Going-against-the-grainers
If our ethical beliefs come from our social environment, how do some people find the moral courage to defy convention?
- by Dane Leigh Gogoshin
If our ethical beliefs come from our social environment, how do some people find the moral courage to defy convention?
- by Dane Leigh Gogoshin
They boast about its improved SVG animation performance compared to Gemini 3 Pro in the announcement!
I tried "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" in Google AI Studio and it thought for 323.9 seconds (thinking trace here) before producing this one:
It's good to see the legs clearly depicted on both sides of the frame (should satisfy Elon), the fish in the basket is a nice touch and I appreciated this comment in the SVG code:
<!-- Black Flight Feathers on Wing Tip -->
<path d="M 420 175 C 440 182, 460 187, 470 190 C 450 210, 430 208, 410 198 Z" fill="#374151" />
I've added the two new model IDs gemini-3.1-pro-preview and gemini-3.1-pro-preview-customtools to my llm-gemini plugin for LLM. That "custom tools" one is described here - apparently it may provide better tool performance than the default model in some situations.
The model appears to be incredibly slow right now - it took 104s to respond to a simple "hi" and a few of my other tests met "Error: This model is currently experiencing high demand. Spikes in demand are usually temporary. Please try again later." or "Error: Deadline expired before operation could complete" errors. I'm assuming that's just teething problems on launch day.
It sounds like last week's Deep Think release was our first exposure to the 3.1 family:
Last week, we released a major update to Gemini 3 Deep Think to solve modern challenges across science, research and engineering. Today, we’re releasing the upgraded core intelligence that makes those breakthroughs possible: Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Update: In What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles? last November I said:
If a model finally comes out that produces an excellent SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle you can bet I’m going to test it on all manner of creatures riding all sorts of transportation devices.
Google's Gemini Lead Jeff Dean tweeted this video featuring an animated pelican riding a bicycle, plus a frog on a penny-farthing and a giraffe driving a tiny car and an ostrich on roller skates and a turtle kickflipping a skateboard and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine.
I've been saying for a while that I wish AI labs would highlight things that their new models can do that their older models could not, so top marks to the Gemini team for this video.
Update 2: I used llm-gemini to run my more detailed Pelican prompt, with this result:
From the SVG comments:
<!-- Pouch Gradient (Breeding Plumage: Red to Olive/Green) -->
...
<!-- Neck Gradient (Breeding Plumage: Chestnut Nape, White/Yellow Front) -->
Tags: google, svg, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, gemini, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release
Ed Boyden has spent the last twenty or so years building the technology needed to create a working simulation of living systems. Put another way – he’s been trying to turn biology into physics.
Boyden has helped develop new techniques for imaging the brain and the body, including optogenetics and expansion microscopy. He’s also known for nurturing all-star talent at his lab at MIT and he and his students have gone on to form numerous bio-tech start-ups. Overall, Boyden is regarded as one of the top scientific minds of this era.
It was a genuine honor to have Boyden on the show, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy this episode.
In this episode, filmed at Boyden’s office, we discuss his background as a child prodigy, his work and what it might actually mean to engineer something like a mind or consciousness. We also get into Boyden’s skepticism around current large language models and the state of science funding in the U.S.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.
One morning, when I woke from troubled dreams, I found myself transformed into an … influencer. [/end Franz Kafka]
I’m taking a semi-break. I won’t do a full post today, just offer a note on where things stand with this Substack.
When I left the New York Times I wasn’t looking for a new job, but I also didn’t want to go silent. I reactivated this newsletter as a way to stay in the discourse, weighing in on and, I hoped, influencing for the better the way some issues were discussed.
As it turns out, however, Substack has become a job — a full-time job for two people, because Robin Wells, my wife and textbook co-author, is deeply involved in researching and editing. That’s fine. What am I going to do, spend my days golfing? (I don’t play golf.) I should, however, take more breaks, which I am sort of doing today.
Along the way, the newsletter has become a tool for informing as well as influencing, with subscribers telling me that they read this Substack to find out what’s going on — which is great. But influence is still my main goal. How’s it going?
At the time I’m writing this, I have >500K subscribers — 528,842, but who’s counting? Weekday posts, which are free, typically get around 500K views. So people are reading what I write.
Substack also has bestseller lists, which as I understand it are based on paid subscribers. Here’s the top of the US politics list:
Two points about that list. First, I sometimes encounter people accusing Substack of being a right-wing tool. Not in terms of the content people read! Except for Bari Weiss’s Free Press, the top 10 are all center-left or never-Trumper.
Second, aside from Heather Cox Richardson, who is in a class of her own, every newsletter above me is a group effort with multiple contributors (and all of them do excellent work!). So being #7 is great.
But what about influence?
One group definitely thinks I have influence: scam artists. YouTube channels pretending to be me, some using AI to produce videos I never recorded, keep popping up. Lately a new impostor channel seems to appear every week.
I have a real YouTube channel, which I intend to populate with more material soon. In fact, here’s a first stab at a short video reacting to events:
As for affecting the discourse, that can be a subtle matter. I’m always gratified to see a theme I’ve emphasized here show up elsewhere a few days or weeks later. Usually there’s no attribution, which is OK — we’re not talking about academic literature — and I can never be 100% sure that I made a difference. But some ideas seem to have migrated from this Substack into general discussion. For example, the point that the US-EU productivity gap is largely driven by a handful of tech clusters, which I believe was novel when I made it, is now raised all the time.
So I guess I’ve become an influencer. And I’ll be trying out new things in addition to YouTube. Coming soon: podcasting!
Does all of this make the world better? All I or anyone else can do is try.
MUSICAL CODA
Long running agentic products like Claude Code are made feasible by prompt caching which allows us to reuse computation from previous roundtrips and significantly decrease latency and cost. [...]
At Claude Code, we build our entire harness around prompt caching. A high prompt cache hit rate decreases costs and helps us create more generous rate limits for our subscription plans, so we run alerts on our prompt cache hit rate and declare SEVs if they're too low.
Tags: prompt-engineering, anthropic, claude-code, ai-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
IC 2574: Coddington s Nebula
Courtesy of an anonymous TPM Reader I wanted to share a fascinating, if mundane document with you. This is a report from the City of Social Circle, Georgia (a very conservative area) reporting on their discussions with the Department of Homeland Security about the department’s plans to build an ICE facility in the city. It contains a remarkable degree of transparency about the city’s discussions with DHS, a helpful reminder of the resilience or the promise of local self-government. But what caught my attention is the slapdash way in which DHS is really trying to run roughshod over local jurisdictions and generating resistance for reasons quite separate from political opposition to ICE’s mass deportation program. I really recommend taking a few moments to read it.
I mentioned the other day that the insider D.C. sheets are helpful guides to when a new idea or bit of news is breaking into the elite D.C. conversation. I saw another example of that today, and it’s a window onto a critical topic, a critical part of the restoring democracy to-do list in the coming years. Semafor’s Liz Hoffman has a piece on the shifting “political pendulum.” What she’s referring to in this context is all those corporations who moved decisively in 2025 to get on the MAGA bandwagon. We think mostly about the tech monopolies. Their leaderships are high profile. In many cases, their structure ensures that the founder maintains total control over the corporations, despite being a public company. So when Mark Zuckerberg starts showing up a UFC matches with Trump or Don Jr. you know where Facebook is placing its bets. But for anyone paying close attention, this corporate shift goes way beyond the highly personalized leadership of the tech monopolies.
And yet now, as Hoffman points out, lots of corporations are starting to realize that these moves are probably not going to age well at all in 2026. There’s a major public backlash brewing, and there’s a very good chance that at least the House will fall to Democrats and the Senate is now more than the theoretical possibility it seemed a year ago. This is of course why corporate America, particularly the big diversified and largely de-personalized mega corporations, has always tried to steer clear of being too identified with either party. There’s political giving. But what we’ve seen over the last year goes far, far beyond that. Lots of big corporations have aggressively competed to be part of Trump’s corporation, in some ways that are not precisely illegal and in many that clearly are … as soon as there’s a functioning Justice Department back on the beat.
Hoffman links to an important overnight tweet from Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in which he says this: “All the mergers approved under the Trump administration need to be undone. Big business has to understand there are consequences when they team up with corrupt government.” In its own way, what Gallego is calling for and committing to is almost more important than criminal accountability for those most guilty of criminal conduct in the administration itself. There’s a reason corporations generally steer clear of aggressive and visible political involvement. Because the tide turns. It’s better to be on at least reasonably good terms with both parties than to seek extreme advantage when one or the other is in power. 2025 went well beyond that with numerous corporations diving into the Trumpian corruption, allowing the president to build subservient media empires and more. Behind the scenes I have had explained to me the kind of transparent cash transactions that titans of corporate America are now ponying up to stay on Trump’s good side. Only public, visible and lasting consequences can reestablish deterrence against participation in these kinds of plots against the American republic. It’s not just creating consequences for criminality in public office. That criminality can only flourish if other major societal stakeholders go along with it, try to participate in it. And corporate America has done so — because of a mix of carrots and sticks — in a way that is almost unprecedented in American history.
Many of these deals were made because companies wanted to avoid trouble. What else could they do? Maybe they’re like the shopkeeper who doesn’t want to be involved with the mob but has to buy into a protection racket because they have no choice. But as long as there are only consequences on one side of the ledger, corruption will always be the obvious choice. Does that point semi-innocent bystanders in a tough spot? Probably so. But saving a republic is complicated and kinetic. Participation with Trump’s corruption isn’t ordinary criminality, though it falls under various clear criminal statutes. It also amounts to making war on the American republic itself.
We’ve discussed before the ways in which a political opposition needs forms of activism which provide an experience, a confidence of forward motion into the future. If the law is on hiatus, that doesn’t mean it’s gone. But an opposition and the public needs visual symbols of the law’s perseverance, its continuity beyond the present moment. There are countless corrupt deals, corrupt mergers, cash payoffs and more that an opposition Congress needs to get to the bottom of. It’s essential. It’s just. It’s absolutely necessary.
Kate and Josh discuss spox Tricia McLaughlin’s departure from DHS and more drama in the Texas Senate primary.
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You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Pensions cost the government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.
Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.
Here is more from The Economist. By the way, Brazil cannot change its pension system without amending the constitution.
