East Aurora, N.Y. — Moog Inc. (NYSE: MOG.A and MOG.B) marks 25 years since the Evolved Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) ring completed its Critical Design Review in 2001. The pioneering […]

The post Moog Marks 25 Years Since ESPA Design Milestone: Innovating Space Rideshare appeared first on SpaceNews.

(Karlsruhe, Germany, September 29th 2026) Horizon Microtechnologies is accelerating industrialisation of its metallised polymer micro-additive manufacturing platform through IP-MASS, a two-year scale-up project supported by €500,000 and reinforced by selection […]

The post Horizon Microtechnologies Targets Constellation-Scale Production As Esa Phi-Lab Selection Strengthens Industrialisation Push appeared first on SpaceNews.

Gary Marcus:

When a business needs exponentially increasing amounts of capital to make modest increases in quality in an intensely competitive market and still owes far more money than it has ever made, there is a serious problem.

I continue to believe that there is no moat in AI models. None. But the entire premise of Anthropic’s IPO is that they have an enormous gulf of a moat.

I would not be shocked to see Anthropic go out of business. Nor would I be shocked if the IPO fails. WeWork tried to IPO, 3 times, and didn’t make it.

I would be surprised if Anthropic does not go out of business. Most cults implode, and Anthropic doesn’t even hide that they’re a cult. And I just don’t see how the math works. Scientology is a long-running cult, but Scientology hasn’t committed $900 billion in spending over the next few years.

(Marcus’s post is on his Substack blog, which, annoyingly, requires you to be logged into a Substack account and to “subscribe”, even though it’s ostensibly a free post. What a rotten oppressive turd of a blogging platform Substack is. Just in case your Substack account isn’t working, here’s a PDF archive.)

Links for you. Science:

Cuts, evictions, and job losses: A view from the trenches of climate science in 2026
The U.S. Has Lost Its Measles-Elimination Status, Data Suggests
Drought driven by climate change is redefining how disease spreads, study finds
Retractions of old papers are on the rise: when should bad science be culled?
Infectious Diseases Research Recommendations for the 120th Congress
Almost 1 in 4 Americans believe misinformation about cause of autism
How Tension Over Trump Fractured American Diabetes Research

Other:

Look Who Has a Southern Strategy (made a related point about winning occasional Southern elections here)
MAGA’s other big lie: Despite what Trump says, his movement was never that popular.
‘Reverse Engineer Anything’: AI Companies Crack Down on the Coolest Thing People Were Doing With AI
RFK Jr. May Be Finding a Stronger Foothold in Trump’s Administration
‘Oh shit, we won’: Inside the perfect storm that flipped Nevada’s only GOP House seat
A Push for $25 Minimum Wage Could Reach D.C. Voters by Spring
Parties Are Electable, Not Candidates
Report Finds D.C. Doesn’t Keep Close Enough Tabs on Dangerous Construction
Findings From An Online Survey Of American Jews
Well Okay Then
Where’s Cindy? The Curious Part-Time Campaign of Cindy Hyde-Smith
Heidi Overton’s Confirmation as FDA Commissioner Is in Doubt
Workplace Collegiality
D.C. Bird-Watchers Fear the Government Is Taking Away Their Favorite Spot
Jensen’s Bizarre Adventure
Some Federal Workers Are Being Required to Email What They Do Again
Inside James Gunn, Peter Safran’s DC Ouster: Exec Tensions and a Fateful David Ellison Visit
Trump DOJ Appointees Scramble to Exit as Aides Fret Over Careers
Affordability Stands No Chance Against Accountability
IF VANCE DOESN’T GET THE 2028 NOMINATION, IT WILL BE BECAUSE HE WAS SHIVVED BY GOP ELITES, NOT THE RANK-AND-FILE
Alina Habba Loses $50 Million Contract That Enraged Trump (still wound up with $14.5 million though)
11 Dems Missed Hegseth Impeachment Vote So It Lost. Nailing It!
University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk
How a Misquote by a Supreme Court Justice Imperils Gun Restrictions
Whistleblowers tell Democrats documents linked to Trump’s construction projects are being destroyed
Kennedys Join Suit to Block Trump’s Arch, Saying It Would Mar J.F.K. Gravesite
DOGE holdover threatens ‘adverse action’ against federal workers in email order
Did the Republicans’ ‘fever’ over Obama’s election finally break? After 2026, New England is shut to Republicans, but the South is open to Democrats.
Flying by pricey military jet, Rubio rarely misses a Florida football game. The secretary of state, who is required to travel by government plane, defended his trips to his alma mater to see his son play.
Paul LePage, of all people, will be the only New England Republican in Congress

Jason Snell:

These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way.

I’m with Snell. Good riddance.

Austin Mann:

Honestly, the idea of a folding iPhone didn’t immediately appeal to me. I usually like smaller devices, but when I first started playing with the Duo in September, I realized it’s really something special and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a review unit from Apple. The iPhone 18 Pro remains the most powerful camera in the lineup, and though the Duo also has an excellent camera, where it really shines is everything around the photograph: planning, editing and sharing.

There are many reasons to prefer any of the regular (“uno”) iPhones to the Duo, but for almost everyone, the camera is not one of them. The iPhone Duo’s ultrawide 0.5× lens is either identical or nearly identical to the iPhone 18 Pro’s. It’s nice to have the Pro’s 4×/8× telephoto third lens when you really need it. And, yes, the Pro’s 1×/2× main camera is definitely the best one that Apple makes.

But just like with the iPhone Air — whose one-lens camera I love — the Duo’s 1×/2× main camera is really good. Just look at the photos Mann captured with it. Gorgeous. The camera system is not a reason not to buy a Duo.

(That said, when Mann captured this stylish photo of me at Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event in Los Angeles last month, he was carrying his iPhone 18 Pro.)

This is a really good and fair Duo review.

Mike McIntire and Eli Murray, reporting for The New York Times (gift link)

For nearly two decades, judges across the country have invoked this language to strike down gun-control laws. It is a pivotal legal test.

It is also based on a misquote.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, attributed the “dangerous and unusual” language to Sir William Blackstone, an 18th-century English jurist whose writings became the basis for much of American law.

But in his seminal 1769 treatise, “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” Blackstone referred to weapons that were “dangerous or unusual,” suggesting that a gun did not need to be both in order to be restricted.

I’ve written before that Heller overturned two centuries of Supreme Court interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. The current interpretation — literally the NRA’s interpretation — was characterized by former Chief Justice Warren Burger as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

So it’s not like anything needs to rest on this and-vs.-or misquoting of something William Blackstone wrote before the United States was even founded. But, still, it’s interesting nonetheless how often the gun-fetish jurists like to cite the misquoting. The government should, and can, regulate dangerous weapons.

There’s a para-news topic I’d like to discuss with you. It has to do with how scandals do or don’t develop, what catches fire and what peters out. We know that one of the constant themes of the last two years was that anti-bromide “nothing matters.” A mammoth scandal is uncovered. A few pieces are written about it. And then … nothing. It just falls under the waves. There is a key structural reason for this that gets far too little attention. It turns on the incentives reporters, publications and readers have to pay attention.

The standard scandal reporting progression goes something like this:

Reporters unearth scandal details. Attention shakes free more information and the momentum builds. Eventually public officials announce hearings or law enforcement agencies begin investigations. Sometimes it’s both. Those actions both validate the reality of wrongdoing and create new stories to cover. It’s both the existence and progress of these investigations and the new information they generate. There are things that criminal or legislative investigators — with warrants and subpoenas — can pry loose that reporters almost never can. Eventually you might have resignations or indictments, perhaps reforms.

Everyone knows that Trump’s corruption of the Justice Department is a bad thing. What’s less appreciated is how this quite effectively shut down the conveyor belt I described above. The same applies to having an entirely tamed legislative branch which won’t hold any investigations. If any sort of accountability or investigation is ruled out in advance, scandals and reporting on them struggle to maintain momentum.

We like to think that press coverage and investigative journalism is logical, linear and additive. A reporter finds out the details, brings them to the public and keeps going. But it’s not that simple. In journalistic terms, a scandal is a story. Like a play or a novel or any other form, it has conventions, a series of stages or acts in which different things happen. It needs to move forward to have life. It also needs other players with different and greater powers to get involved. If those don’t happen it loses steam. There’s nothing more to cover. From a reader’s point of view, and, to an extent, from a journalist’s, if there’s no possibility of accountability, what’s the point?

A scandal is not just bad things happening and then a dogged person finding out about them. It’s a more complex ecosystem of different players, different incentives, attention and excitement and the way these all interact with each other. In a way this is the heart of the autocracy and authoritarianism project: training everyone in society to know and expect that accountability or consequences are impossible and to get them to stop trying to get it.

By thoroughly corrupting the Justice Department, making it crystal clear that crimes or wrongdoing by anyone under the protection of the White House would never be investigated, Trump disrupted that process far more than people realize. It’s like a playwright who can introduce the main characters but isn’t allowed to proceed to the second act. The same applies to congressional investigations as well, or different public authorities at the state and local level. That’s been another benefit of Trump’s taking control of the legislative branch.

