously from 2000 to 2005 whilst America improved? Why did England and Estonia hold steady after 2015 whilst most other OECD countries declined? How have Singapore, Taiwan, Japan avoided decline altogether?

A better explanation is that a country’s education system is more important than its television diffusion.1 East Asian PISA and IQ scores have probably remained constant, or even risen, because of their rigorous education systems and intensive tutoring cultures. The two European countries which avoid PISA-malaise – Estonia and England – have more rigorous education systems than their neighbours. They (more or less) use the knowledge-rich curricula, direct instruction, and systematic phonics – techniques which their more progressive neighbours abandoned between 1975-1990.

Here is much more from Alexander Thompson, recommended.

The post Is it the screens? Or education systems? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Picture of The Week

A starry night, in another galaxy

When we look up at our own night sky, most of the stars we see are the familiar residents of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few more distant objects, like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, our neighbouring galaxies, peek into our little corner of the cosmos. What this Picture of the Week shows us is a completely different stellar landscape, zooming in to the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud to reveal what looks like a sky filled with millions of foreign stars.

The central regions of galaxies are hard to study: dust partially blocks our view, and stars are so densely packed that it’s difficult to tell them apart. To uncover these hidden stars in the Magellanic Clouds, astronomers used ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). Over several years, VISTA's high-resolution infrared camera pierced through the dust to image the cores of these galaxies, finding a treasure trove of information about the inner lives of our nearest galactic neighbours.

The team, led by Maria-Rosa Cioni, a professor at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, observed these galactic cores about 40 times over this extended period. With these data, they could then measure the subtle motion of stars in the cores, which is key to pinpoint the exact location of the centres of these galaxies. As well as this, by monitoring the periodic changes in the brightness of certain stars, which can be used to measure distances, astronomers will be able to reconstruct the 3D structure of the cores of these galaxies. Now that this unique dataset has been publicly released, the wider astronomical community can also access the information within, potentially digging up more secrets from deep inside our cosmic companions.

Links

charity.wtf

Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob

Charity Majors
Updated

This is a peek into the research behind our “AI Norms and Values” docs, which we developed over the summer and recently shared on our site. If you’re looking for those, go here:

  1. How Honeycomb does business, the principles we all abide by

  2. Why Honeycomb engineering is embracing AI

  3. AI norms and values (and ethical issues we have a stance on)

Back to our story.

Earlier this year, I was spending a lot of time stewing over why everyone around me seemed so frazzled and on edge.

Half the company was spitting mad about all the slop they were getting. Instead of receiving five crisp bullet points, they were getting twenty-page docs full of padding and slop. They would ask a colleague a question, and the reply would begin with “Claude says…” These folks felt like their time and attention were being not just taken for granted, but actively abused.

The other half of the company felt equally injured. They were working faster and delivering better outcomes than ever, and wasn’t this exactly what we had asked of them? They were more upset about the fact that some people hadn’t updated their workflows in years. Of course you can’t keep up if you aren’t willing to adapt, they protested.

Everyone was mad. One side wanted to place limits on AI (“I am so sick of reviewing docs the sender didn’t even read!”). The other side wanted us to force people to use AI (“I am so sick of reviewing docs riddled with basic errors that a single pass would have caught!")

I was, at different times, in both camps.

But the thing that bothered me most was how often I kept hearing the word “dehumanizing”. People said they no longer felt like they had a human connection with their coworkers anymore. This was new.

On the one hand, AI is not special. On the other hand…is it?

My first instinct was to say that tools are tools. The quality of the work is all that matters — outcomes are all that matter — not how the work was made. Do our customers care if we use AI or not? Probably not. They care a lot about the quality of the product and whether it meets their needs, not so much about how we made it.

So maybe we all just need to be ruthlessly outcome-oriented. Build the best thing we can, as fast as we can. AI is a powerful and versatile tool, so we should use it wherever we can to make our work better and do it faster.