The post Brazil facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Lydia Mee, reporting for Motorsport:
IMAX has announced that a select number of races will be shown live in IMAX locations across the United States in 2026. The new fan viewing experience is part of a collaboration with Apple TV, which has taken over the broadcasting rights for the championship in the US on a multi-year deal from 2026.
“F1 is a rapidly growing force in sports and culture in the US, and by bringing F1 on Apple TV live to IMAX theatres nationwide, we’re delivering the energy and excitement to even more screens in a truly immersive way,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of music, sports, and Beats.
You know what would add even more screens in an immersive way? If Vision Pro users had access to the same live screenings on virtual IMAX screens.
Amid growing cultural panic about the use of AI in writing, we’re missing the most important point: AI cannot write
- by Aeon Video
Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time
- by Carlo Iacono
Defying time and colonial power, a landscape artist layers the deep histories of his ancestors to create hopeful futures
- by Aeon Video
‘Daniel never opens with a formal introduction, thesis statement, or polished hook. Instead, he drops you into the middle of whatever he’s thinking about.’
I asked AI to analyse my writing style from the first 80 newsletters;
‘Grammatical correctness is sacrificed for rhythm and voice.’
‘Humour is structural, not decorative - The reader should feel amused throughout without being able to pinpoint exactly where the “joke” was.’
‘Daniel’s comedy comes from perspective and timing, not cleverness with language.’
I feel regret!
Finally got my shit together and hit publish on video #3 in the Drawing Machine 101 series; we’re still in the introduction and setup stage, the coding happens in a few videos’ time.
One of my favourite things, is to watch videos where people are making or doing something fairly niche, but which is new to them. The person is competent and I learn from watching them, but then diving into the comments gives you even more hints & tips as people made suggestions on how to do things better (or even sometimes “properly”).
Katherine’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Nelferch is a) wonderful and b) a good example of people always giving advice on whatever she’s doing.
And I’m not even being snarky (honest); I’m not yet painting the walls of a barn, or restoring a Land Rover, or building a greenhouse, but there’s always some top tips down in the comments if I were ever going to do some of those things.
So I’m very pleased to see the comments on my video are already filling up with better pen & ink suggestions than I made, and pretty sure will continue to do so for years to come 😁
As we’re in YouTube land LB ALLIX has posted this, which packs more into 1m 37s than I ever could.
And here’s Olivier (your Berlin based interdisciplinary IT & 3d freelancer) with his fantastic wallplotter.
Way back in newsletter #051 I introduced “80s Pop: Roxy 🍿” - I won’t rehash it here ‘cause it’s all in there…
👇 👇 👇 👇 👇
👆 👆 👆 👆 👆
One of the ideas behind the Patreon; where people can support the making of the Drawing Machines 101 videos (I want them to be free & they take a bunch of time and resources to make, I’m fine with taking that on, but people supporting takes the edge of that a bit), is that I send out artwork each month.
To keep myself sane and not burning out, the things I post out each month are supposed to be created in the process of making the videos.
However, while we’re still in the introduction videos phase I’m not actually making plots, so for the first few months I’ve been doing fun extra things. This month has been Riso prints based a custom code variant of the “80s Pop Roxy 🍿” project, which in turn is based on the “70s Pop” pen plots.
While I’m looking forwards to everything coming together in virtuous cycles: making videos supports the patreon, the patreon supports making videos; I’m enjoying a second feedback loop of trying to learn how to use the Riso machine while setting up the Riso studio, and getting to send off the results.
One day the Venn Diagram of all the things I’m doing will hopefully become nearly a fully overlapping circle.
“Daniel Savage invites us into a world where geometric abstraction meets machine-assisted animation. Blurring the boundaries between analogue and digital, Savage uses a pen plotter to bring his layered, colour-rich frames to life”
Go grab Something Savage from Vetro Editions, and see more of Daniel’s work on his websi… oh “New site coming soon.” - classic! Here and Instagram.
While you’re over at Vetro, there’s a handful of Tracing the Line books left from the first edition, I’m in it so it must be good!
Now I’ve got the Pen & Paper video out of the way, which I was weirdly blocked on for various reasons, I’ve moved onto happily recording the next much shorter one, and preparing the couple after that too. Hopefully I can get back to a mainly weekly-ish schedule!
We’ll see how well that works out in the next newsletter that should be hitting your inboxes on Thursday the 5th of March.
I hope you’re all doing very well, and if not, that things get better soon!
Love you all
Dan
🧡
High winds coupled with dry conditions fueled fast-spreading wildland fires in the U.S. southern Plains in winter 2026. On February 17, several large blazes broke out on the Oklahoma Panhandle and burned quickly through tens of thousands of acres of grasslands and shrublands. The winds also caused dust storms and low visibility throughout the wider region.
Smoke from multiple fires as well as wind-borne dust streamed across the Plains on the afternoon of February 17, when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image. The Ranger Road fire, the largest of the group, started that day shortly after noon near Beaver, Oklahoma, and spread rapidly throughout the afternoon. By the evening, it had burned into Kansas and consumed an estimated 145,000 acres (587,000 hectares), the Oklahoma Forestry Service reported. Combined with other fires nearby, including the Stevens and Side Road fires near Tyrone, Oklahoma, more than 155,000 acres burned that day, the agency said.
The Ranger Road fire exhibited features of a “fast fire,” a particularly dangerous and destructive type of fire characterized by rapid spread. These blazes usually burn in grasslands and shrublands rather than forests, often occur in autumn and winter when fuels are dry, and are propelled by strong winds. Wind gusts up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour were measured across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles on February 17, the National Weather Service said.
The fires destroyed several structures, threatened farmland and livestock, and prompted evacuation orders for parts of western Oklahoma and southern Kansas, according to news reports. Oklahoma’s governor declared a disaster emergency for counties in the Panhandle.
Persistent winds and dry conditions led to further fire growth on February 18. The Ranger Road and Stevens fires approximately doubled in size that day, the Oklahoma Forestry Services reported. On February 19, a red flag warning remained in effect for the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, with forecasts calling for wind gusts up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour and very low relative humidity.
Wind-blown dust created other serious hazards across the region. Near Pueblo, Colorado (west of this scene), poor visibility led to a deadly pileup of dozens of vehicles on Interstate 25, according to reports. And in southern New Mexico, officials warned travelers of dangerous conditions due to blowing dust.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Lightning likely ignited several large fires that sent smoke pouring over the Canadian province in early September 2025.
Satellite-based maps show northern wildland fires becoming more frequent and widespread as temperatures rise and lightning reaches higher latitudes.
Tens of thousands of people fled to safety as blazes spread throughout the country’s Biobío and Ñuble regions.
The post Winds Whip Up Fires and Dust on the Southern Plains appeared first on NASA Science.
In the specific sector I work in (previously law and now tech), I am surprised by how few US companies hire in Canada. The Canadians I know in these fields are typically on par with the Americans, but doing the same work at half the price. This superficially looks like an economic puzzle: with no timezone difference, language barrier, or cultural friction, why would American companies not hire the much cheaper Canadians? I believe the answer brings together everything I’ve touched on in this essay. The reason is legibility. There aren’t enough Canadians with resumes that American hiring algorithms recognize. If an American tech company uses “Previously worked at a company like Amazon” as a filter, a software engineer from RBC, despite being equally talented, does not pass the filter. If Canada wanted to see more of its citizens hired by US companies, the strategy shouldn’t be better education or training. It should be subsidizing large US companies to open offices in Canada, purely to brand candidates as “Amazon Product Managers.” Because once they have the badge, the market will finally see them.
Here is more from Daniel Frank, note the post covers some quite different issues, all related to talent. Via Watt.
The post Why don’t American companies hire more in Canada? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker delivered the State of the State address. The underlying purpose of the address is to explain the state budget, but Pritzker, a Democrat, used the occasion to talk far more broadly about the state of Illinois and the nation.
Pritzker anchored his speech by reaching back to the days of John Peter Altgeld, a German-born American who helped to lead the Progressive movement and served as governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897. Altgeld oversaw passage of some of the strongest laws in the country for workplace safety and protection of child workers, invested heavily in education, and appointed women to important positions in state government despite the fact that women could not yet vote.
Pritzker noted that in his State of the State speech in January 1895, Altgeld talked about “the need to ensure that science would govern the practice of medicine in Illinois; the high cost of insurance; the condition of Illinois prisons; the funding of state universities; a needed revision of election laws; the concentration of wealth in large businesses.” Altgeld expressed pride for appointing women to office and his statement that “[j]ustice requires that the same rewards and honors that encourage and incite men should be equally in reach of women in every field and activity.”
Pritzker said he brought up Altgeld’s defense of equal rights “to highlight one enduring human truth—injustice can become a genetic condition we bequeath on future generations if we fail to face it forthrightly.”
Pritzker then turned to the year that has passed since President Donald J. Trump took office. “To be perfectly candid,” Pritzker said, “as Illinois is one of the states whose taxpayers send more dollars to the federal government than we receive back in services, I was hoping that his threats to gut programs that support working families [were] the kind of unrealistic hyperbole that fuels a presidential campaign but then is abandoned when cooler heads prevail.” But, he said, “Unfortunately, there are no cooler heads at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.”
The Trump administration has cost Illinois $8.4 billion, Pritzker said, “illegally confiscating money that has already been promised and appropriated by the Congress to the people of Illinois.” Pritzker was clear that this money is not handouts but “dollars that real Illinoisans paid in federal taxes and that have been constitutionally approved by our elected Democratic and Republican representatives in Washington.”
Unlike the federal government, states must balance their budgets every year. Trump’s billions in illegally withheld funds inflict a cost on the state’s residents, while Illinois has been “forced to spend enormous time and taxpayer money going to court and fighting to get what is rightfully ours.” Pritzker said: “It is impossible to tally the hours, days, and weeks our state government has spent chasing news of Presidential executive orders, letters, and edicts that read like proclamations from the Lollipop Guild.”
Pritzker noted that Trump is making life harder for everyday Americans with tariffs that raise costs for working families and small businesses; trade wars that are devastating farmers; cuts to healthcare, nutritional assistance, and education; increased bureaucratic demands on states; and low job creation. The good news, Pritzker said, is that Illinois had managed such crises before and had found a way forward.