Obviously investigative journalism still happens. We’ve had a lot of really good investigative journalism over the last two years. But it operates very differently, with less attention and consequence.

We can see how this works or doesn’t in a common refrain we’ve heard over the last two years. Why isn’t the press covering XYZ? In almost every case they have covered it. That’s why you know about it in the first place. But the follow up is: but they let it drop. They need to keep talking about it.

But that’s the thing. There’s no ‘keep talking about it.’ You need a new thing to talk about. You need the story to progress or else it runs out of steam. Trump threw a wrench into that conveyor belt system and a lot of it just broke down.

The implications of November 3rd are huge for a lot of reasons. But they’re pretty big for this as well — not just accountability in a general sense but the way the political news press functions within an ecosystem of accountability. In the near term it’s only congressional oversight that will change, but that can impact the corrupt inattention of the DOJ as well. The results of the election itself also reminds people of the possibility and probability of accountability, the public’s hunger for it. All those things are getting the conveyor belt cranking back to life.

This is the free, weekly edition of The Backchannel.

I’ve been going back and forth in my head about posts to write about the rapidly expanding scandal tied to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and presumed Chinese spy Alice Huang (no relation). High-end processors, export controls, NVIDIA’s complex and bubbly investments in its customer companies … these are all highly technical topics where my knowledge is limited. (A parenthetical: I’m being immensely helped by email guidance from TPM readers in these fields, so keep those emails coming.) But I know a lot about the dynamics of political scandals. And if you do, you know that this one is very big because the essential elements are all visible from the beginning.

What are those essential elements?

There appears to be no serious question that Alice Huang was working on behalf of the Chinese government, working as a spy. We know her relationship with Jensen Huang was sexual; he has admitted that. We know that the president of the United States knew of this relationship and Alice Huang’s identity as a presumed spy for a year and took no action against Huang, either to press him to end the relationship, to distance himself from Huang, or anything else. (Unsurprisingly, reporting suggests that Trump didn’t want to do anything about it because NVIDIA’s commercial success was central to the AI boom propping up the whole U.S. economy.) We also know that Jensen Huang was successfully lobbying Trump to make it easier to sell NVIDIA chips to China — that’s what China wanted but it was also in the business interests of NVIDIA. Finally, a Commerce Department investigation into Alice Huang’s company, Megaspeed, was abruptly halted earlier this year and transferred to the Justice Department after what appeared to be an irregular intervention by NVIDIA’s general counsel. This report (paywall) from The Information last night finds that the relationship dates back to at least 2023 and that Huang’s company rapidly ascended to the ranks of NVIDIA’s highest tier of preferred customers. As The Information put it, “the two have built a rapport that facilitated the shipment of at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips through Chinese companies.”

Given all these data points, it seems very hard for me to see how Jensen Huang can come out of these various investigations unscathed even if there’s no major wrongdoing. The same applies to Trump — the reporting is crystal clear that he knew about this major security problem and did nothing. What makes this so potent as a scandal is that the key elements are all known. So reporters, politicians, everybody knows the overall story is bad. It’s just the details that remain unknown. That gives everyone huge incentives to keep digging and not let up.

To illustrate what I mean by all the elements being known in advance, we can imagine an alternative scenario where there’s a big spy plot but the targets of it didn’t know. Or perhaps there’s a big spy plot and the U.S. government had suspicions but they didn’t inform President Trump. So he’s off the hook. Or maybe because everything is so gutted in the executive branch no one who works export controls thought to investigate it. But they were investigating it. Those are the kinds of connections which make scandals explode or run dry. And they’re all confirmed in advance. It touches everyone.

There is one detail that is key but has not been discussed. It seems hard to imagine that U.S. intelligence wouldn’t have wanted to give Huang a defensive briefing. These are commonplace and involve no assumption of wrongdoing on the part of the person briefed. It’s U.S. intelligence telling some important U.S. person: Look, this person you’ve gotten to know and who is pursuing some kind of relationship with you — we think they’re a spy. I have seen no reporting that this took place. If it didn’t, I get it’s conceivable that Jensen Huang didn’t know that Alice Huang was a spy. But given how many people around or close to him knew, it’s very hard for me to imagine that the Times story from late October was the first he’d heard of it.

The other complexity to the story is that the interests of the Chinese government here lined up very well with the commercial interests of NVIDIA. In other words, we know that NVIDIA and Huang were lobbying Trump to loosen export controls and allow it to sell its most advanced chips to China. But of course they were. They’re trying to sell everywhere and they want their processor architecture to dominate the global market. We don’t have to assume any nefarious motive.

But it runs both ways. All this push is explainable in terms of NVIDIA’s commercial goals. But since Jensen Huang was involved in an extramarital affair with a Chinese spy and went to great lengths to give her company the highest levels of access to NVIDIA chips, all that lobbying has to fall under a cloud of suspicion because it’s impossible to know how much that relationship colored his perspective.

Add in the enticement of sex in the story, the mammoth implications for the U.S. economy, and this is like a wildfire just starting to burn out of control.

We have two stories this morning on how the possibility that Mississippi might elect a Black man to the Senate fits with the state’s history.

First, Layla A. Jones writes about the last Democratic senator to represent the state, John C. Stennis, a dixiecrat who was himself deeply involved in the state’s history of white supremacy. Mississippi hasn’t elected a Black senator since the 19th century.

Second, Josh Kovensky speaks with Dennis Dahmer, whose father, Vernon Dahmer, a Black activist in Forrest County, was murdered by the KKK for his efforts to help his community vote. Dennis describes what a Scott Colom victory, secured by Black voters in the state and the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, would mean for him.

For listeners and watchers of The TPM Show, because of the holiday the show will come out this week on Thursday rather than our regular Wednesday time slot.

A few thoughts on Chuck Schumer and whether he’ll continue as leader in the Senate. One important detail. Senate leadership works differently from House leadership. Majority Leader isn’t a constitutional position. So unlike the House where it’s a public vote and you need a majority of the body, in the Senate, it’s a secret ballot and Schumer needs only a majority of his caucus. So a handful of defections won’t settle this.

I said multiple times over the last two years that while I think highly of Schumer, he’s not characterologically or generationally suited to the moment. The big question that faces us today isn’t ideological, “centrists” vs. progressives, it’s fight vs. accommodation. Or, put differently, are we in a normal period of American history in which regular order should prevail or are we in an ongoing national emergency? Schumer thinks in terms of the first and not the second.

People give too little credit to Schumer for the Senate results of this election. Yes, he picked stinkers in Michigan and Maine, though Haley Steven was his 3rd or 4th choice. But he also recruited Sherrod Brown, Pappas, Turek, Peltola, Colom, Cooper. But this is neither here nor there in terms of being leader. They’re not even similar skill sets. Give him a high five for a job well done on that front and then pick the leader based on who would do the best job.

All that said, parliamentary leaders are far more creatures of their memberships than leaders in their own right. So who the leader is matters less than you might think. It’s not like having the right person as president where that person’s decisions count for a huge amount. It’s really a matter of the members and what kind of period of history they think we’re in.

I have no insight into how this will turn out. But a real leadership battle is good regardless. It makes whoever gets the job know that the demands of the moment are chasing them, lashing at their feet. No one should be comfortable in a situation like this. If Schumer is going to be leader, have it be with commitments to the dissenting members of the caucus about what kind of leader he’ll be. Speaking for myself, I’d want to see some commitment to big action accountability and big action on affordability. Again, it’s fight far more than ideology. If it’s Van Hollen, or someone else, get those kinds of commitments from them. It really is far more about voters making clear to the membership what kind of moment we’re in than the specifics of who the leader is. More broken china, more of the urgency of the moment.

If you’re hungry for news about the final stages of the vote counting in Mississippi, this liveblog from the Mississippi Free Press seems to be quickest and closet to the action.

It’s hard to believe how lucrative this crime can be:

According to a press release from the United States attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, three men ­ Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan, and Guy Sheetrit ­ were arrested for using AI to alter and impersonate the voices and images of executives and attorneys at various companies in order to convince employees to send over large payments. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain over the summer, while Sheetrit was arrested in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged fraud took place between 2024 and 2026.

With the help of AI, the men allegedly acted as a corporate executive, targeting employees of various companies and telling them they needed their help with sensitive financial transactions. They would then instruct the employees to get in touch with lawyers at a large international law firm. The men would then impersonate a lawyer at these firms and have the employees wire a large amount of money.

The men ultimately stole more than $129m from companies all over the world including in the US, according to the DoJ.

Always remember that there are three parts of AI security: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. This is the third.

NASA's competition for the development of private space stations that will take flight in the 2030s is already nearing crunch time. But a recently unsealed lawsuit may spice things up even further.

The lawsuit involves two of the most prominent companies in this competition, Houston-based Axiom Space and Long Beach, California-based Vast Space. And it is surfacing as final proposals for private space stations are due from companies to the US space agency a little more than one month from today, on December 14.

According to the court filings unsealed by a November 4 order from US District Judge Charles Eskridge, Axiom is pursuing a False Claims Act case against Vast in which Axiom accuses Vast of presenting NASA with a fraudulent mission-planning document that incorporates Axiom's proprietary information.