Is it really that simple? I had nearly convinced myself that it was, when I noticed how contradictory my own behavior had become.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I begin harshly judging everyone who sends me AI slop

At the same time I was repeating “it doesn’t matter how it was made, it matters how good it is” every day, I was developing a violent disgust reflex for AI-generated text on the side.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. As recently as December 2025, I still found some Claude-isms kind of catchy and clever — I noticed AI language, but it didn’t trigger violent rage. By spring, I was snapping at the tendons of any poor soul who showed up in my inbox with an “I’d value your take on this” or “the call most leaders still won’t make”.

It started with DMs and emails, but it didn’t stop there. By summer, my reactive rage-response to AI-generated text had spread to include most forms of writing. If I’m reading a newsletter and I start to sense AI-isms, I delete and unsubscribe. If I’m reading a blog post, I close the tab; if I’m on social media, I unfollow or unfriend. If it happens repeatedly, I will go out of my way to avoid that writer in the future. I mostly try to not engage, but if I had a button that would let me deliver a 10,000 volt shock to the author I would slam that button every time and I wouldn’t care who saw.

More importantly, I judge them. Yes, I look down on them. If they don’t care enough about their own point of view to do the work and refine it themselves, if they don’t care enough about me to write me a note, then why the fuck should I give them a single morsel of my precious attention?

By the time I became fully aware of my aversion, it had already become fairly extreme. But this makes no sense, if all that matters is the outcome.

But this makes no sense

I don’t know about you, but most of my insights seem to start this way: me, loudly insisting Thing A is true, while persistently behaving as though Thing B is true, and finally, through much toil and suffering and resentment, finding some way to reconcile the two.

It is super annoying. But this is what got me looking a little closer at language and what was happening under the hood.

Language does many different jobs for us

Writing is thinking on paper, as William Zinsser once said. Writing is language, encoded for posterity. But language, and writing, do many different jobs for us.

Language evolved as a way to connect — person to person, mind to mind, one mind to many. This is some of the oldest and strangest wiring we have as human beings, and the neurological infrastructure for linguistics gets used and reused, over and over.

In software, for example, we convert natural language into bits and bytes that computers can use to do math on. Lawyers convert language into legal text and taxonomies. The technical and professional worlds are awash in dialects where language has been abstracted from its roots as an emotional and relational tool and given functional, depersonalized meanings.

In many of these contexts, substituting AI-generated language can be wholly acceptable. No one blinks an eye if you use structured data generated by AI, or a formal proof generated by AI (as long as it’s accurate). The situations where the use of AI tends to land jarringly, causing frustration, rage, even a sense of betrayal, are the ones where the value of the communication is less abstract, and more personal or relational.

Every job language does for us is either functional or relational, or some combination of the two, and knowing which one you’re in the middle of tells you a lot about whether AI belongs there, and how it’s likely to be received

Does the value lie in the idea itself, or the fact that a particular person said or thought something?

There are a bunch of different frameworks out there for disclosing how much AI went into building something, and it took me a while to realize why none of them were hitting the mark for me. That’s because it’s less about how much AI is being used, and more about in which contexts people are using AI, and secondarily whether or not they disclosed and I consented to it being used there.

I apologize with all my heart for coming up with Yet Another Framework, but I published one in the recent “AI Norms and Values” post on the honeycomb blog, because I couldn’t find anyone else talking about it in quite this way. (If you know of one, tell me!)

Here it is. Personal on the left, the value is that it comes from a specific person who thought or felt something; functional on the right, the value is about the idea being communicated, not the person who said it.

Personal vs functional communication

Sometimes, yes, the quality of the work is all that matters. If you and I are collaborating on a document or a diff, all our collective comments and edits are in shared service of making the ideas better. It isn’t about whose idea it was or which tools we used, we are just iterating and improving until it’s as good as we can make it. The use of AI here is just another tool, one of many. In these situations, it’s appropriate to be ruthlessly outcome-oriented.