He noted the growth of Illinois’s economy and economic stability over the past eight years even as the state had balanced its budget every year and made historic investments in education, child welfare, disability services, and job creation in the private sector. In the past year, Illinois’s gross domestic product was more than $1.2 trillion, up from $881 billion when Pritzker took office.
Looking forward, Pritzker outlined plans to address the top three economic issues on the mind of most Americans: the cost of housing, electricity, and healthcare. He promised to reduce the cost of housing by cutting local regulations and providing more options for financing. He promised to address the skyrocketing cost of electricity first by pausing the authorization of new data center tax credits and then by investing in renewable energy and nuclear power. Finally, he announced that, as of this week, the state had eliminated $1 billion in medical debt for more than 500,000 people in the state by purchasing and erasing it for pennies on the dollar.
Pritzker warned that the benefits of our changing world are increasingly “reaped by a smaller and smaller group of people while middle and working class Americans pay for it. Special interests and large corporations seem to delight in finding ever more insidious ways to extract money from everyday people. Those same companies then react with a mixture of surprise and outrage when they’re asked to rein in their worst abuses.”
“I’m committed to doing everything government can to rein in the worst of the price gouging and profiteering we are seeing,” Pritzker said. “But I implore the titans of industry who regularly ask government to make their lives easier—what are you doing to make your employers’ and your customers’ lives easier?”
Then Pritzker turned to the crisis federal agents created on the streets of Chicago. “A year ago, I stood before you and asked a provocative question: After we have discriminated against, disparaged, and deported all our immigrant neighbors—and the problems we started with still remained—what comes next?” Pritzker said. He recalled that when he asked that question, some people walked out.
“But a year later, we have an answer—don’t we?” he said. “Masked, unaccountable federal agents—with little training—occupied our streets, brutalized our people, tear-gassed kids and cops, kidnapped parents in front of their children, detained and arrested and at times attempted to deport U.S. citizens, and killed innocent Americans in the streets.”
Pritzker identified Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the architects of that plan to “drip authoritarianism…into our veins.”
But, he noted, people in Illinois did not accept that authoritarianism.
Pritzker reminded the audience that President Grover Cleveland had similarly tried to “subdue the Illinois population with hired thugs” during the 1894 Pullman strike after the Pullman Company, which made railroad cars, cut workers’ wages by about 25%. When workers struck, Cleveland deputized U.S. Marshals to end the strike. They fired into crowds of bystanders and, according to a Chicago paper, “seemed to be hunting trouble.” Twenty-five people died and more were wounded before the strike ended.
Altgeld had opposed the arrival of federal troops, and his fury at their intrusion still smoldered when he gave his State of the State speech almost six months later. “If the President can, at his pleasure, send troops into any city, town, or hamlet…whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law,” Altgeld wrote, “his judgment, which means his pleasure being the sole criterion—then there can be no difference whatever in this respect between the powers of the President and those of...the Czar of Russia.”
Pritzker joked that he wished he “could spend just one year of my governorship presiding over precedented times. I yearn for normal problems,” he said. But these are not normal times.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love—about loving people and loving your country and the power involved in both,” the governor said. “I know, right now, there are a lot of people out there who love their country and feel like their country is not loving them back. I know that.” But he told those people that “your country is loving you back—just not in the way you are used to hearing.”
“It’s not speaking in anthems or flags or ostentatious displays of patriotism. It will never come from the people who say the only way to love America is to hate Americans. Love is found in every act of courage—large and small—taken to preserve the country we once knew. You will find it in homes and schools and churches and art. It is there; it has not been squashed.”
Pritzker called out the love shown by “the bicyclers who showed up in Little Village every day during Operation Midway Blitz to buy out tamale carts so the vendors could return to the safety of their homes,” “the parishioners who formed human chains around churches so that immigrants could worship,” and “the moms in the school pickup line who whipped out their cameras and their whistles,” and in “the face of every Midwesterner who put on their heaviest coat and protested outside on the coldest day.”
That love for one’s neighbor, he suggested, is the country’s most powerful tool against the rise of authoritarianism.
“I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party,” Pritzker said. “We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness—or one rooted in cruelty and rage.”
“I love my country,” Pritzker said. “I refuse to stop. The hope I have found in a very difficult year is that love is the light that gets you through a long night.”
—
Notes:
https://fox2now.com/news/illinois/illinois-eliminates-1-1-billion-in-medical-debt-for-residents/
YouTube:
NASA and contractor engineers pumped more than 750,000 gallons of supercold propellants into the agency’s huge Space Launch System rocket Thursday without any signs of hydrogen leaks or any other significant problems in a major step toward launching four astronauts on a flight around the moon as early as March 6.
The practice countdown began Tuesday night, kicking off a carefully choreographed series of steps to ready the world’s most powerful operational rocket for what amounted to a simulated launch Thursday at 8:42 p.m. EST. Controllers then carried out additional tests to make sure the team can recycle, hold and restart an actual launch countdown as needed to handle unexpected problems.
The initial stages of the rehearsal countdown went well and at 9:35 a.m. Thursday, Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson gave her “go” to begin the multi-hour process of pumping 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen fuel into the SLS rocket’s first stage. The second stage was loaded with another 22,500 gallons of oxygen and hydrogen propellants.
Unlike the rocket’s first fueling test earlier this month, when hydrogen leaks forced the team to call off the countdown, sensors detected no significant leaks the second time around and the rocket’s tanks were topped off without incident.
For the remainder of the dress rehearsal, propellants were added as needed to make up for the relatively small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that normally warm and “boil off” in their tanks. Another milestone presumably was reached in the final 10 minutes of the countdown when the propellant tanks were to be pressurized as they would be for an actual launch. Again, no problems were noted.
While detailed analysis remains to be completed, the preliminary results were a positive sign Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen may, in fact, be cleared for launch in just two weeks. Hoping for the best, the crew planned to enter pre-flight medical quarantine Friday.
It will be the first piloted flight to the moon since the final Apollo landing in 1972, carrying the crew farther from Earth than any astronauts in history. Wiseman and his crewmates will also be the first to ride into space atop the 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket, making only its second flight, and the first to fly aboard an Orion deep space crew capsule.
More important, the flight will serve as a major step toward the follow-on Artemis III mission to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole in 2028.
NASA originally planned to launch the Artemis II mission early this month, but NASA engineers and contractors ran into problems during an initial dress rehearsal countdown when hydrogen leaks were detected near the base of the rocket.
Sensors in a cavity between umbilical plates where the fuel lines are attached to the SLS first stage began detecting hydrogen gas buildups when flow rates were increased after an initial “slow fill” period.
After troubleshooting, engineers were able to press ahead with the test, keeping leak rates within acceptable limits by varying flow rates and temperatures. That allowed them to safely fill the first and second stage propellant tanks and then to replenish them as needed.
But late in the countdown, when engineers began pressurizing the first stage as they would for an actual launch, the leak rate in the fueling umbilical suddenly shot up, climbing toward concentrations of 16% in the inert nitrogen gas flowing through the cavity. Beyond that, the risk of fire becomes a real threat.
The dress rehearsal was called off before the team could work through the planned countdown recycle options.
After studying test data, engineers decided to replace two seals that were thought to be responsible for the leak. A second “mini” tanking test was carried out last Thursday when a small amount of liquid hydrogen was pumped into the core stage to confirm a leak-free environment.
But a filter in the ground system apparently froze, reducing the flow rates. Even so, NASA said in a blog post, “the test provided enough data to allow engineers to plan toward a second wet dress rehearsal this week.” No other details were provided, but the seals apparently worked as required during the fueling exercise Thursday.
I liked it very much, noting it is not one for the purists. The visuals and soundtrack added to the general passionate feel. I can recommend the Jonathan Bate review and the Louise Perry review (WSJ). The other version of this movie I can recommend is the Luis Buñuel Mexican interpretation, also full of passion and that poor pig. At its heart, this is a very Mexican story and no way should it be done in a Masterpiece Theater kind of style.
The post Wuthering Heights, the movie appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
With six additional satellites launching in May and continued expansion later this year, the EarthDaily Constellation will enter commercial operations in Summer 2026, delivering daily, consistent global coverage.
The post EarthDaily in Orbit: From First Launch to Commercial Operations appeared first on SpaceNews.
If the United States wants to defend the homeland against the next generation of missile and aerial threats, hardware alone will not save us. Sensors, radars and interceptors are necessary but no longer sufficient. The decisive advantage for Golden Dome for America will come from software and the ability to integrate, test, adapt and fight […]
The post Golden Dome will fail without software-defined warfare appeared first on SpaceNews.
02.19.2026 DURANGO, Colo. — Agile Space Industries, a leading provider of in-space chemical propulsion, today announced their Series A equity financing round. The round was led by Caruso Ventures and […]
The post Agile Space Industries Oversubscribed $17M Series A Accelerates Growth of In-Space Propulsion Capabilities appeared first on SpaceNews.
Japanese lunar company ispace said work on a new engine for its lunar landers is facing delays and that it is keeping open the option of switching engines.
The post Japan’s ispace warns of delays in new lunar lander engine appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA has classified the flawed Starliner crewed test flight in 2024 as its most serious level of mishap, with the agency’s leadership citing shortfalls in how officials oversaw the program.
The post Starliner investigation identifies flawed NASA decision making appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode of Space Minds, David Ariosto interviews Matt Kuta, president and co-founder of Voyager Technologies about how the company is pursuing a commercialized future in low Earth orbit. […]
The post Creating new demand in the nascent orbital economy appeared first on SpaceNews.
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
An independent review of the first, and so far only, piloted flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft concluded the test represented a potentially life-threatening “type A” mishap resulting from multiple technical problems and management miscues, NASA officials said Thursday.
“This was a really challenging event and … we almost did have a really terrible day,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA associate administrator. “We failed them.”
He was referring to now-retired astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who were launched in June 2024 expecting to spend eight to 10 days in space. They ended up remaining in orbit for 286 days, hitching a ride home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule after NASA ruled out landing aboard the Starliner.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said NASA will continue working with Boeing to make the Starliner a viable crew transport vehicle, adding that “sustained crew and cargo access to low Earth orbit will remain essential, and America benefits from competition and redundancy.”
“But to be clear, NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected, the propulsion system is fully qualified and appropriate investigation recommendations are implemented,” he said.