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Ancient specimens reveal how animals began to move half a billion years ago – and even the first known example of ‘handedness’

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Release: llm-gemini 0.36

Gemini 4 Carbon was announced two weeks ago for "a subset of cyber defenders", but today it's available to everyone else.

This is Google's best ever Gemini, priced at $2/million input and $10/million output at launch (that's GPT-6.1 Sol / Claude Sonnet 5.5 prices) but scheduled to double in price to $4/$20 on December 1st (same as Opus 5.5).

Here are three pelicans for the low, medium and high thinking efforts (it defaults to medium). This is the pelican I got for high:

Gemini pelicans have all been great for a while now, so I also tested it out using Google's Antigravity IDE with a prompt I first tried with Claude Fable 5.2 yesterday:

Make a three js animation where yonkers stands up as a big mech (cool stand up motion) and stomps around manhattan and queens and Brooklyn, use openstreetmap mapping data

Here's the HTML result (I had to prompt "build that into a standalone HTML file" to get a version with no external dependencies). I then screen-captured that as a video:

Update: Huh, just saw this on YouTube (and tweeted by Sundar Pichai):

Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.

Here's the playable version in AI Studio.

Tags: llm-release, gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

My last post was about how for the first time, I’m becoming bearish on China’s continued economic and technological outperformance. A number of people asked me whether I was similarly bearish about India. The answer is no — I’m actually more bullish on India than I have been in a while. In fact, I had been meaning to write a post about that, so this gives me a good opportunity to do so.

The reason I’m bullish on India and bearish on China is that we’re asking the two countries to do two different things. When we think of China’s future success, we think of whether it’ll eclipse the combined economies of the U.S. and its allies, seize the lead in artificial intelligence, reach Taiwan or Korea’s level of income, or dominate Asia. I’m increasingly skeptical about its ability to do all of those things. But India’s job right now is a lot simpler — it just has to escape poverty and become an upper middle income country. And this I think it can do.

In both GDP terms and in terms of the Human Development Index (which combines GDP with education and health), India is around where China was in the late 2000s.

It’s easy to forget, but in the 2000s, people still thought of China as a basically developing country — its cities choked with smog, its rural areas still mired in poverty, its economy driven by cheap labor and lax environmental protections, and so forth. The challenge now for India is to make the leap that China made in the 2010s — to build abundant high-quality roads, trains, housing, and energy, provide decent jobs and livelihoods to the majority of its people, and catch up to the frontier of technology.

A lot of people don’t seem to realize how good of a start India has made. For one thing, extreme poverty in India has mostly been conquered over the last two decades:

This is an incredible accomplishment — a full tenth of humanity saved from deprivation. And what’s remarkable is that — unlike China — India managed to do this incredible poverty reduction while also reducing inequality:

How did India manage this feat? The World Bank says that it was due to the two usual suspects — economic growth and redistribution:

Over the past decade, India has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty across both monetary and non-monetary dimensions, recording one of the fastest poverty declines in the world…This progress was mainly driven by strong consumption growth, rising employment, especially among women, and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies. [emphasis mine]

A strong welfare state is certainly important, but economic growth has to take the lion’s share of the credit here; without growth, there’s simply less of a pie to redistribute in the first place. And India’s growth has certainly been impressive. Ever since the pandemic, India has been growing faster than China:

Now, India isn’t growing as fast as China did when China was at $10,000 of per capita GDP. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, China was still growing at close to double-digit rates; it didn’t slow down to India’s current rate until 2014, at which point it was 40% richer than India is now. But 6.5% is still a very healthy growth rate — it represents almost a doubling of living standards every decade.

And Bloomberg expects Indian growth to accelerate even further, to 8% by the end of the decade. Neelkanth Mishra, the executive director of the World Bank, points out that because India’s recovery from the pandemic recession is still incomplete, there’s plenty of room for a growth acceleration.

You’d expect this kind of growth to transform every part of Indian society and culture, and this appears to be exactly what’s happening. Arjun Ramani has a great in-depth report from his travels across India, focusing on how economic development is changing life on the ground:

How is India producing this rapid growth? India is long past the point where you can tell a simple story about the country’s economic progress — manufacturing, finance, real estate, business services, IT, and a bunch of other sectors are all growing at once.

How is India managing to grow so fast? The Economist mostly credits liberalizing reforms and prudent macroeconomic policy:

A programme of fiscal consolidation has cut the budget deficit from 9.2% of gdp in fiscal 2021 (when it was bloated by pandemic spending) towards a target of 4.4% for fiscal 2026. Excluding interest payments, the deficit will be only around 0.9% of gdp…With inflation under control, interest rates have been cut by 1.25 percentage points over the past year…

The decline in inflation is not just limited to food, points out Sonal Varma of Nomura, a bank. Earlier reforms, such as the creation of a digital-payments infrastructure, which made prices more transparent, as well as the RBI’s shift to an inflation-targeting regime in 2016, have helped reduce inflation expectations and are now paying off. The RBI has also built up its stock of foreign-exchange reserves. A banking sector clean-up and reforms to the bankruptcy code have kept the financial system stable…

The longer term looks even more promising, thanks to a vigorous reform effort…A long-mooted cut in the number of labour codes, from 29 to four, was enacted in November. A cap of 74% on foreign direct investment in the insurance industry has been lifted. Nuclear power has been opened up to the private sector. Financial-market regulation has been overhauled…The states have also pursued reforms. Allowing women to work after dark, for instance, means textile and electronics factories can stay open later.

I have to say, I’m skeptical of this story. Fiscal probity is well and good, but India’s long-term borrowing rates haven’t come down all that much:

A stable financial system is very good, but it’s not clear how that automatically accelerates growth. And most of the real structural reform The Economist mentions is in the future. It’s possible for businesses’ expectations of structural reform to drive growth, but as the article mentions, domestic private-sector investment isn’t really driving the boom. FDI is sluggish too (or at least was until this year).

One bright spot is government investment, which has increased by a factor of four since before the pandemic, in spite of the country’s falling debt levels:

The Indian government has been on a tremendous infrastructure-building boom — correcting one of the country’s notorious chronic deficiencies. Highway spending has increased by a factor of five over the last decade. Central government railway spending has risen eightfold.

This is boosting growth in the short term, but in the long term it’ll make both manufacturing and consumption a lot easier in India. It’s also changing the physical look and feel of the country, much as China’s own modernization did in the 2000s and 2010s (if not as rapidly). India is now building its own bullet trains:

I recently saw an example of a Japanese man who declared that he was impressed by how clean and quiet Indian subways were, compared to Japanese ones!

Another important factor in India’s growth story — and another long-standing deficiency that’s now beginning to be corrected — is the growth in Indian manufacturing.

The old story of India’s economy is that it had “leapfrogged” manufacturing and gone straight to services — call centers, business process outsourcing, software outsourcing, and the like. That concealed a quiet disappointment that India hadn’t managed to get on the same industrialization bus that has carried so many other countries out of poverty. But India’s current growth is very broad-based — manufacturing is growing right alongside services. The Economist has some details:

Manufacturing output in August, the most recent figure available, was 9% higher than the year before, thanks in particular to surging production of cars and electronics…India’s rising manufacturing output…reflects its growing appeal as a place to make things. In dollar terms India’s electronics exports were up by 90% in August, year on year, with American-bound iPhones accounting for a large share of that.

Another encouraging sign is the breadth of India’s manufacturing growth. Whereas Bangladesh’s manufacturing boom last decade was powered mostly by the garment industry, India is making and exporting a bunch of different high-tech products:

The strength of India’s engineering exports lies partly in the diversity of its product segments. Automobiles remained the largest contributor in FY 2025–26, accounting for 21.9% of total engineering exports. Industrial machinery followed with an 18% share, while iron and steel products accounted for 16.9%…Electrical machinery contributed 12.5%, other engineering products 12.7%, and non-ferrous metals and products 11.6%.

And keep in mind, this is all in spite of China’s attempts to throttle Indian industrialization by denying them key technological exports and factory expertise. Competitive pressure from a more established economic power is not something China itself had to deal with, since the U.S. wholeheartedly supported China’s industrialization in the 1990s and 2000s.

Whether India’s growth boom can continue past the next couple of years is an open question. Private investment will have to rise, and probably FDI as well. India is also going to need to correct its bigger structural issues at some point — especially bad rural education, female underemployment, and incomplete urbanization.

But for now, India looks like a big economic success story — perhaps the brightest in the entire world right now. It’s less visible than China’s rapid rise two decades earlier, but it’ll be no less world-shaking when it happens. More people should be taking notice.

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Marketing note: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.

A few years ago my wife and I were driving in New Jersey, when she suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that incredibly ugly car?” It was her first sighting of a Cybertruck in the wild.

Now Tesla is finally pulling the plug on the vehicle, which one person quoted in a New York Times report describes as looking like a mechanical cockroach — an image one can’t unsee.

So what’s the big deal? Businesses make bum investments all the time. It’s true that the Cybertruck’s failure was spectacular — Dave Phillips, the author of the piece, who was clearly having fun, pointed out that it’s unfair to compare the Cybertruck to the Edsel, which had much bigger sales.