Other times, the value of a piece of writing derives from the fact that a particular person said it, thought it or felt it, or its value is grounded in your relationship. Why do you care more about what your skip level says about your performance than you would care about reading the same advice in a book? Likely because this is someone you know and respect, someone with influence over your career prospects, someone who knows what you’re capable of and has a vested interest in helping you succeed. In these circumstances, people expect to hear your voice; if they don’t, they may invent all kinds of terrifying reasons why.

There are plenty of messy situations in the middle where objective and subjective overlap, but people are usually crystal clear on what it is they want out of any given interaction.

The more personal the interaction, the more AI-generated text can cause a loss of trust

When I started talking to my coworkers, trying to figure out why they were so angry and frustrated all the time, one thing I heard over and over was, “I asked for my colleague’s opinion, and they sent me back a Claude snippet. I wanted to know what THEY THOUGHT.” When someone wants your opinion, AI generated text registers as a violation.

Another common source of friction was performance reviews. “My performance review was obviously written by ChatGPT. Did my manager even read it, or just push a button and spit it out? What are they even there for, if they aren’t even writing my reviews?” We encourage our managers to use AI to develop systems that help them become better managers, but this is a clear risk of using AI to aid in the writing or editing of reviews: if your voice is lost in the process, it may destroy trust between you.

I have a longer explanation of the four points — personal opinion, professional opinion, artifacts, code — at the Honeycomb blog, and I discuss more of these examples in depth, so I’m not going to recap it all here.

The more any interaction is personal or relational, the more the use of AI in that context tends to cheapen it and degrade trust, unless AI has been specifically invited into that relational context. If you’re expecting a human-to-human interaction, or if you’re specifically requesting a personal response, and what you get back seems like it was pasted from a chatbot, it can be intensely alienating and angering. Even — yes — dehumanizing.

This explains my own hair trigger

I think this is why I went from finding AI generated text inoffensive to rage-inducing in such short order. I don’t get mad when people use AI to outbound to me (or maybe I should say, I don’t get madder), but when someone writes to introduce themselves or ask for some of my time to review their startup or whatever, I get furious. You’re reaching out to me, human to human, using slop? You can’t even be bothered to write your own “hello”? Fuck you.

Or if someone engages with one of my posts and asks questions, but they’re using AI-generated slop, then I get mad because they’re wasting my time. I’ve engaged with enough slop arguments to know there’s no there there. I don’t know which parts are coming from them and which parts are just meaningless slop.

If I’m giving someone I don’t know some of my scarce and valuable time, I at least want to know I’m giving time to them and their problems, not chasing some meaningless robot effluvia, as I have done far too many times before.

People always say, “oh, but those were MY ideas, I was only getting AI to help me format them”. In my experience, people vastly overestimate how much comes from them and underestimate how much comes from the AI. And anyway, all I have to go on is the signal I have.

This is also why I don’t want to spend time reading any blog posts or newsletters or social media posts written by AI. I don’t care what the AI vomits forth. I have an AI of my own, I can read any time that I want. If I’m reading someone else, I want to know that it’s their thoughts. AI slop isn’t a perfect proxy, but it’s a decent weeder. Besides, aesthetically, it’s just so, so, so bad. I value good writing more than ever these days.

The slick, uncanny valleyness of AI communication

AI is not magic. AI is just a tool, and we should use it anywhere and everywhere we can to do better work, faster, and deliver better outcomes for our users.

But companies, too, are more than one thing.

Every company exists to deliver great outcomes for their users and returns for their stakeholders. But every company is also a collective of people who have come together to achieve a lofty goal, something larger than they could have individually achieved. Ideally, these goals are in harmony.

Relationships matter. A respectful environment matters too. And whereas lines of code are indifferent to their origin, and can be validated by harnesses and tests, people are intensely attuned to the language people use with them. Relationship maintenance cannot be automated.

Yes, AI is just software. But it is special in one way: the slick, sycophantic, uncanny valleyness of the way it communicates. Human-like, but not human, which is somehow vastly more alienating than messages that are plainly automated. This is why communication that sounds like AI is so degrading to trust. We all know how easy it is to have the machine spit out some bullshit on our behalf, and we don’t want it done to us.