He made the comments as the agency was releasing the results of a months-long independent investigation of the Starliner mission. The panel’s report cited a long list of management failures and technical issues that were not fully understood at the time but were still considered acceptable for flight.
The panel concluded the problems experienced during the mission were representative of a “type A mishap” meaning an unexpected event that could have resulted in death or permanent disability, damage to government property exceeding $2 million and the loss of a spacecraft or launch vehicle.
Isaacman said the eventual cost of the Starliner’s woes exceeded the $2 million threshold “a hundred fold.”
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected,” he said. “But the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It’s decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human space flight.”
Isaacman said the investigation revealed pressure within NASA to ensure the success of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which is based on having two independent astronaut ferry ships. That advocacy “exceeded reasonable bounds and placed the mission the crew and America’s space program at risk.”
“This created a culture of mistrust that can never happen again and there will be leadership accountability,” Isaacman said.
The report quoted unnamed personnel saying things like “there was yelling in meetings. It was emotionally charged and unproductive.” Another said “if you weren’t aligned with the desired outcome, your input was filtered out or dismissed.” Yet another told the panel, “I stopped speaking up because I knew I would be dismissed.”
Equally troubling, according to one NASA worker quoted in the report, “NASA wasn’t blaming Boeing, but everybody else was. […] You know, it’s our program. We’re responsible too. Nobody said that. And nobody within NASA [or outside of NASA] has been held accountable. Nobody. We’re 11 months after it happened, and there’s been no accountability at all, from any organization.”
Isaacman promised that “lessons will be appropriately learned across the agency and there will be accountability.”
In the wake of the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011, NASA awarded multi-billion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to build independent ferry ships to carry astronauts to and from the space station. SpaceX, awarded an initial $2.6 billion contract, has now launched 13 piloted Crew Dragon flights for NASA and seven purely commercial missions.
In contrast, Boeing, awarded an initial $4.2 billion contract, ran into multiple problems during an unpiloted Starliner test flight in 2019 that eventually required a second crew-less test flight before Wilmore and Williams were finally launched on June 5, 2024, on what has been the ship’s lone crewed test flight.
The trip to space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket went smoothly and the crew successfully docked with the International Space Station the next day. But the capsule experienced multiple helium propulsion system leaks along the way and several maneuvering jets did not produce the expected thrust.
“During the rendezvous and proximity operations, propulsion anomalies cascaded into multiple thruster failures and a temporary loss of six-degree-of-freedom control,” Isaacman said Thursday. “The controllers and the crew performed with extraordinary professionalism … and docking was achieved.
“It is worth restating what should be obvious,” he said. “At that moment, had different decisions been made, had thrusters not been recovered or had docking been unsuccessful, the outcome of this mission could have been very different.”
Williams and Wilmore downplayed the malfunctions during the flight, which was originally expected to last about eight days. But NASA and Boeing ended up extending their stay in orbit, carrying out weeks of tests and analysis to determine whether the Starliner could be trusted to safely bring its crew back to Earth.
By August 2024, Boeing managers were convinced engineers understood the problems and the crew could safely come home in the Starliner. But NASA managers ruled that option out. Instead, they decided to keep the astronauts aboard the station until early 2025 when they could hitch a ride back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry ship.
To make that possible, a Crew Dragon was launched in September 2024 with just two astronauts aboard instead of four as originally planned. That freed up two seats for Wilmore and Williams after the SpaceX crew completed their six-month stay in space.
The Starliner, meanwhile, successfully made an uncrewed return to Earth in September 2024 even though, the investigation report revealed, additional propulsion problems left the craft with no available backup options had another failure occurred.
The mission, “while ultimately successful in preserving crew safety, revealed critical vulnerabilities in the Starliner’s propulsion system, NASA’s oversight model and the broader culture of commercial human spaceflight,” the investigation team concluded.
The panel issued 61 formal recommendations “across technical, organizational, and cultural domains to address these issues before the next crewed Starliner mission.”
“The report underscores that technical excellence, transparent communication, and clear roles and responsibilities are not just best practices, they are essential to the success of any future commercial spaceflight missions,” the team said. “The lessons from CFT must be institutionalized to ensure that safety is never compromised in pursuit of schedule or cost.”
For its part, Boeing said in a statement the company had made “substantial progress” on corrective actions “and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the findings in the report.”
“NASA’s report will reinforce our ongoing efforts to strengthen our work … in support of mission and crew safety, which is and must always be our highest priority. We’re working closely with NASA to ensure readiness for future Starliner missions and remain committed to NASA’s vision for two commercial crew providers.”
Update Feb. 19, 9:34 p.m. EST (0234 UTC): SpaceX confirms successful landing on the droneship.
For just the second time, a Falcon 9 booster returned to Earth on a drone ship stationed among the islands of the Bahamas during a mission to deploy 29 Starlink satellites for SpaceX’s satellite internet service.
Liftoff of the Starlink 10-34 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 8:41:40 p.m. EST (0141:40 UTC).
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a greater than 95 percent chance for favorable liftoff during the window. Meteorologists cited not notable items that would provide a constraint to launch from a weather perspective.
SpaceX launched the mission on Falcon 9 first stage booster B1077. This was its 26th flight after launching previous missions, including Crew-5, CRS-28 and NG-20.
Less than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1077 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ situated off the coast of Exuma island in The Bahamas. This was the 150th landing on that vessel and the 573rd booster landing for SpaceX to date.
It was one year ago this week that SpaceX first landed a booster within the territorial waters of The Bahamas during the Starlink 10-12 mission on Feb. 18, 2025.
In the lead up to that flight, SpaceX announced it was planning to use that first mission as a stepping stone to enabling a crewed mission to a polar orbit, which it eventually did with the flight called Fram2.
However, Fram2 did not feature a booster landing adjacent to The Bahamas. Reportedly, there was environmental concern on the part of the government of The Bahamas following the in-flight break-ups of SpaceX’s Starship rocket during Flight 7 and Flight 8 in 2025.
The two entities have since come to an understanding in the intervening time, paving the way for this second booster landing near the island nation.
Falcon 9 lands on the Just Read the Instructions droneship off the coast of The Bahamas pic.twitter.com/h5Ju4ndXSj
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 20, 2026
Up and to my office, where abundance of business all the morning. Dined by my wife’s bedside, she not being yet well. We fell out almost upon my discourse of delaying the having of Ashwell, where my wife believing that I have a mind to have Pall, which I have not, though I could wish she did deserve to be had. So to my office, where by and by we sat, this afternoon being the first we have met upon a great while, our times being changed because of the parliament sitting. Being rose, I to my office till twelve at night, drawing out copies of the overcharge of the Navy, one to send to Mr. Coventry early to-morrow. So home and to bed, being weary, sleepy, and my eyes begin to fail me, looking so long by candlelight upon white paper.
This day I read the King’s speech to the Parliament yesterday; which is very short, and not very obliging; but only telling them his desire to have a power of indulging tender consciences, not that he will yield to have any mixture in the uniformity of the Church’s discipline; and says the same for the Papists, but declares against their ever being admitted to have any offices or places of trust in the kingdom; but, God knows, too many have.
I’ve spent lots of time recently digging into the available information on the state of childhood today. I’m shaken by what I’ve learned—and you will be too.
Over the years, we’ve all heard that our youngsters are “at risk.” But it’s easy to dismiss warnings of this sort as idle fearmongering. After you’ve seen several generations grow up into responsible adults, you tend to stop worrying.
But this time, it really is different.
So many different parties now prey on youngsters—and they include some of the largest companies in the world. Parents struggle for solutions when the enemies are literally inside their home, embedded in ever-present tech that seeks to manipulate and monetize kids.
Below I’ve tried to compile a summary of the main issues we face. We can discuss solutions at a later stage, but right now I want to raise the alarm.
Let me add one more thing: I am not blaming the youngsters. Previous generations (including my own) must bear responsibility for this. And it’s adults, not kids, who need to take the lead in fixing this mess.
The average child now plays outside for only 4-7 minutes per day. Even inmates in top security prison get more outdoor time than this.
The time youngsters spend with friends has fallen in half—and it only took ten years for that to happen.
Children are entering school with autism-like symptoms due to the use of devices, as well as their parents’ excessive screentime—especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding. This is “leading to a generation of toddlers suffering from ‘still face effect’, an emotionless expression.”
From the same source: “Children are beginning school with low core strength, speech delays, poor bone density.”
70% of children quit organized sports by the age of 13. Participation has been declining steadily since the rise of smartphones.
Rates of obesity among children have skyrocketed in recent years. There are now more than 250 million obese youngsters, and that number will continue to grow.
Lack of physical activity is so extreme that teachers report children arriving at school “without the strength in their fingers to hold a pencil or even a knife and fork.”
From the same source: “Some are unable to use the toilet by themselves, hang their coat on a peg or even recognize their own name.”
The dramatic arrest Thursday of the former Prince Andrew by eight carloads of British police should scare Donald Trump and many other Jeffrey Epstein associates.
For Trump the problem is that the former royal, who turned 66 on the day of his arrest, doesn’t want to go to prison.
Typically, criminal suspects and criminal defendants can win leniency by offering up bigger fish. And what bigger fish is there than the president of the United States?
To the Trump gang, honor is a meaningless word.
Whether crown prosecutors are willing to trade leniency for—metaphorically—Donald Trump’s head on a pike, is not knowable at this point. But even if they have no interest in Trump a public record will be created in the weeks and months ahead that cannot possibly bolster Trump’s claims of wrongful persecution or reduce his risk of prosecution for child rape, on which there is no statute of limitations in federal law.
Trump asserts he is innocent. Unless and until he is found guilty at trial, or confesses, that is his position under the law. The court of public opinion is another matter, especially for politicians who have bent the knee to Trump and stand to go down if he does.
What we do know is that Andrew and his lawyers will try to save his skin. That will almost certainly include offering up other British citizens who may have further knowledge of Donald Trump’s involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein child rape scandal.
We also know that usually someone in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s position is asked to come in to see the police. White collar suspects don’t usually get grabbed unawares, held in a plain jail cell, and give the British equivalent of a Miranda warning, known as being “under caution” that anything they say can and will be used against them in court.
Indeed, you have to go back to 1647 for the last time a British royal arrested. Charles I was beheaded in 1649, a fate Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten need not fear.