Beyond that, however, the Cybertruck was, as the article says, “a culture war on wheels.” The 7-year arc of the Cybertruck coincided with the transformation of Musk’s public image from that of a planet-friendly innovator to that of a racist, conspiracy-theorizing, African-children-killing oligarch. Once upon a time driving a Tesla was a way to signal that you were rich but environmentally conscious. But driving a Cybertruck became a signal of MAGA fealty.

Yet there is an even wider cultural context here. The Cybertruck was the physical embodiment of a dystopian ideology that has become dominant among billionaire tech bros — an ideology that draws heavily from cyberpunk novels and movies.

Wait, can fiction really have major political consequences? Of course it can. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t really understand the behavior of many right-wing influencers until you realized how their thinking about the world was shaped by reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in their youth. Well, today’s tech billionaires grew up reading William Gibson and watching Blade Runner. But rather than taking cyberpunk’s visions of dystopia as cautionary tales, they saw them as manifestos. And with the great power that flows from great wealth, they have been trying to turn their adolescent dreams into reality.

For those unfamiliar with the term, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction usually set in a not-too-distant future that combines advanced technology with social collapse. Predatory corporations and artificial intelligences rule the world — challenged only by morally ambiguous hackers, who live mainly in the virtual world of what Gibson called cyberspace — while homeless people sleep in piles of trash.

On immediate reflection, the cyberpunk influence on the tech broligarchs is obvious and overwhelming. For example, Elon Musk wasn’t trying to design a mechanical cockroach; he was clearly trying to build a car that looked like the vehicles in Blade Runner. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $80 billion — 40 times what Musk wasted on the Cybertruck — trying to sell the world on his Metaverse, a virtual space modeled on Gibson’s cyberspace. He even changed the name of his company to promote the doomed venture. Should we be surprised that Zuckerberg’s wild spending spree on AI is running into serious headwinds and that even the WSJ believes that Meta is doubling down on loss-making AI bets?

Furthermore, the cyberpunk influence on tech bros goes beyond bad investments. It’s also crucial for understanding the seemingly bizarre public relations strategy of the AI frontier labs: “Our technology will lead either to mass unemployment or to the extinction of the human race. Now, invest in our IPO.” To some extent this is a way of hyping the potential of what they are selling. But it also, I believe, reflects the mindset of middle-aged guys who grew up on cyberpunk and believe that it truly predicts our inevitable future.

Crucially, while you or I might read Neuromancer or watch Blade Runner and shudder at their visions of the future, billionaire tech bros surely picture themselves living in that future not as unemployed and homeless, but as edgelords ruling the world. Technological dystopia may sound like a nightmare to most of us, but for the broligarchs — despite their occasional expressions of concern and mumbling about Universal Basic Income — it’s basically a dream, which they are trying to use their financial and political power to make come true.

But the public isn’t buying it — literally in the case of Cybertrucks and the Metaverse, figuratively in the form of overwhelming voter opposition to data centers and AI in general.

So, will public opposition be enough to stop the cyberpunking of America? Stay tuned.

MUSICAL CODA

Marketing note: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.

A few years ago my wife and I were driving in New Jersey, when she suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that incredibly ugly car?” It was her first sighting of a Cybertruck in the wild.

Now Tesla is finally pulling the plug on the vehicle, which one person quoted in a New York Times report describes as looking like a mechanical cockroach — an image one can’t unsee.

So what’s the big deal? Businesses make bum investments all the time. It’s true that the Cybertruck’s failure was spectacular — Dave Phillips, the author of the piece, who was clearly having fun, pointed out that it’s unfair to compare the Cybertruck to the Edsel, which had much bigger sales.

Beyond that, however, the Cybertruck was, as the article says, “a culture war on wheels.” The 7-year arc of the Cybertruck coincided with the transformation of Musk’s public image from that of a planet-friendly innovator to that of a racist, conspiracy-theorizing, African-children-killing oligarch. Once upon a time driving a Tesla was a way to signal that you were rich but environmentally conscious. But driving a Cybertruck became a signal of MAGA fealty.

Yet there is an even wider cultural context here. The Cybertruck was the physical embodiment of a dystopian ideology that has become dominant among billionaire tech bros — an ideology that draws heavily from cyberpunk novels and movies.

Wait, can fiction really have major political consequences? Of course it can. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t really understand the behavior of many right-wing influencers until you realized how their thinking about the world was shaped by reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in their youth. Well, today’s tech billionaires grew up reading William Gibson and watching Blade Runner. But rather than taking cyberpunk’s visions of dystopia as cautionary tales, they saw them as manifestos. And with the great power that flows from great wealth, they have been trying to turn their adolescent dreams into reality.

For those unfamiliar with the term, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction usually set in a not-too-distant future that combines advanced technology with social collapse. Predatory corporations and artificial intelligences rule the world — challenged only by morally ambiguous hackers, who live mainly in the virtual world of what Gibson called cyberspace — while homeless people sleep in piles of trash.

On immediate reflection, the cyberpunk influence on the tech broligarchs is obvious and overwhelming. For example, Elon Musk wasn’t trying to design a mechanical cockroach; he was clearly trying to build a car that looked like the vehicles in Blade Runner. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $80 billion — 40 times what Musk wasted on the Cybertruck — trying to sell the world on his Metaverse, a virtual space modeled on Gibson’s cyberspace. He even changed the name of his company to promote the doomed venture. Should we be surprised that Zuckerberg’s wild spending spree on AI is running into serious headwinds and that even the WSJ believes that Meta is doubling down on loss-making AI bets?

Furthermore, the cyberpunk influence on tech bros goes beyond bad investments. It’s also crucial for understanding the seemingly bizarre public relations strategy of the AI frontier labs: “Our technology will lead either to mass unemployment or to the extinction of the human race. Now, invest in our IPO.” To some extent this is a way of hyping the potential of what they are selling. But it also, I believe, reflects the mindset of middle-aged guys who grew up on cyberpunk and believe that it truly predicts our inevitable future.

Crucially, while you or I might read Neuromancer or watch Blade Runner and shudder at their visions of the future, billionaire tech bros surely picture themselves living in that future not as unemployed and homeless, but as edgelords ruling the world. Technological dystopia may sound like a nightmare to most of us, but for the broligarchs — despite their occasional expressions of concern and mumbling about Universal Basic Income — it’s basically a dream, which they are trying to use their financial and political power to make come true.

But the public isn’t buying it — literally in the case of Cybertrucks and the Metaverse, figuratively in the form of overwhelming voter opposition to data centers and AI in general.

So, will public opposition be enough to stop the cyberpunking of America? Stay tuned.

MUSICAL CODA

The US military is taking a new approach to prop up commercial launch companies as SpaceX looks to wind down its Falcon rocket program, suggesting defense officials see the workhorse rocket's retirement as a potential national security risk.

The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital has twice in the last two weeks announced it was sending cash to two of SpaceX's competitors in the launch business. First, on October 26, the office announced a $150 million conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space. Military officials revealed a second $150 million Pentagon loan Tuesday for Rocket Lab.

Stoke Space and Rocket Lab are the first two launch companies to receive significant support from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), an organization established in 2022 to infuse companies developing "vital" national security technologies with capital. OSC has been on a loan spree in recent weeks, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to companies specializing in batteries, drones, and semiconductors. In the space sector, the office also provided a $150 million loan to LeoLabs, a commercial satellite tracking company, for production and deployment of radar units.

Read full article

Comments

Links for you. Science:

LLM Book (excellent explainer of LLMs)
Her Death From Dengue May Signal That the Disease Is Here to Stay
SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content
Ecology and spread of the North American H5N1 epizootic
The Arms Race Between Bacteria and Their Viruses: Update on Phage Countermeasures Against Bacterial Defence Systems
Mutation and Recombination Rates in Free-Ranging Polar Bears
The flu strain driving this season’s unusually early spread

Other:

The reddest House seat Dems are poised to flip is TN-4, where Victoria Broderick, a progressive who backs Medicare for All and is openly pro-trans rights, leads. Trump won it by 24. She ran on a shoestring budget with no party support. Here are other Democrats who flipped deep-red seats.
The Much Maligned “Groups” Are the Reason Democrats Won the Midterms
Affordability or Accountability? Dear God, Democrats. Do Both—and More
Total System Failure: U.S. Government Networks Will Need To Be Torched And Rebuilt
Trump Has a Secret Plan to Evade Accountability. Will Dems Defeat It?
Major media outlets sanitize Stephen Miller’s white nationalist ideas
Don’t Let Trump Up Off The Ground. Democrats are already reverting to the approach that has let Trump escape in the past: treating accountability as a sideshow, even hoping to cut deals with him.
The Trolls’ Comeuppance: How the attention economy turned on Republicans
What Won the Democrats the Midterms?
Understanding the Grand Theory of Trumpism
White House Network Possibly Exposed to Hackers Via Proxy Services (more details here)
Honey Pot Huang
Commerce Dept. Chip Inquiry Was Halted After Nvidia Intervention
Ahmed Moor, a Gaza-born Philadelphian, is John Fetterman’s first 2028 challenger
Silicon Valley and Trump rally behind Nvidia CEO after his affair with alleged Chinese spy
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries Are Not Meeting the Moment
The tortured pollsters department: I said regularly that I thought polls were underestimating Democrats. They did. Here’s why I had my doubts.
Palantir hires a former Democratic senator as it faces scrutiny in new Congress
Mar-a-Lago Face Won’t Save You
Utah gambling crackdown continues as prediction markets halt operations in the state
Immigrants Are Being Systematically Returned Home Despite Court Orders
He Ran on Fighting Data Centers. Now, He’s Going to Congress
Inside the Operation That Helped Ukraine Turn the Tables
A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics: Republicans Spent $200 Million Attacking Trans People And Lost Everything
540-Plus Seats Flipped, 6 New Trifectas: Dem Wins At The State Level Keep Piling Up
The Honeypot That Might End the AI Boom
D.C. developers weigh in on Janeese Lewis George’s housing promises
DC Votes to Ban Foie Gras. Now What?
Metro weighs higher fares and service cuts amid rising costs
What the 2026 Exit Polls Signal for Democratic Investigations in Congress