This means that humans who want to use it for interpersonal interactions will need to work hard to compensate for the loss of trust it engenders. It can be done — it’s not impossible. But it will not work to simply deny this effect and shove AI-generated happy birthdays and performance reviews down everyone’s throats. Not in 2026.

In the absence of universal norms, conventions will do

I’m not claiming that this personal/subjective vs functional/objective scale represents some universal truth, or that all companies should adopt guidelines like this one. But I also don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way.1 And I think most companies would benefit from writing down their expectations for how people should communicate with each other right now.

This is why we invested so much energy into writing down our AI norms and values. (If you haven’t been following the series, it’s all up now: How We Do Business, AI for Honeycomb Engineering, and AI Norms and Values.)

A lot of things about communication that used to be clear (like “this was written by a person”), no longer are. And a lot of hurt feelings, anger, and frustration are roiling about in the breach. Old norms no longer apply, and new norms are not yet broadly developed or agreed upon.

At times like these, having an agreed-upon convention or standard, any convention or standard, can really help.

1

I decided to write this piece after Gergely told me he too has started blocking people who send him slop introductory messages. People, we can start a movement here! Block all slop senders!

NASA Science

An Early Look at Fall Color in Canada

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
July 27
September 6
A river winds through a mostly green tundra landscape in summer, dotted with numerous lakes.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
A river winds through the same tundra landscape in autumn, now colored red and orange. Some green vegetation remains visible along the river.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
A river winds through a mostly green tundra landscape in summer, dotted with numerous lakes.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
A river winds through the same tundra landscape in autumn, now colored red and orange. Some green vegetation remains visible along the river.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
July 27
September 6

Autumn color sweeps across the low-growing shrubs and tundra vegetation of Nunavut, Canada, in this image pair captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.

As North America rode out a summer of remarkable heat, fall foliage and cool, crisp weather still seemed like distant, alien concepts across much of the continent in early September 2026. But fall comes early in the tundra and subarctic ecosystems of Nunavut, in far northern Canada.

Vivid signs of the season were already sweeping across the landscape on September 6 when the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 captured this image (right) of the Coppermine River winding through low-growing shrubs and tundra vegetation upriver of Kugluktuk, a community at the river’s mouth. The other image (left) shows the same area on July 27, 2026, when vegetation was still green.

The region is known for willow and birch shrubs, blueberries, bearberries, and other low-growing tundra plants that turn shades of red, orange, and yellow each fall. A NASA and South Dakota State University analysis of seven years of satellite data found that foliage in the region begins to change in early September and peaks in mid-month, making this one of the first places on the North American continent to change color. But blink and you might miss it: the analysis also showed that far northerly regions tend to have shorter periods of peak color—sometimes a week or less—compared to many lower-latitude areas.

In the fall, leaves change colors as they lose chlorophyll, the molecule that plants use to synthesize food. Chlorophyll makes plants appear green because it absorbs the red and blue light from sunlight as it strikes leaf surfaces. However, chlorophyll is not a stable compound, and plants must continuously synthesize it, a process that requires ample sunlight and warm temperatures. As temperatures drop and days shorten in autumn, levels of chlorophyll fall as well.

As concentrations of chlorophyll decline, the green fades from leaves, presenting an opportunity for other pigments—carotenoids and anthocyanins—to take the stage. Carotenoids absorb blue-green and blue light, so in the absence of chlorophyll, they cause leaves to appear yellow. Anthocyanins absorb blue, blue-green, and green light, so light reflecting off the pigments appears red.

Citizen scientists have an opportunity to help NASA scientists track fall color and contribute to long-term environmental databases with the GLOBE North American Phenology Campaign. Participants observe and record leaf color changes during the spring and fall, helping scientists understand plant responses to climate and environmental changes.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

A river winds through a mostly green tundra landscape in summer, dotted with numerous lakes.