Significantly, the arrest Thursday of Andrew wasn’t on child rape or sex trafficking charges, but charges more troublesome for Trump.
At least for now the disgraced former royal is charged only with official misconduct. That creates a bargaining chip on both sides.
Will crown prosecutors threaten to up the ante with rape and related charges, assuming they have enough evidence? Or will they let the former prince avoid that stain on his already deeply stained reputation, but hammer him under British national security and states secrets statutes?
The official misconduct charge also means under British law that crown prosecutors can break the confidentiality between the taxpayer-provided security details that went everywhere with Andrew when he was a prince, including when he was a government employee assigned to trade negotiations on behalf of London.
Official security guards In the United Kingdom, just as in the United States, normally are told to ignore protectee misconduct. But now those bodyguards can be brought in to testify under oath. Indeed, they probably already have been interviewed by British law enforcement.
The crown prosecutors also can require the security teams to produce official logs they kept. If those records were fudged to conceal misconduct by Andrew the crown has a lever against the bodyguards, who potentially face criminal charges themselves.
The official misconduct charge against the former prince gives these security guards every incentive to cooperate and even, perhaps, to produce as bargaining chips their personal diaries, photographs, and other evidence about the official misconduct charges.
Woe be on to any of them who participated in any of the sexual assaults of girls.
It’s not unknown for protectees to invite their bodyguards to participate in such things. Think of former President John F. Kennedy who, according to then 19-year-old college student Mimi Alford was slipped into the White House while First Lady Jacqueline was away. Alford’s best-selling book details how she gave oral sex to JFK when then asked her to do the same for in the White House swimming pool for his senior bodyguard.
There’s no crime in that, since she was of age, but it provides a lens to focus on what’s going on across the pond between with the former prince and crown prosecutors.
Americans should also pay close attention to how very differently the Epstein files are being treated by European authorities and by Trump’s administration.
Several European governments have opened investigations into people named in the files.
Norway has charged former Prime Minister Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland with “gross corruption: for his lies about Epstein.
In contrast, the Trump administration brazenly violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That law, signed late last year by none other than Donald Trump, requires full disclosure of the Epstein files except for the images and identities of the victims.
Instead, half of the more than six million of known pages are being held back. The names of various men, evidently including Trump in some cases, are redacted.
Worse, redactions of some victim’s identifying information were done so sloppily that internet sleuths have identified by name some of the young women who have not gone public. It’s hard to believe those redactions were an accident. As I see it, they were a warning to others: accuse Trump and you will be punished in the court of public opinion.
Pam Bondi, Trump’s personal attack dog defense lawyer who also is attorney general of the United States, smugly sneers at House Democrats who dare question her conduct in hiding files. Asked at a hearing to simply look at Epstein victims in a hearing room last week, she refused.
The roughly three million pages of documents released so far show that federal law enforcement, under the George W Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations utterly failed in their clear and compelling duty to investigate the international sex trafficking operation and rape of girls.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, un-redacted files he has seen mention girls as young as ten and in one case just nine years old.
In shocking displays of excusing moral depravity, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, and other Trump loyalists have tried to excuse what went on by suggesting that Epstein had sex, not rape, with girls who were 15, or so still below the age of consent.
It will be revealing whether Kelly and her ilk revise their positions now that we know prepubescent girls were among those sexually assaulted.
Bondi is so determined to protect trump that the Justice Department traced the searches made by those members of Congress who went to use one of the four computers allowing them less fettered access to the half of the Epstein files that have been made public.
Her ability to use the power of the government to cover up will be weakened as the public record in London and other European capitals grows because those governments are investigating, not covering up.
Andrew, like all criminal defendants and suspects—including Trump—is entitled to a presumption of innocence. It is the obligation of prosecutors to persuade a jury or a judge of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt or to get a confession, usually made in return for leniency.
Prince Charles has demonstrated integrity in this, no matter what else you may think of him. The British king is conducting himself with honor.
Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about the president of the United States, his attorney general, and others running his protection and extortion rackets in our name.
That’s because to the Trump gang, honor is a meaningless word.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post The Ex-Prince and the President appeared first on DCReport.org.
Links for you. Science:
Does Intermittent Fasting Live Up to the Hype?
Is Coal Mining Pollution America’s Next Big Critical Minerals Source?
Who The Hell Was This?
When measles came to class: a look back at the 1989 Kent State University measles epidemic
RFK Jr. touts yet another unhinged ‘wellness’ plan
Rare Roman Panther Figurine with Its Paws on a Severed Head Is a Propaganda Tool Used in Britain
Other:
Understanding Epstein’s Crimes. Sex trafficking isn’t widely understood. Here is what Epstein did.
The Best Of Us
Trump is popular only in Elon Musk’s racist online cesspool
Could Be
Federal officer seen on video kicking, injuring dog (this is a very good boy!)
Trump and the Kennedy Center: Renaming, Rebuilding, Revolting
Bill Gates faces fresh scrutiny for Epstein ties following Justice Department’s document release
D.C. Attorney General Secured Nearly $907 Million for District in 2025
Meet the Only Runner on Cardozo Education Campus’ Girls Cross-Country Team
The Housing Crisis as a Land Crisis
Deep Holes, Rats the Size of Dogs, and Restrictive Priority: When Access to Fields Are the Barrier to Youth Sports
D.C. must restore TANF to pull more children out of poverty
Seniors in 10-story building face sixth week without working elevator
Wilson Building Bulletin: The D.C. Council lawyers up against Mayor Bowser
Ballou High Football Standout Nearly Missed His Shot Due to Eligibility Requirements
Snowpolitics: Candidates for D.C. office weigh in on the snowstorm response
Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue
International Olympic Committee Asks Fans to Not Boo JD Vance at the Opening Ceremony (lmfao)
Gillibrand Attends Antisemitic, Anti-Catholic, Anti-LGBTQ+, Misogynistic Bible Study
The Paramilitary ICE and CBP Units at the Center of Minnesota’s Killings
ICE agents shatter window, leave 1-month-old baby, mother in car after Portland arrest
The Nation Nominates Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize
In Ohio, I Caught a Glimpse of the New Resistance
Germany warns its citizens about visiting ‘violent’ US
Colleges See Major Racial Shifts in Student Enrollment (study here)
Paris prosecutors summon Elon Musk after raid on X’s French offices
Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion
Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up
Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino tossed from Vegas bar
‘No humanity’: Detainees describe conditions inside Whipple Federal Building
Here’s a list of items Democrats could promise to do if they regain enough power. Ones that really make it clear that ordinary working people are the focus. Even when Democrats promote good ideas it’s like they aren’t looking all the way down to minimum-wage workers. Or it’s about some social program to just spend money on the problem. Some things need that but there are ways to help that aren’t just government money, that are more about empowering people.
I will refer back to this list in a number of future pieces. Obviously, other topics need support too, like re-emphasizing equality for all, but this list is about policies that would apply to all. Also some policies are already prominently promoted, like some help with daycare and boosting trade schools. This list is what needs to be added or emphasized.
* Expand collective bargaining and union contracts in every area possible. There is no other tool better at improving conditions, and doing so by empowering rather than charity.
* Integrate AI with existing jobs in positive ways. AI should come into the workplace in a coordinated way that helps both employers and employees, rather than a chaotic wiping out of jobs. Union contracts with provisions for how AI integrates would help, and by empowering working people to have some control of it. So, see the item above.
* Legalize immigrants who contribute. Deport only undocumented immigrants who are committing crimes. For those who have been here for years, abiding by laws, working and paying taxes, for Pete’s sake keep that up.
* Break up employment monopolies. Not just for how they dominate products, but so they don’t hold monopolies on jobs and drive down wages and benefits and treatment.
* A serious attack on wage theft. It’s much bigger than most realize ($15 BILLION last year) and by no means limited to low-wage or undocumented workers. (And so what if it was? Work should always pay what was agreed.) One step: Anytime one employee wins a court case, do a full investigation of what other workers that employer shorts.
* Tighten working hours regulation. The old model of a job: You were hired for fixed hours and a given shift (day, night). If the employer had misjudged and there really isn’t enough for you to do, they would still have you on the job and pay you. The new model: Your schedule might randomly be day or night, meaning you can’t plan consistent day care, or side job, or night classes. You might randomly get fewer hours, but you still have to remain available. Enforce the old model.
* Tax wealthier paychecks to strengthen Social Security. Only about the first $180,000 of paycheck income is taxed for SS. If you make a million the other $820,000 are SS tax free. It has been known for decades that the limit needed to be raised to fund SS.
* Expand very small business administration help. Many ordinary workers are small business owners or have a side business. Anything to help that will help the economy.
* WPA-like art projects. Make working people feel like they are who is important. Sponsor lots of public art that celebrates working people, as was done by the WPA during the Great Depression.
* Monthly press conference on worker progress. Just as we carefully respond to the inflation rate, have a high-level report each month on economic indicators of how ordinary working people are fairing. Importantly, presented by the president or top administration or Congressional officials. If the economy is improving, are workers getting their full share of that? Is anything slipping which needs attention and improvement? Make real that worker status is the focus.
* Encourage Fed to prioritize employment. The Fed can’t be dictated to but it can be made clear that the emphasis should be on best conditions for workers. Fighting inflation, versus what is best for the pay of working people, are typically a trade-off. But tolerating a little more inflation while creating conditions that raise worker pay might, on balance in the long run, be what’s best. The Fed can constantly monitor for that best balance and push it as close to optimal as possible.
* Get dangerous chemicals out of common products. The list of things government should do to create a system more focused on what helps everyday people is long. Pick one or two like this to make prominent, to indicate an overall focus on people.
This list is incomplete, but specific and symbolic. A firm commitment to such a list would give voters a solid understanding, and inspire them.
DO YOU VALUE YOUR RIGHTS? HELP US TO CONTINUE PROTECTING THEM BY SUPPORTING OUR NONPROFIT EFFORTS.
The post For Democrats To Be the Working Peoples’ Party appeared first on DCReport.org.