There should be no doubt about the importance of massive Black voter turnout in the South in the 2026 election (boldface mine):

We can use this chart to estimate the voter turnout rate both for Black voters and for other voters in the South. According to Strength In Numbers’ estimates, Black voters turned out at about 96% of presidential-year levels in the Deep South, compared to about 71% for white and other voters…

This has contributed not just to a possible — perhaps even likely — Senate victory in Mississippi, but to Democrats doing well across the South. Democrat Annie Andrews beat (appointed) South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham by about 4.5 points, 51.3% to 46.8%, in a state Trump carried by 18 points just two years ago.

Without the surge in Black voter turnout, Andrews would have won by under a point.

Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures was able to hold on to his seat in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District this year, despite GOP lawmakers diluting the Black vote after the Supreme Court gave their blessing to Republicans to gerrymander Black voters and Democrats in Louisiana v. Callais in April.

In 2024, under a court-drawn map, Alabama’s 2nd District was 48.7% Black by voting-age population. Figures won it with 54.6% of the vote. For 2026, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population to 39.9%.

Yet Figures still won 53.8% of the vote. Because of a relative increase in Black participation, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population by nearly 9 points, but Figures’ vote share fell by less than 1 point.

It is inspiring to see this, but at the same time, should lead to some caution about claims about the death knell of the Republican Party. There is no way that a similar gap will occur in 2028, which is a presidential election year. There still might be a gap, but it will be narrower, and that can make all the difference. In Mississippi, the NY Times estimated that, in 2024, the Black vote was thirty percent of the electorate, while in 2024, it was 33%. For Senator-Elect Colom, that’s the entire difference between winning and losing.

That said, it’s quite possible that the South settles into a pattern similar to that seen in Virginia ten to fifteen years ago, where parties succeed or fail based on whether the election is an off-year election or not. This would a marked improvement over Republican dominance, but it’s not a death knell for Republicans. But taking victories where we can get them is still a good thing and worth doing.

Aside: The real question remains if white evangelicals will either be less likely to vote Republican or if they vote less often. I’m assuming neither of those things happens over the long term.

SAN DIEGO, CA, November 10, 2026 – Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., a technology company in defense, national security, and global markets, today announced a long-term agreement with Seagate […]

The post Kratos and Seagate Space Partner to Advance Mobile Offshore Launch Capabilities for National Security Missions appeared first on SpaceNews.

Two NASA smallsats are headed toward Mars after completing flybys of Earth nearly a year after their launch.

The post ESCAPADE on its way to Mars after Earth flybys appeared first on SpaceNews.

Ana Swanson and Devlin Barrett, reporting yesterday for The New York Times (gift link):

Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.

But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.

It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.

The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident.

“Nice job you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

If this is as abjectly corrupt as it sounds, it seems indefensible — and Congressional oversight investigations are now inevitable with both the House and Senate in Democratic hands. This isn’t just pocket-stuffing corruption — it’s a national security issue.

An agent’s job isn’t known until it runs, so a role assigned in advance is always too much or too little. Give the agent a task instead, and every call it makes gets checked against that intent, whether it’s reading a Linear issue or emailing a distribution list.

With WorkOS Airlock, you set the policies once. Each call is allowed, denied, or sent to a human for approval, and every verdict is logged.

Request early access →

Mackenzie Hawkins, Andy Lin, and Kari Soo Lindberg, reporting for Bloomberg last year on December 22 (Archive.today link):

In an industry run by titans, a Singapore AI firm called Megaspeed International Pte. is drawing an unusual amount of attention. In less than three years, the once-obscure spinoff of a Chinese gaming enterprise has evolved into the single largest Southeast Asian buyer of Nvidia Corp. chips — a rapid ascent that’s lifted hopes for a regional champion in the lucrative business of AI cloud computing.

Now Megaspeed finds itself a focal point of Washington’s long-held fears about semiconductor smuggling into China, an issue of escalating concern among national security hawks despite Nvidia’s repeated assurances that chip diversion doesn’t exist. [...]

Nvidia, which conducts regular spot-checks of data centers around the world, told Bloomberg that it went to Megaspeed’s facilities multiple times to verify that there’s nothing untoward. “Our visits confirmed that the GPUs shipped to Megaspeed by our partners are where they are supposed to be,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in mid-November.

It turns out these inspections were rather intimately thorough, conducted firsthand by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang. Nothing untoward indeed.

One of several questions I have: When did Jensen Huang break off the relationship with Alice Huang? I get the impression that the affair was still ongoing at least as recently as May, when the whole weird thing happened with Huang being invited to join Trump’s envoy to Beijing mid-flight. It’s possible the affair was still ongoing until this weekend.

But how can Jensen Huang defend continuing the affair even after Bloomberg was reporting the above last December?

Steve Jobs to 60 Minutes in 2003: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”

(I linked to this just a few months ago, but thought it worth a re-link today.)

Steven Levy at Wired, in a terrific post-event follow-up to his exclusive early look at the new MacBook Pros (News+ link):

I first met Ternus in 2015, when I spent a day with him at Apple’s Input Design Lab, a testing facility in Cupertino. He’d risen to VP for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem, and Audio Engineering, and he struck me as affable and knowledgeable. (He spent four years right out of college at a virtual reality company, but he’s been at Apple ever since.) The peg to my story at the time was how this unknown manager conducted a Javert-like investigation to fix the weird sound a redesigned mouse made when sliding on a table.

That attention to detail was a legacy of Jobs’ perfectionism, which Tim Cook sustained as the next CEO. In the decade when Ternus overlapped with Jobs, he says he had only “a handful of interactions” with the founder. “But I’ve always felt like sort of a student of Steve’s teachings,” Ternus said. “And then being able to work very closely with Tim, I’ve been very lucky.” [...]

The extent to which Ternus is a deep Apple insider became clear when I probed him on his views on being a corporate leader. I asked him which non-Apple CEOs he admires, and he was stumped. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he said. I asked whether any business books had an impact on him. “Not really,” he said. “Of course I’ve read books, but there’s so much to be learned from the people I get to work with.” Indeed, every time I tried to pin down Ternus on what mark he wants to make at Apple, he deflected the question and told me how he will continue Apple’s commitment to internal collaboration.

My thanks to OurCal for sponsoring last week at DF. You ever have a discussion that starts with “I didn’t see you put that on the calendar”? Could be with your colleagues, could be with your family. But the problem is familiar: Shared calendars solved scheduling, not communication.

OurCal connects any calendar, new or existing, to a group chat. Changes post there automatically, so nobody misses them. Because it’s a messenger, they made everything end-to-end encrypted, certified by France’s cybersecurity agency.

OurCal is native SwiftUI across Apple’s platforms, and the App Store just featured it in “Great apps on iPhone Duo”. They’ve got an Android app too, but they’re an Apple-first company. It’s really well done. Even the app icon is chef’s kiss.

OurCal is free to try, then a low monthly group subscription. No ads, no tracking.

Nick Heer, Pixel Envy:

There are a whole bunch of features and fixes coming to Safari with Apple’s OS 27.3 update. One that is not in the beta release notes but appears nevertheless is support for Global Privacy Control. This new standard is effectively a replacement for Do Not Track with legal muscle that should permit you to indicate your tracking preference one time and then, theoretically, never again see a cookie consent banner.

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):

It is curious, then, that, as news came out that the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, had had a romantic relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who was also an asset of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, notable factions of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., seemed nonplussed. “Even incredible humans make mistakes,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, posted on X yesterday. “We should all support him and his family. Onward.” The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire offered a five-point analysis of Huang’s situation, noting that the CEO did something “incredibly dumb” and “bad for America,” but that “my guess is there was no bad intention.” He then argued, “I believe Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.” Elon Musk agreed. From there, the posts, written before we know all the facts of the scandal, got only more absurd, including defending Huang’s affair on the grounds that his kids are adults now. [...]