July 27, 2026

JPEG (35.42 MB)

A river winds through the same tundra landscape in autumn, now colored red and orange. Some green vegetation remains visible along the river.

September 6, 2026

JPEG (33.94 MB)

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The post An Early Look at Fall Color in Canada appeared first on NASA Science.

Marginal Revolution

Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From a new NBER working paper:

Whether AI assistance builds or erodes professional expertise is unsettled. In a pre-registered three-month randomized controlled trial, we gave 133 practicing patent lawyers at eleven U.S. intellectual property law firms access to a custom AI drafting assistant and measured both their performance while using AI and their professional judgment afterward without it. All work was scored by blinded expert patent attorneys. Paralleling findings from other white-collar domains, AI access raised the quality of work delivered on benchmark patent drafting tasks at 10 days (0.34 SD, p = 0.03) and 90 days (0.38 SD, p = 0.01), with larger gains among junior lawyers. After three months, all subjects redlined an existing patent application without AI, a core task of patent practice requiring expert judgment. Treated lawyers outperformed controls by 0.32 SD (p = 0.04), but this advantage was concentrated entirely among senior lawyers (0.45 SD, p = 0.02). Junior lawyers showed no average gain; their scores instead bifurcated, with sharply fewer mediocre scores offset by more poor and more good ones. The largest gains from AI thus accrued to the lawyers who retained the least. Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice.

That is by David Autor, et.al.  Do note that over time the allocation of humans to tasks will evolve so that more of the humans become more productive, not less.  RCTs somehow have the odd disadvantage of requiring too many things to be held constant, and so they can miss the benefits of longer-term adjustments.

The post Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Central Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ACPN50 PHFO 161758
TWOCP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 AM HST Wed Sep 16 2026

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Western East Pacific:
A tropical wave is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms
well to the south of the southern tip of the Baja California
Peninsula. Upper-level winds are forecast to remain unfavorable
for significant development through the weekend as the system moves
westward at 10 to 15 mph. However, gradual development of
this system is possible early next week, and this system could
become a tropical depression when it reaches the western
portion of the east Pacific basin.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...40 percent.

$$
Forecaster Gallina/Blake
NNNN


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABNT20 KNHC 161757
TWOAT

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
Issued by the NWS Weather Prediction Center College Park MD
200 PM EDT Wed Sep 16 2026

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

Central Subtropical Atlantic (AL98):
A small area of low pressure located several hundred miles east of
Bermuda has become better defined over the last 24 hours.
Environmental conditions could become a little more conducive for
further development in the next few days while the system moves
slowly westward to southward over the subtropical Atlantic.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.

$$
Forecaster Gallina/Blake


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABPZ20 KNHC 161758
TWOEP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
Issued by the NWS Weather Prediction Center College Park MD
1100 AM PDT Wed Sep 16 2026

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Northwestern Mexico:
An area of low pressure has moved inland over the western
portions of Sonora during the last few hours. While development
chances have ended, the risk of heavy rains and flash flooding
continues to portions of Sonora and into the Southwestern deserts of
the United States.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...near 0 percent.

Southwest of Southwestern Mexico:
An area of low pressure could form well offshore of southwestern
Mexico within the next few days. Environmental conditions appear
conducive for some gradual development, and this system could
become a tropical depression early next week while it moves slowly
northwestward or northward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...60 percent.

Western East Pacific:
A tropical wave is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms
well to the south of the southern tip of the Baja California
Peninsula. Upper-level winds are forecast to remain unfavorable
for significant development through the weekend as the system moves
westward at 10 to 15 mph. However, gradual development of
this system is possible early next week, and this system could
become a tropical depression when it reaches the western
portion of the east Pacific basin.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...40 percent.

$$
Forecaster Gallina/Blake


Astronomy Picture of the Day

There was something behind the clouds. There was something behind the clouds.


National Weather Service

Heavy to Excessive Rains in The Four Corners Region and Midwest; Heat Persists in the South-Central U.S.