I think David Lewis was off his rocker, I think Donald Davidson was far too impressed by elementary logic and decision theory, I think Willard Quine was a mediocre logician with some philosophical side-interests, I think Daniel Dennett never understood philosophy, I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations, I think P.F. Strawson struggled to understand much of philosophy, I think Gilbert Ryle was a classicist who wanted philosophy gone by any means necessary, I think Gareth Evans had no philosophical depth, I think John Searle was a philosophical lightweight, I think Jerry Fodor had no idea about philosophy and didn’t care, I think Saul Kripke was a mathematician with a passing interest in certain limited areas of philosophy, I think Hilary Putnam was a scientist-linguist who found philosophy incomprehensible, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosophical ignoramus too arrogant to learn some history, I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism, I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests, I think the positivists were well-meaning idiots, I think Edmund Husserl had no interest in anything outside his own consciousness, I think Martin Heidegger and John-Paul Sartre were mainly psychological politicians, I think John Austin was a scientifically illiterate language student, I think Noam Chomsky was neither a professional linguist nor a philosopher nor a psychologist but some sort of uneasy combination, I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, I think Plato and Aristotle were philosophical preschoolers, I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, I think the human brain is a hotbed of bad philosophy (and that is its great glory).
Here is the link, via The Browser. My honest view is that he is worrying too much about other people, and not enough about issues.
The post Colin McGinn’s “My Honest Views” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2. Record low U.S. crime rates are real, not an artifact of data issues.
3. Is the LDS Church suddenly bearish? What do they know?
4. Alcohol death rates in Europe, by country.
5. Australia as a partial model for the FDA.
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again. Higher production volume means larger, more efficient factories. It means more opportunities to use dedicated, high-speed, continuous process production equipment, or to implement efficiency-improving methods like Design for Manufacturing or Statistical Process Control. It means more incentive to develop new, better production technology. It means more opportunities to fall down the learning curve. The list goes on.
If you’re only going to run your process once, or just a handful of times, these opportunities are considerably narrowed. It’s obviously hard to justify the time and effort it takes to design a really efficient production process or invent some new manufacturing equipment if that process is constantly changing.
An example of this playing out in practice is the different cost trends of cars vs. car repair. In inflation-adjusted terms, cars have steadily gotten cheaper over time. The cost of car repair, on the other hand, has steadily gotten more expensive, rising mostly at the rate of overall wages (and recently, even faster).
Much of this difference comes down to the nature of the processes at work. Cars are manufactured via a repetitive, high-volume process that spits out nearly identical models by the hundreds of thousands or millions. Car manufacturers can justify spending billions of dollars designing a new model of car and the process for making it, because that cost will get spread out over a huge number of cars. Repairing a damaged car, on the other hand, is different: for a given model, any given repair process will be run a much smaller number of times, or maybe only once (since cars might get damaged in accidents in unique ways). A repair facility will need to accommodate a huge number of different models and model years, each damaged in different ways. There’s much less opportunity to design an efficient, highly automated repair process.
There are some complications to this basic pattern — the Toyota Production System and its descendents were designed to get mass-production-style benefits for a much more variable production process by making that process more flexible — but they don’t change the fundamental logic.
Thus, for things that we can repetitively produce in very large volumes — cars, transistors, LCD screens, corn — we’ve gotten good at making them very cheaply. Things produced in much smaller volumes, or where we need to adapt our process on the fly based on the specific situation, are much harder to produce cheaply. One way of thinking about services, which tend to get more expensive in inflation-adjusted terms over time, is that they’re things which generally require a lot of situation-specific adaptation, and can’t be produced via some high-volume, highly repetitive process.
An important aspect of this is automation. I’m fond of pointing out that it’s generally possible to build a machine to perform any particular task (and it has been for quite some time). If you’re going to do some task thousands or millions of times, it’s long been possible to automate that task with some sort of dedicated machine. (People skeptical of humanoid robots are very fond of pointing out how this sort of hard automation is far more efficient than a human-shaped robot at doing some task.) The challenge with automation has historically been flexibility: creating a machine that can make adjustments on the fly, perhaps changing the sequence of tasks completely as the situation changes, the way a human can. Even if the hardware itself can be used to perform a variety of different tasks, information processing capabilities have been limited; it has taken a lot of time and effort to get any particular automated process working, which could only be justified if those costs could be amortized over a sufficiently large volume. This is why the car industry has by far been the biggest user of industrial robots historically, as they have the right combination of very high production volumes, and frequent (but not too frequent) process changes (since models change yearly).
But this is changing: automation technology is getting more and more flexible. Computer vision has advanced, billions of dollars are being poured into developing humanoid robots, and a panoply of AI technologies are making it possible for an automated system to flexibly respond in a highly variable environment. Self-driving cars are one example. Being able to drive between any given two points, responding to situations or disruptions as they appear — traffic lights, pedestrians, other cars — is the exact sort of thing that automation historically has been very bad at, but that technology is now chipping away at.
As automation technology gets better and better, I have been thinking about how it will get pushed into areas requiring low-volume production or situation-specific adaptation that previously have been resistant to it. One potential trajectory is that with better, more flexible automation, “minimum efficient scale” — the size of an operation you need to be competitive — shrinks. With sufficiently capable robots, for instance, it might become possible to efficiently produce things in really small-footprint, low-overhead factories. The idea of “microfactories” is something people are enthusiastic about: you often see it in various prefab construction startups, but that excitement has spread elsewhere. The premise of the (now-defunct) EV startup Arrival was building cars using these sorts of highly flexible microfactories.
But another possible trajectory is in the opposite direction: large-scale, highly efficient production operations which capture significant economies of scale, but which produce a very wide range of outputs. Factories producing millions of different products in low volumes, or even quantities of one. I’m tentatively calling this idea “AWS for everything.”
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon’s cloud computing business. The idea of it (and of other similar offerings like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) is that instead of needing to set up your own computing infrastructure to do things like host a website or store large amounts of data, you can just rent it from Amazon. Amazon builds the data centers, sets up the servers, and creates the software tools and infrastructure that other people can use to set up and manage their computing needs.
Making this work as a business demands a huge amount of expensive infrastructure; even before AI, Amazon and other cloud computing companies spent a huge amount of money building data centers in various regions. But as Ben Thompson notes, AWS “benefits tremendously from economies of scale.” The more customers AWS has, the more efficiently it can use its infrastructure, similar to how electric utilities wanted lots of customers to reduce demand variability and achieve higher utilization rates. Thus with AWS you get a highly variable output — millions of different websites and computing tasks — supported by large-scale infrastructure investments. You can very quickly use Amazon’s infrastructure to perform whatever computing task you’re interested in, from hosting a small website to processing terabytes of data, without needing to build or operate any of that infrastructure yourself.
This same basic logic applies to physical automation. If you have machinery or equipment that can perform different sorts of tasks or produce a variety of different goods, and an effective software control layer that can tell each piece of equipment what it should be doing and where material should be routed, you can automatically produce a very large variety of different things. And the larger your operations, the lower your marginal costs of production: the more you produce, the greater your equipment utilization rate, and the more you can capture other economies of scale, such as using more efficient high-volume equipment.
Historically setting up this sort of highly automated, highly flexible production operation has been limited by the fact that setting up any particular automated process took a great deal of time and effort, and the technology didn’t exist for that automation to respond flexibly to a highly variable environment. So automated production lines, even ones that used flexible technology like robotics, could only be justified for high-volume production, and the range of variation they could accommodate was fairly limited.
But as automation and AI get better, this becomes much less true. If your software is smart enough, and your equipment flexible enough, you can set up some new process to produce some new widget on the fly, automatically working out what the process steps need to be and how to route the material through the various machines, without needing to take the time and effort to dial it in that was required historically. And if your volumes are high enough — if you’re producing enough different widgets, each with its route through a sequence of machines, sharing processing steps where possible — your costs for each individual unit of production might be very low indeed, even as you produce a wide variety of different things. So I can imagine having very large-volume production operations, which obtain large economies of scale and produce a wide variety of different outputs. Huge warehouses filled with all sorts of different machines, materials, parts, and components being routed between them, paths and tasks changing on the fly, a panoply of different goods rolling off the equivalent of the assembly line, each one sent to its final destination by low-cost, small-scale delivery vehicles like drones or Austin Vernon’s pallet EVs. Customers could spin up production on this rented equipment and start producing whatever they wanted without having to build their own factory. These sorts of operations wouldn’t displace traditional mass-production style processes (which will still have a substantial cost advantage), but would exist alongside them.
(You probably don’t even need to completely automate the hardware side, so long as you have a sufficiently intelligent control layer. Uber’s mapping software can direct a driver to where they need to go, leaving the driver to actually turn the wheel and work the controls. Amazon has similar software that tells its distribution center workers where to pick up and bring packages. So you can imagine humans acting as much of the “connective tissue” in this sort of production process, being directed by software telling them where to go and what to do to maximize utilization.)
You can see the seeds of this “AWS for everything” concept in some businesses that exist today. In manufacturing there are fabricators that specialize in high-mix production like SendCutSend, OSH Cut, or JLCPCB. You send your part design to SendCutSend: their software automatically checks to see if it can be fabricated using their equipment (laser cutters, CNC machines, etc.), and they send you back the part a few days later. According to SendCutSend’s founder Jim Belosic, this model only works because of economies of scale, being able to efficiently spread the costs of their millions of dollars of equipment. As he said on Tool or Die:
The key with high mix is that it actually works at scale. The larger volume of high mix, the easier things get...Especially with sheet cutting. With sheet cutting, the software side of us, it allows us to take hundreds of different customers, with a quantity of one part each, and put them onto a sheet, like tetris, nested all together, and run it all at once. So we only do one setup, for potentially dozens or hundreds of customers, we do one load into the machine, we only retrieve the material once. And we have really good sheet utilization, we have almost no scrap. It’s probably one of the lowest in the industry.
It doesn’t work though, when you only do a few. If I was to run one of those customers at a time, we’d be bankrupt.
SendCutSend has grown rapidly — founded in 2018, they recently passed $100 million in annual revenue — but they still work hard to maintain flexibility, using equipment that doesn’t require months of downtime to reprogram or configure when processes change. They’re also expanding their offerings. They started with laser cutting, later added CNC machining, and now offer welding of single parts. They’ve also gradually expanded the range of materials that they offer. You can imagine that as automation gets better and better, this sort of business model could continue to be extended, going to multi-part welding, assembly, and eventually entirely finished goods.