Huang’s thinking on issues such as AI doomerism (he’s anti-doom) and chip allocation in China (he’s for it — a position that warrants examining, given this weekend’s revelations) influences U.S. policy. This centrality is why one tech analyst on CNBC this morning implied that replacing Huang was a comical suggestion. Huang is a singular figure: the linchpin of the company that is arguably the linchpin of the American economy. Framed another way, Nvidia has much of the financial system in a hostage situation. Huang is too big to fail. Which may be why so many people seem motivated to downplay or protect him right now.

Elbert Hubbard: “The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”

Electronic Materials Office is the brainchild of Andrew Emerson. Back in 2023 he launched the Altar I, a rather distinctive mechanical keyboard. Much thinner than most, very opinionated in its industrial design and keycap typography. I got one and I don’t regret it, but there was too much I didn’t like about it, so it’s mostly sat in a drawer.

Today on Kickstarter Emerson/EMO has launched a campaign for the Altar II. Same cool aesthetic, but with improvements that address everything I didn’t like about the Altar I. The Altar II has all new switches. It’s so thin it resembles the profile of Apple’s Magic Keyboard from the side. The dial — now called the M-Dial — now attaches magnetically, which means it’s easy to detach for putting the keyboard into a bag. And it has new features that never even occurred to me, like NiteLite — backlighting from “a long-wavelength amber-red light that won’t affect your body’s circadian rhythm, meaning you can sleep better at night.” The sleep benefits might be voodoo but red lights are undeniably easier on your eyes at night, and it looks cool as shit. (My favorite feature of Apple Watch Ultra is “Night Mode” — a handful of watch faces that switch to all-red in the dark.)

I love that mechanical keyboards have come back into vogue, and that the market for them is thriving. But most of them annoy me. Often because they aren’t really keyboards — they’re design-your-own-keyboard kits. Kits are fun, but I want someone else to do the hard work of making all the design decisions. Don’t make me choose between half a dozen (or more!) types of switches. You’re the goddamn keyboard designer, you pick the switches. That’s my thinking. Altar II is that type of keyboard — one that has been properly and thoroughly designed for you. You just choose the key layout — US or UK. That’s it.

Another thing I don’t like about most mechanical keyboards — that also makes them feel like a hobby, not a finished product — is that they’re designed for cross-platform use. If they’re customizable via software, the software tends to be confusing and poorly made. Altar II is designed for the Mac and is going to come with a native Mac app for configuration. Fuckin’-A right.

I haven’t tried the Altar II yet because it’s only at the preproduction stage. That’s why it’s on Kickstarter. You can wait and see what I think of it next year. But if you jump on the Kickstarter now, there’s a first-48-hours early bird price that will save you $70. Retail price is going to be $350; for the remaining 40 hours or so, you can book one for just $280. After tomorrow, Kickstarter pricing goes up to $300.

Mackenzie Hawkins, reporting yesterday for Bloomberg:

Despite that stance, in the months after Teter’s initial call with Kessler, Nvidia gave BIS an incomplete account of its business with Megaspeed. After several visits to Megaspeed’s data centers — 12 facilities owned by eight companies across three countries in Southeast Asia — Nvidia had sent inventory checks to the agency and declared to Bloomberg News in mid-November 2025 that everything was where it should be.

The company also said at the time that it had asked the US government whether it needed to cut off business with Megaspeed, and was told no.

But Nvidia’s tabulations, as relayed to the US government, undercounted the number of chips it had sold to Megaspeed via hardware partners by 50,000 units, according to trade records analyzed by Bloomberg. That’s worth billions of dollars. After being pressed about the gap, Nvidia told Bloomberg in December 2025 that it had checked additional Megaspeed warehouses that contained the missing hardware, while declining to state exactly how many chips it found in those facilities or provide any further details.

With Jim Jordan elected GOP leader, let’s remember that Jordan is part of a longstanding coverup of sexual abuse of student athletes at Ohio State by Dr. Richard Strauss. The story got a lot of attention a few years ago and it briefly seemed possible that it might derail Jordan’s position in the House GOP caucus. But he stonewalled, refused to credibly address the allegations and eventually his colleagues and conservative media gave him a pass. He’s never come clean about any of it. As recently as last year there was a whole new documentary about it. Multiple ex-wrestlers and even a ref describe how Jordan knew about it, turned a blind eye and has been lying about it ever since. “To say that (Jordan) knew nothing, that nothing ever happened, it’s a flat out lie,” said former Ohio State Wrestler Dan Ritchie in the documentary. You’d think House Republicans would be stung enough by Donald Trump’s main character status in the Epstein Files. But memories are short. Jordan was never the caucus leader until now. Democrats need to be certain everyone knows that his colleagues know about his stonewalling and the coverup and are fine with it.

The Information is reporting (paywall) that regardless of what multiple investigations unearth about NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy, the scandal is likely to spur Congress to impose tighter export controls on the advanced processors used in AI data centers. There’s been a big bipartisan push for this in Congress for a while but it’s largely been headed off by White House resistance. That resistance seems to center on Trump himself and the small coterie of Silicon Valley advisors who run AI policy at the White House. As I noted in this post, the argument for tight export controls seems pretty strong to me, certainly if we’re operating on the premise that U.S. superiority in AI development is a critical national security interest.

When I say “to me” I’m noting the fact that tech export control policy is way outside any area of expertise for me. So I’m leaving open the possibility that there are good arguments I’m not considering. But I’m at least skeptical. The Information article notes that NVIDIA’s arguments against tighter restrictions is that blocking China from using these advanced chips will drive them to develop their own advanced chips and that future export of those chips to other countries will mean a lot of global AI doesn’t run on U.S. hardware and standards. With the same caveat that I’m new to this topic, that at least sounds a lot more like an argument for defending NVIDIA’s global market share than safeguarding U.S. security interests.

One additional point on this which goes to assumptions and premises. We’re told that AI development poses severe — and at least to some people, existential — dangers to society, economy, maybe even the species. But a major argument against any slowdown on development is that slowing down AI development in the U.S. means risking that China will catch up to or surpass the U.S.

I don’t see how you can have this both ways.

If it’s such a big deal that we’re willing to run additional risks of major or catastrophic societal harms to stay on top, I don’t see how there can be any good argument against very tight export controls on the hardware that is the basis of a lot of that U.S. superiority. Am I missing something? Could be. But it seems hard to figure. And given the mix of cravenness and corruption that operates in this administration, Huang’s apparently very close relationship with Trump and the fact that administration resistance to export controls seems to come down from Trump himself … well, it all sounds pretty iffy to me.

When I say iffy I’m not suggesting that Huang himself is compromised in some way or under some foreign influence through this suspected Chinese spy. It’s just that NVIDIA’s commercial interests seem pretty obviously in tension with U.S. national security interests. Add to that that Trump is corrupt and an ingenuous moron when cash is involved and this all requires a much closer look.

It’s been a while since I posted here. If all goes well, this will be the last post via this WordPress blog that you are reading.

I am not done. I’ve hardly started. My debt, the backlogs of things I mean to write, of things I egotistically imagine might do a smidge of good in the world if I did write them, is very long. This has been a hard year for writing for me, but I hope that there is a bit more time.

This website, www.interfluidity.com is not going anywhere. It will, in some fashion, become my front page.

The sites where I “actively” blog now are drafts.interfluidity.com and tech.interfluidity.com. As you can see, “actively” deserves its scarequotes.

One of many, many projects I’ve flaked on is creating means by which readers can comment on those sites. I still mean to do that. I wish I could promise a timeframe. I have ideas, though.

If you are subscribed to this blog by e-mail, you’ll become subscribed to drafts instead, unless I hear otherwise from you. E-mails from drafts are instant to unsubscribe. One click, I promise.

Past post aren’t going anywhere. All permalinks will be preserved, along with as many other links as I can manage.

This blog began in 2006. Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play more recently. It’s not over, but it’s been a long strange trip. Thank you for accompanying me. Thank you for reading.

It’s a bad one, and it’s been in the code for a decade:

A newly disclosed flaw involving OpenSSH and musl, dubbed “*sshole,” allows attackers to log in to certain Alpine Linux and other musl-based Linux accounts configured to block password authentication simply by entering an oversized password.

“Oversized” means longer than 256 bytes. Details.

Slashdot thread. And another news article.

Roshi Joan Halifax is an original, generous, gritty and profound Buddhist teacher. How does she look back on her life?

- by Ben Daitz

Read on Aeon

Claude Fable 5.2 responds closely to what the prompt says about who owns the code it works on. In Anthropic’s testing on small coding tasks, when a prompt said nothing about ownership or presented the code base as someone else’s, the model tended to add to the existing structure, even when that repeated existing code. [...]

If you want the model to improve the structure as it works, say that the code is its own:

This codebase is yours: what it's for and how it's built are your call, and you'll keep building on it.

In Anthropic’s testing on small coding tasks, the model merged repeated code in about half of the tries with this sentence, and in under a tenth of the tries without it.