And it’s not just manufacturing where this sort of production model might emerge. I was inspired to write this essay after reading a really great essay about lab automation at Owl Posting, speculating that various lab automation startups might converge on being “AWS for biotech”: large, automated labs that can spread the costs of their automation over a large number of experiments run for different customers. Right now much of this sort of lab work isn’t automated, not because it’s not possible to automate but because it’s not repeated enough to be worth it in any particular lab. Centralize all those experiments in one place, and maybe that changes:
If you are to accept that lab centralization (as in, cloud labs) means you can most efficiently use lab robotics—which feels like a pretty uncontroversial argument—it also means that the further you lean into this, the more able you are to vertically integrate upstream. If you’re running enough experiments such that your robots are constantly humming, you can justify producing your own reagents. If you’re producing your own reagents, your per-experiment costs drop. If your per-experiment costs drop, you can offer lower prices. If you offer lower prices, you attract more demand. If you attract more demand, your robots stay even busier. If your robots stay even busier, you can justify producing even more of your own inputs. And so on, ad infinitum, until you devour the entirety of the market, and the game of biology becomes extraordinarily cheap and easy for everyone to play in.
I’m not a scientist, but I can imagine how this sort of model could apply to other areas of scientific research as well — chemistry, materials research, etc.
How far could this model be pushed? I opened this essay talking about car repair, which has risen in cost far faster than the actual production of cars. I’ve been in car accidents where the damage was relatively minor, but that nevertheless cost a large fraction of the entire value of the car to repair, due to the un-optimized, un-automated, labor-intensive repair process. Could we have some sort of large, centralized car repair facility, spreading the cost of its automated equipment (heavy industrial robot arms, lifts, welding robots, perhaps even metal fabrication equipment) across a huge number of repaired cars?
It’s not obvious to me whether this would work for car repair. Whether “AWS for everything” will work in a given industry will depend on the specifics of that industry, the costs and capabilities of the equipment available, and what scaling effects look like. If equipment is relatively inexpensive, and there aren’t substantial economies of scale at work, I wouldn’t expect this sort of production arrangement to necessarily make sense. A few years ago people were very enthusiastic about this sort of model for cooking, with “ghost kitchens:” commercial kitchens without any sort of dine-in option, preparing food for delivery-only restaurants. Some of the supposed advantage of ghost kitchens was that they required much smaller amounts of space that could be located outside of expensive, high-traffic areas (since you didn’t need any sort of dine-in option). But ghost kitchens were also expected to have economies of scale. Multiple different “restaurants” could be served from the same facility, possibly taking advantage of batch ingredient prep or high-capacity equipment. But while ghost kitchens are still around, they don’t seem to have been the enormous success they were originally predicted to be. (Possibly this will change if food prep automation gets much better, but that’d be somewhat surprising to me.)
So for many industries the “AWS for everything” model won’t work. But I nevertheless think there’s a good chance that certain kinds of production — manufacturing, certain sorts of scientific research, other capital-intensive services — will be organized this way in the future.
Thanks to Austin Vernon for reading a draft of this. All errors are my own.
Tongits is practically stitched into Filipino culture. If you grew up in the Philippines, you have probably seen it played at family reunions, fiestas, or that random Sunday afternoon when someone pulled out a deck and said, “Tara, isang round lang.”
It is simple. It is competitive. It is dramatic. And for some reason, it always turns into an argument about who miscounted points.
Then the internet showed up and did what it does best. It moved everything onto a screen.
Enter the Tongits Go modern twist. Same game. Different battlefield.
But is it just the same Tongits wearing digital makeup, or is it actually different?
The Tongits Go modern twist is not a reinvention of the rules. You still form sets and runs. You still manage high-value cards. You still aim for Tongits, a draw, or survival.
The difference is in structure.
Instead of a plastic table and three chairs, you need:
That is it.
Platforms offering Tongits Go modern twist bring automated scoring, instant matchmaking, and structured competition.
No more reshuffling because someone claims the deck “felt weird.” No more debates over whether someone miscounted points.
The system handles everything.
Efficiency has entered the chat.
Let’s be honest. Traditional Tongits has a rhythm.
Shuffle. Deal. Trash talk. Think. Count. Argue. Repeat.
It is slower, and that is part of its charm. You read body language. You watch with hesitation. You study discard strategies.
With the Tongits Go modern twist, speed becomes part of the game itself.
Matches start instantly. Turns move faster. Hesitation is punished. The tempo forces sharper decision-making.
There is no time to stare dramatically at your cards while pretending to think. The clock is running.
If you grew up playing the classic version, the pace might feel intense at first. But once you adjust, it is hard to go back.
Digital Tongits is efficient. And efficiency is addictive.
Here is where things get interesting.
Traditional Tongits strategy relies heavily on:
In contrast, the Tongits Go modern twist focuses on:
You cannot rely on body language online. You rely on data and behavior patterns instead.
The fundamentals remain unchanged:
But the tempo changes everything. Digital play rewards quick thinking and consistency. Strategy becomes tighter. More calculated.
In a way, it strips away theatrics and exposes pure gameplay.
In classic Tongits, your “rank” is based on reputation.
If you win often, people remember. If you lose often, they remember that too.
But there is no official ladder.
The Tongits Go modern twist formalizes this competitive spirit. Leaderboards. Tiers. Tournaments. Measurable progress.
You are not just “magaling.” You are ranked.
This structured competition appeals to players who crave progression. It gives goals beyond just winning one round.
You grind. You improve. You climb.
And suddenly, Tongits is not just a pastime. It feels like a competitive ecosystem.
Traditional Tongits offers pride. Sometimes cash. Mostly pride.
Digital Tongits introduces:
The Tongits Go modern twist gamifies the experience. It gives you reasons to log back in.
You are not just playing for the round. You are playing for rewards, achievements, and ranking movement.
It taps into the same structure that makes mobile games so engaging. Short sessions. Clear incentives. Visible progression.
Convenience meets competition. That combination is hard to ignore.
Let’s address the elephant in the room.
Traditional Tongits is loud. It is emotional. It is personal.
Half the fun is the teasing. The other half is the reaction when someone unexpectedly declares Tongits.
Online play replaces that with chat features, emojis, and usernames. It sounds less exciting on paper, but rivalries still form.
You start recognizing players. You remember aggressive styles. You build digital grudges.
The Tongits Go modern twist does not remove social interaction. It transforms it.
Older players may miss the face-to-face tension. Younger players, raised on mobile games and online communities, feel right at home.
Different medium. Same competitive fire.
This is not a loyalty test.
Choose traditional Tongits if you:
Choose Tongits Go modern twist if you:
Most players rotate between both.
Family gathering? Traditional.
Late-night competitive session? Online.
The flexibility is the real upgrade.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: absolutely not.
Traditional Tongits survives because it is cultural. It thrives in fiestas, living rooms, and spontaneous get-togethers.
The Tongits Go modern twist does not erase that. It extends it.
Think of it as preservation through evolution.
If Tongits stayed locked to physical tables only, it might slowly fade among younger, mobile-first players. By adapting to digital platforms, it stays relevant.
The mechanics remain. The spirit remains.
Only the setting changes.
Tongits Go modern twist vs traditional Tongits is not a battle. It is a timeline.
One represents heritage, community, and physical presence. The other represents accessibility, speed, and structured competition.
Both versions protect the core gameplay. Both reward strategy and timing.
The difference lies in pace and presentation.
Tongits has survived generations because it adapts without losing its identity. Moving to mobile platforms is just the latest chapter.
Same game. New arena.
And if a card game can evolve without losing its soul, that says something about its staying power.
Tongits Go modern twist is a digital version of the traditional Tongits card game. It keeps the classic rules but adds online matchmaking, rankings, tournaments, and automated scoring.
The core mechanics remain the same. However, Tongits online introduces faster pacing, structured competition, digital rewards, and access to a broader player base.
It depends on context. Traditional Tongits is ideal for in-person bonding and reading opponents. Tongits Go modern twist is better for convenience, ranked progression, and competitive online play.
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The post Tongits Go Modern Twist vs. Traditional Tongits: Which One Actually Wins? appeared first on DCReport.org.
The New York Times editorial board thinks about the current environment for (now legal) marijuana, and calls for more careful regulation, and federal taxation:
It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem
"Thirteen years ago, no state allowed marijuana for recreational purposes. Today, most Americans live in a state that allows them to buy and smoke a joint. President Trump continued the trend toward legalization in December by loosening federal restrictions.
This editorial board has long supported marijuana legalization. In 2014, we published a six-part series that compared the federal marijuana ban to alcohol prohibition and argued for repeal. Much of what we wrote then holds up — but not all of it does.
At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.
It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around six million in 2012 and less than one million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol.
...
"The unfortunate truth is that the loosening of marijuana policies — especially the decision to legalize pot without adequately regulating it — has led to worse outcomes than many Americans expected. It is time to acknowledge reality and change course."
Construction on the Interstate Bridge Project take until at least 2045
Area residents can count on traffic disruptions on I-5 for the next two decades
Construction will likely take even longer as packages are “sequenced” and delayed because adequate funding for the full $17.7 billion cost hasn’t been identified
The biggest single transportation project in the Pacific Northwest, the proposed Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, which would replace the I-5 bridges over the Columbia River and widen the freeway between Portland and Vancouver has gotten a lot bigger–and will take a lot longer–than officials have been promising. As City Observatory reported last month, the cost of the project has exploded from an estimated maximum of $7.5 billion to an new estimated maximum of $17.7 billion. But that’s just one dimension of change: the same materials show that the project which was vaguely promised to be finished in a decade or less, will likely drag on through the mid-2040s. Welcome to the forever project!
The Oregon and Washington highway departments started in earnest planning for–and spending money on–a replacement for the I-5 bridges over the Columbia River in 2005. They’ve already spent two decades and close to half a billion dollars on the effort, mostly on consultants. And by all indications, this process is going to drag on for at least a couple of more decades–and saddle the region with billions and billions in costs and debt, as well as extended disruption due to ongoing construction.
The good news, if you’re a consultant, is that this is going to mean lots and lots of employment. Going forward, contractors and staff expect to bill $558 million — about $2.4 million per month for the next 231 months (more than 19 years), according to internal documents obtained by City Observatory. This will be to oversee construction, and comes on top of about $273 million already spent on staff and consultants, plus more than $200 million spent on the earlier, failed Columbia River Crossing project. Here’s a table showing planned spending for “management” for the next two decades.