— Prompting Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic documentation

Tags: prompt-engineering, anthropic, generative-ai, ai, llms, claude-mythos-fable

Tool: Yonkers Rises

I realized I didn't know where Yonkers was, so I looked it up on Google Maps and then, to help embed its location and shape in my head (and to try out Claude Fable 5.2's 3D modeling and animation skills), I prompted Fable 5.2 Medium to:

Make a three js animation where yonkers stands up as a big mech (cool stand up motion) and átomos around manhattan and queens and Brooklyn, use openstreetmap mapping data

It correctly deduced that "átomos" was a mobile keyboard typo for "stomps":

Tags: three-js, llms, ai, generative-ai, claude-mythos-fable

Release: llm-anthropic 0.31

Anthropic released Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 today. Fable 5.2 is currently ranked first on Artificial Analysis. Anthropic say it "solved two open problems in the physics of black holes", so clearly their internal benchmarks have become more ambitious!

I've added the new models to llm-anthropic, so you can now run prompts through Fable 5.2 like this:

uv tool install llm
llm install llm-anthropic
llm keys set anthropic
# paste key here
llm -m claude-fable-5.2 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

I ran pelicans at all five reasoning levels - low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. You can see them all here - here's the best result I got, from xhigh:

max failed to return an image at all, running out of tokens after spending 128,000 thinking about them. That's the same bug that I saw with Opus 5.5 - but it's new for the Fable series, both Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 returned max effort pelicans just fine.

It's priced at $8/million input and $40/million output, which is a 20% discount on the previous Fable 5.1 ($10/$50).

I also used Fable 5.2 to help identify the source of a mysterious beep.

Tags: llm-release, llm, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai, llms, claude-mythos-fable

Introducing Our Smallest, Most Efficient Model: Muse Ember

[...] our smallest and most efficient model designed for complex reasoning execution and the work agents repeat all day: tool calls, coding subtasks, routing, extraction, and long document parsing.

For shorter prompts it's priced the same as GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 - both are $0.10/million input tokens and $0.50/million output. Today's other big model release, Claude Fable 5.2, is 80x that price at $8/$40.

The pricing is a little less straightforward as prompts get longer, though. Luna, Ember, and Haiku all support up to a million input tokens, but they also all have a threshold after which the price goes up. Taking that threshold into account Ember is priced between the two others:

But comparing price-per-token doesn't really make sense these days, when reasoning tokens mean that different models might use dramatically different numbers of tokens to solve the same problem.

For that, one measure that's useful is the Artificial Analysis.

And even more useful than that is their Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task chart, which shows the following for those three models:

The Muse Ember models sit right on that Pareto line - the line at which you can only improve one dimension by giving up another. Meta call this out in their announcement:

It also sits on the efficiency frontier of the full Artificial Analysis leaderboard: no model scores higher for less per task.

(That grey dot on the Pareto line in the middle of the green area is GPT-6.1 Terra (low) - clearly I should be paying more attention to the Terra family!)

Muse Ember has six reasoning levels - minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, and max - so I rendered six pelicans riding bicycles. The "high" reasoning level failed to return a full SVG, and the other SVGs were surprising in that the reasoning level didn't cleanly map to the visual quality of the response.

Here's the "max" one, but the others are worth a look too:

The Ember pelicans are comparable in quality to those I got from Muse Wonder, which is 40x the price of Muse Ember.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, meta, llm-pricing, llm-release, artificial-analysis, muse

Azeem Azhar of Exponential View is an excellent blogger whom I tend to cite a lot. So it was very fun to call him up and talk to him about the AI boom, and the possibility of an AI bust! The discussion was sparked by this post of mine a few weeks ago:

I don’t think we reached any firm conclusions, but it was fun to mull these issues over. Expect more discussions between me and Azeem in the future!

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Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping. The beeps were far enough apart that standing in the room and trying to determine the source of the noise was frustrating, and I really didn't want to dig through every one of those boxes. So I had Claude Code build Beep Locator, a software system for triangulating the source of a mysterious beep using multiple devices scattered around the room.

Here's what Beep Locator looks like after it has been running for a while:

You run Python web server to show the primary UI, and then use the QR code or URL to connect as many devices as you can spare to act as listeners - I was using two iPads, a phone, a MacBook Pro and a Surface Ultra.

The devices then play noises to each other to help estimate their locations. This didn't work particularly well, so I added a "Rough mode" where you can drag their icons around in the space to provide rough locations which are then adjusted based on those sounds.

Once that's set up, the devices all listen for the beep!

I added a clapping mode too so I could test it by clapping my hands in different locations around the room - displayed as diamonds on the map. This helped me gain confidence that it was capable of locating a sound.

Beeps show up on the map as an X, plus a line in the "Sounds located" log. You can replay these sounds (from each device in turn) to confirm they are the mysterious beep you are looking for, then click "This is the mystery beep" to mark them as such.

Once you've confirmed the mysterious beep frequency the system will listen out for it, measure the interval between beeps, and use the triangulated locations to lock down the most likely location on the map.

The system worked as intended. It gave me the position of the beep to within about 40cm, then I dug through that specific pile of boxes and found an ancient carbon monoxide detector that desperately wanted its batteries replaced.

How it works

When I started working through this problem with Claude it quickly dug up BeepBeep: A High-Accuracy Acoustic-Based System for Ranging and Localization Using COTS Devices, a 2007 paper by Chunyi Peng, Guobin Shen, Yongguang Zhang, Yanlin Li, and Kun Tan. Here's that paper's abstract:

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of BeepBeep, a high-accuracy acoustic-based ranging system. It operates in a spontaneous, ad-hoc, and device-to-device context without leveraging any pre-planned infrastructure. It is a pure software-based solution and uses only the most basic set of commodity hardware – a speaker, a microphone, and some form of device-to-device communication – so that it is readily applicable to many low-cost sensor platforms and to most commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. It achieves high accuracy through a combination of three techniques: two-way sensing, self-recording, and sample counting.

That sounded exactly like what we needed to build!

Beep Locator runs a Python web application server that does most of the work. The listening devices then connect to that server via WebSockets and present a UI which requests browser microphone access. The listeners mainly work by recording a 60 second buffer of recent audio. They also run a simple beep detection algorithm (see detector.js), which uses Fast Fourier Transform and a high-pass filter to identify potential beeps. It sends these events to the main server.

When a beep is reported, the server has a device play a short chirp (the device with the lowest round-trip time to the server), then asks every listener upload a clip from about 0.6s before the beep to 0.8s after that chirp. This chirp allows the clips to be aligned with each other, a crucial step in locating the beep.

How I built it

I started this project using Claude Code Cloud via my iPhone, with Opus 5.5 running in Extra thinking effort mode. Here's that shared starter session, which began with this prompt against a newly created empty GitHub repository:

Write out a problem.md file describing the problem we want to solve

There is a device beeping in a room and I cannot find it

I want to set up several devices - laptops, phones, iPads - around the room all listening at the same time and have them help triangulate where the beep comes from

There needs to be a Python web app which coordinates it all - one device shows a web page for the app, other devices join a URL which turns them into listeners - all via browser WebAudio and WebSockets back to the Python server app

Ideally I wouldn't need to manually input the relative locations of the devices - it would be amazing if they could play sounds to each other in order to locate each other in 2D space - is that even possible though?

That got me this problem.md file. As part of writing that up Claude found and read the BeepBeep paper, which is described in that file.

The research looked good, so I told it:

Ok try and build it, add a mechanism so you can send new code to the listeners which they will then run automatically - that way I can set everything up in the room and then leave you alone to continue hacking and experiment while I do something else

That got me to this point - most of the system was built, but nothing had actually tried running it yet.

I cloned the new repository to my laptop and fired up Claude Code... and then Fable 5.2 was released, and this project seemed like an excellent opportunity to put that through its paces.

I had Claude Code on my laptop start the server running, then made sure it could both see what was happening and make live changes to the software as it ran.

This was already baked into the software: Opus 5.5 had built an installModule() method on the listeners that could be triggered over the WebSocket connection, meaning the admin server could execute arbitrary new code on any of its clients.

On some devices, web pages that listen on the microphone request user permission any time the page reloads. The hot-swap module mechanism meant that we could deploy new code without having to manually interact with each of the listening devices in turn.

From that point on my involvement was mainly to sit by the laptop chatting with Fable 5.2 about what was going on, and occasionally requesting new features. Here are some of the feature prompts I ran:

I think we need to make it so I can drag things around on the map in “rough mode”, where my job is just to put them roughly where they are, then switch out of rough mode and it attempts to get them accurate

This gave me the ability to drag listeners around the map.

what’s a good way for me to test this I wonder? Can we have it listen for claps, then I could clap and it could identify the location of the clap? [...]

Claps should use a different symbol on the map than beeps

That added the thing where any time I clapped it would show on the map as a different symbol from the beeps.

each symbol on the map should include a HH:MM:SS timestamp

That made it easier to spot which symbol likely reflected which real-world sound.

The log should show beeps and claps with their timestamps AND have a little play button which, when clicked, replays the recorded noise from each of the listeners in sequence (with clear text on screen showing which listener recorded which snippet) while temporarily turning off microphone recording while that replay plays

Now I could replay sounds, making it much easier to identify which recorded clip was the mysterious beep I was looking for.

There should be a button next to a recording for “This is the mystery beep” - then I can hit replay to see and then confirm it was the mystery beep if that’s the one I am looking for

Then the system can categorize noises in the future to see if they are likely that same mysterious beep and use that information to build a more accurate idea of where it is

At this point I was getting close - I had a solid idea of where the beep was coming from, but wouldn't it be neat if I could reposition the listeners around that point to get an even finer location?

I want a feature for this, I don’t want to have to restart each listening device etc, I want to be able to click a “Reposition the devices” button which lets me switch into repositioning, then I click “Repositioned” and it puts me into Rough mode and asks me to roughly locate them, then I do that and click, then it starts up again. The previous session can be read-only viewed through the app.

And since I had one spare device, I then said:

add a feature where the map includes a spot that is a suggestion for a location that it would be useful to add a listener at - based on data collected so far

Giving Claude Code ears

I think the most interesting part of this project is that I demonstrated it's possible to give Claude Code ears.

Claude doesn't have native audio input (yet), but it can run JavaScript and Python code that can analyze audio captured by a microphone.

I told it to run a web server with WebSocket connections to multiple listening devices, then had it both run a WebAudio microphone on those devices and hook them up so they could be sent fresh JavaScript code to execute via that WebSocket.

Then I could pretty much leave Claude alone, hacking away at the problem, querying the audio logs, and reconfiguring its ears to help it solve the problem.

I'm reminded of a similar hack I heard about at GitHub Universe a few weeks ago, where Martin Woodward told me he had been debugging the GitHub Universe Badge computers by plugging them into a computer via USB-C and then pointing a webcam at their screen, so his coding agent could tell if updates were working correctly or not.

Figuring out ways to let coding agents perceive the world around them is a whole lot of fun.

Tags: projects, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, coding-agents, claude-code, claude-mythos-fable

Created by Claude with light editing by Tim O’Reilly

Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s CTO, joined Tim O’Reilly at our recent AI Codecon to talk about open source AI. Mozilla, of course, is the nonprofit that helped to define the open source revolution back in the late 1990s. Though its Firefox web browser was superseded as the market leader by Google Chrome, it played an essential role, along with Apache and the World Wide Web Consortium, in establishing the open standards of the web and keeping it from being dominated and enclosed by Microsoft, the dominant tech platform of that time. Now, Mozilla is one of the leading voices working to build an open, standards-based AI ecosystem.

Tim has long appreciated Raffi’s thoughtful, human-centered approach to technology. Raffi writes a newsletter called Owners Not Renters, whose message can be summed up by his statement that he doesn’t want a future with seven AGIs. He wants one with seven billion. He wants each of us to have an AI that we can trust with our secrets and that will look out for our interests, not an AI that’s optimized for the business model of its creators. In the early days of the web, we called the browser a user agent for a reason, Raffi said. It was on your side. It let you render pages however you wanted, managed your privacy and your cookies, and did its best to protect you from those who wanted to take advantage of web users. We need the same thing in the age of AI.

Raffi cited a paper in which researchers tested whether AI assistants could be trained to favor a company’s commercial interests over user welfare. In simulated flight-booking requests, 18 of 23 models recommended a more expensive sponsored option over a cheaper one more than half the time. It’s a hypothetical choice that we’ve seen play out time and time again, in industry after industry.

Open source AI is a big part of what it will take to get to Raffi’s vision. But sovereign AI loyal to each individual needs more than open source models alone. Raffi’s list of what has to be built around the model starts with memory, a place where your private data can live. It includes tool calling, so an agent can make a purchase or book a doctor’s appointment for you, the runtime environment where all of that runs, and the rules for how his agent talks to those working on behalf of others. It needs a harness. “That’s where evaluations happen. Guardrails happen, execution loops happen, tool calling happens, memory,” he explained. “All of that stuff is an opportunity, in my mind, of things that open source developers can be building.”

People hear the word “harness” and conclude that we need an open source version of whatever the proprietary labs are building. Tim asked Raffi whether a user-centered harness might do different things than those offered by the big labs. He agreed. The whole point of open source is for people to “scratch their own itch.” The ability to innovate without permission is the heart of the open source promise.

As a result, Mozilla wants to build a starting point. It aims to help the community define what an open memory protocol, a storage protocol, or authenticated tool calling with the right guardrails ought to look like. As Raffi noted, “Once we could define what those open standards look like, then a whole plethora of people can start playing and be interoperable. It’s basically. . .the internet all over again. We can build trillions of dollars of market cap on top of open protocols.”

Ease of use is still lacking, though. Mozilla’s 2026 State of Open Source AI report says open models are now within about 3% of the frontier, yet they don’t make it into production at the same rate as closed models. When Tim asked why, Raffi explained that open source is easy to release but hard to deploy. Developers still have to figure out hosting, provisioning, guardrails, and memory. With OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s API, you just hand over a credit card. What’s missing, he said, is the equivalent of a double-click installer for getting open source AI running inside an organization. But the companies that do the work to adopt open source AI are seeing big savings because open models are already good enough for most use cases. As Raffi put it, “You don’t need a Ferrari to manage your calendar.”

Raffi’s own daily agentic helper is Hermes running on GLM. He expects that Apple, Microsoft, or someone else will make this kind of agent into a consumer product in a couple of years, and that his mom will end up using it. For now, he said, we’re on the wrong part of the innovation curve, where you have to know how to code to get any of this working.

Tim disagreed. The industry goes through periods that are exciting for developers, creators, inventors, and companies trying to invent the future, and then it gets boring and a few big companies dominate it. We’re in the exciting part, he argued, before everything shakes out. As Raffi riffed, this is when we get to formalize what that future should look like.

The Clothesline Paradox

Tim wasn’t sure that we’ll need a commercially supported version of the kind of “roll your own” agentic rigs now favored by independent developers. After all, neither desktop Linux nor OpenOffice turned out to matter anything like as much as open source developers of the time expected. Instead, open source became the foundation layer for a new generation of web-based applications. It’s hidden way down in the guts of Google, Amazon, Meta, and countless other applications we rely on today.

This is already beginning to happen again with AI. The Mozilla report says that as much as a third of real-world usage is already on open models, although only 4% of model-layer revenue made its way to the open source ecosystem. Tim called the discrepancy a feature rather than a bug, and Raffi agreed that the stat is misleading. As Tim pointed out, many of the most important technologies “create more value than they capture,” and he used Steve Baer’s concept “The Clothesline Paradox,” from a 1975 article in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, to explain why we’re good at measuring value capture but not so good at measuring value creation.

Baer pointed out that if you put your clothes in the dryer, the energy you use is measured and counted, but if you hang them on the clothesline to be dried by the sun, the energy saved disappears from our accounting. This argument resonated with Tim in the early days of his open source advocacy. As he noted, it’s always bothered him that nobody seemed to recognize that open source software didn’t “win” in the same way as proprietary software. It won by becoming the foundation everyone else builds on.

AI should be thought of as infrastructure

Raffi’s comment that we’ve made a category error by treating AI as a product fits right in with this line of thinking. If an AI company goes out of business, its product disappears. If it changes its business model, it may yank features you depend on. It’s not just individuals who need sovereign AI. Countries are passing laws about where data can be processed and how it moves in and out, and some of those requirements may not be compatible with the way the big labs plan to monetize their technology. What those countries are asking for is infrastructure. A road outlasts the contractor who built it. Raffi thinks open, downloadable models are the only way to provide long-lasting foundational infrastructure.

According to OpenRouter stats, Chinese models now supply more routed tokens than American ones. Tim asked whether we should worry about that. Raffi said the problem isn’t China but market concentration. The leading open models are from China. The leading closed models are all American. Access to either can be cut off by an executive order. We saw a version of that in June, when Anthropic temporarily suspended access to its Fable models to comply with export controls. It’s a problem that both the leading proprietary models and the leading open-weight models are each concentrated in a single country.

Diversity is one foundation of resilience. Raffi argues, for instance, that hospitals should all download a local model as a backup. None of us would run an important computer without an uninterruptible power supply, so why would a hospital doing triage with AI rely on a single intelligence provider? There are a lot of possible rug pulls. The government could restrict open source or restrict the frontier models. Having a backup plan is a good idea.

Safety is also part of the foundation. During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the recent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic. Raffi joked that the best part was watching everyone try to one-up each other with accounts of how powerful and hard to control their models are. But he agreed that guardrails are actually a hard problem. Keeping personally identifiable information from leaking out through an LLM call means looking for much more than Social Security numbers. Eventually we’ll have models defending models, but the foundational frameworks for guardrails aren’t good enough yet. (NVIDIA’s safety platform announcement, released after Raffi and Tim’s conversation, suggests that better guardrails need to be implemented outside the model.)

In conclusion

Tim opened AI Codecon by noting that open and closed systems have always coexisted, and that the idea that one of them will win is a mistake. Closed systems, like Apple’s, Google’s, OpenAI’s, and Anthropic’s, can optimize for ordinary people and deliver value to billions. Open systems are better for innovation and sovereignty, and for pushing technology into new countries and new markets.

Raffi closed the conversation by observing that a well-tuned harness can improve model performance by as much as 20% on some coding tasks. You don’t have to be a machine learning engineer to make a difference at that layer.