“GEC” is the “General Engineering Consultant.” These estimates include no provision for labor cost escalation over that 20 year period, so the actual figure could be much higher.
Construction on the river crossing itself won’t start, according to this schedule until 2028, but WSDOT will start charging tolls in 2026, in what is called “pre-completion tolling”–The pre-completion period, to be clear, lasts for a full two decades.
IBR has produced an elaborate schedule, which combined with a project map, shows when and how long major tasks will take. The project will start with “pre-completion” tolling and then construction on the bridge crossing. Wider freeway segments and re-built intersections further from the Columbia River (Marine Drive in Oregon and Mill Plain in Washington) will be completed much later (in the 2040s).
Neither ODOT nor WashDOT has enough money to actually build the project, so their plan is to start spending the money they do have on some parts of the project, and then when that runs out, come back and ask for more. Their plan calls for them to do some parts of the project earlier than others, what they call “sequencing.” As it turns out, sequencing favors some program aspects over others. For example, Tri-Met will get an expanded Ruby Junction maintenance facility–estimated to cost $440 million started in 2029 even though no light rail trains are expected to carry passengers until late in 2035. Similarly, a separate $94 million light rail overnight facility will be built starting in 2030–almost five years before trains run. And, of course, the entire point of this financial strategy and “sequencing” is to make it all but impossible to give the two state DOTs all the money they need to finish the project: Once you’ve built the new, higher bridge, you’ll have to build new higher approaches and intersections to access it; once you build the maintenance facility and overnight rail yard, you’ll have to buy the trains to run on them. It’s a calculated strategy to extract the $17.7 billion (and quite probably a good deal more).
So what promises to be a perpetual payday for consultants is going to be a pricey and painful problem for people traveling between Portland and Vancouver for the next two decades. Motorists will have to start paying tolls (likely ranging between $3 and $4 at the peak hour) to cross the I-5 bridges as soon as the project gets a go ahead. Then, for the next two decades of construction, people crossing the river or using nearby roads will likely seen regular disruptions as roads a closed, re-routed, and rebuilt. For example, between 2032 and 2034, after one new bridge is built, all traffic will be diverted to that bridge as an old bridge is torn down and a second bridge is built. In all, freeway traffic will be re-routed five times before the bridge is finished. Only after the bridge is built will several connecting freeways and interchanges be rebuilt, with additional disruptions.
As a post-script, its worth noting that in many respects, this may be the best-case scenario. Right now, the Oregon and Washington Transportation departments don’t have anywhere near enough money to actually build the whole project. Their plans is to get started, and then hold the two state’s legislators — and Portland/Vancouver travelers–hostage to come up with the money to pay for all of the other pieces of their elaborate plan. As we’ve pointed out, just the federal environmental review has already taken more than two years longer than their schedule. If their track record is any indication, we can expect even more delays, as well as cost overruns, throughout this entire period. Given that they’ve been working on “basically the same project” for the past twenty years, its a good bet that the disruption–and the consultant paychecks–will go on well past the mid 2040s.
The Government of India’s Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation has created an impressive Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect AI’s to Indian datasets. An AI connected to data via an MCP essentially knows the entire codebook and can make use of the data like an expert. Once connected one can query the data in natural language and quickly create graphs and statistical analysis. I connected Claude to the MCP and created an elegant dashboard with data from India’s Annual Survey of Industries. Check it out.
The post India AI Data MCP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Abandon Swift adoption
Back in August 2024 the Ladybird browser project announced an intention to adopt Swift as their memory-safe language of choice.As of this commit it looks like they've changed their mind:
Everywhere: Abandon Swift adoption
After making no progress on this for a very long time, let's acknowledge it's not going anywhere and remove it from the codebase.
Via Hacker News
25+ years into my career as a programmer I think I may finally be coming around to preferring type hints or even strong typing. I resisted those in the past because they slowed down the rate at which I could iterate on code, especially in the REPL environments that were key to my productivity. But if a coding agent is doing all that typing for me, the benefits of explicitly defining all of those types are suddenly much more attractive.
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, programming, programming-languages, static-typing
The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived
New opinion piece from Paul Ford in the New York Times. Unsurprisingly for a piece by Paul it's packed with quoteworthy snippets, but a few stood out for me in particular.Paul describes the November moment that so many other programmers have observed, and highlights Claude Code's ability to revive old side projects:
[Claude Code] was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I’ve been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer. It’s fun to see old ideas come to life, so I keep a steady flow. Maybe it adds up to a half-hour a day of my time, and an hour of Claude’s.
November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.
And as the former CEO of a respected consultancy firm (Postlight) he's well positioned to evaluate the potential impact:
When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.
That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive. Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.
He also neatly captures the inherent community tension involved in exploring this technology:
All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
Tags: new-york-times, paul-ford, careers, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, ai-ethics, coding-agents, claude-code
LLMs are eating specialty skills. There will be less use of specialist front-end and back-end developers as the LLM-driving skills become more important than the details of platform usage. Will this lead to a greater recognition of the role of Expert Generalists? Or will the ability of LLMs to write lots of code mean they code around the silos rather than eliminating them?
— Martin Fowler, tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat, via HN)
Tags: martin-fowler, careers, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming
Note: This is a really long post — sometimes I’ve got more to say than fits on an email to you from Substack. So — if you want to see all of this, as well as the photos in large-format, click on the above headline to open this post in your browser.
In 2006-2007, I started working on a book that turned out to be Builders of the Pacific Coast — making many trips in my Toyota Tacoma up to Vancouver Island and neighboring islands in British Columbia. I was documenting a group of extraordinary builders who, in the absence of building inspectors and codes, had created some unique homes. (I was there because my long-time friend, artist Godfrey Stephens had been telling me for years about BC builders.)
I had heard about the First Nations tribes, but wasn’t until then aware of their magnificent buildings and tribal art — all based on the cedar tree. The cedar, because it grows straight and tall in the rainy northwest forest, has straight grain, which is the key to its workability. Using only simple tools — wooden wedges, stone malls, and blades of bone or stone — builders were able to split long, straight boards used for sheathing and roof decking in the days before metal.
To give you an idea of size, a Salish building discovered by Capt. George Vancouver in 1792 was over 1000 feet long — almost 1/5 of a mile. A longhouse discovered by the explorer Simon Fraser in 1808 measured 650 feet long by 60 feet wide.
Inextricably linked to carpentry skills in the construction of buildings was the artistry in carving tall, upright cedar poles: totems, which typically showed such revered animals as ravens, bears, whales, wolves, and beavers.
Northwest Coast art is still very much alive these days, but the days of monumental structures built without metal tools are long gone.
Here are some archival photographs from Builders of the Pacific Coast. (They actually look better here than in the book!)
-Above drawings from wonderful book, Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians © 1984 by Hilary Stewart, published by Douglas and McIntyre
A few stories about centibillionaires — men whose net worth exceeds $100 billion — and their role in our society:
· In 2022 Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, purchased Twitter. Since then he has turned the platform into a racist cesspool, overrun by literal Nazis.
· Last year Skydance Media, run by David Ellison — the son of Larry Ellison, the world’s 6th richest man — acquired Paramount, which includes CBS. The new management put Bari Weiss, a conservative pundit with no relevant experience, in charge of CBS News. The network that once featured Edward R. Murrow has been going downhill ever since. On Tuesday night CBS management, responding to an obviously partisan demand from the Trump-appointed head of the FCC, prevented Stephen Colbert from running an interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
· Paramount is now trying to acquire Warner Brothers, which would give the Ellisons control of CNN.
· Jeff Bezos, the world’s 5th richest man, bought the Washington Post in 2013. He followed a hands-off approach for a decade, but in 2024 he began heavily intervening, preventing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, then requiring that the opinion section focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” He has now gutted the newsroom, leaving the paper that brought down Richard Nixon a shell of its former self.
Furthermore, standard measures of political spending show an explosion of billionaire money seeking to influence American elections. Since the Roberts Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling the percentage of total contributions accounted for by billionaire money has skyrocketed:
Source: Americans for Tax Fairness
For those who need a refresher, Citizens United was a 2010 ruling by a narrow majority on the Supreme Court that effectively removed all restrictions on political spending by wealthy individuals and corporations. Such spending must be undertaken by nominally independent organizations, but in practice so-called Super PACs (political action committees) coordinate closely with candidates and parties. The result of the ruling, which you can see in the chart, was an explosion of political spending by billionaires as well as industry lobbying groups. Citizens United is what enabled both Elon Musk and the crypto industry to play huge roles in the 2024 election.
Some of the rise in billionaire spending can be explained by growth in the number of billionaires — but not much. The number of U.S. billionaires rose 85 percent between 2010 and 2023, from 404 to 748. But billionaires’ share of political contributions rose by 1700 percent.
In short, we are in the midst of an unprecedented power grab by America’s oligarchs. This power grab is arguably the most important fact about contemporary U.S. politics. In many ways MAGA is just a symptom.
What lies behind this power grab? An extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top.
Last month I interviewed Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth inequality (among other things.) Zucman has been producing charts on wealth at the very top — the 0.00001 percent, which currently means 19 people. He shared his latest data with me; it looks like this:
Source: Gabriel Zucman
Wealth in America is now more concentrated in a few hands than it was during the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century. Money has always been a potent source of political influence, so this vast increase in concentrated wealth at the top inevitably translates into increased power.
However, after Citizens United America experienced an increase in oligarchic power far surpassing even what one might have expected given soaring wealth at the top. At this point it’s clear that we have experienced a fundamental change in the way our society works. Everything that is downstream of the American political system – federal and state governments, the courts, regulatory power, economic policy, health policy, media independence – and of course democracy itself – is under extreme threat from the tidal wave of billionaire influence.
Let me offer three reasons surging wealth at the top has caused a lurch away from democracy.
The first reason is a bit wonkish, but here goes: Political scientists and economists have long argued that highly concentrated interest groups are more politically effective than diffuse groups, an argument that goes back to Mancur Olson’s classic 1965 book The Logic of Collective Action.
Here’s a hypothetical example: Suppose that spending $1 billion on political influence would enrich a plutocrat by 1 percent of their wealth. Someone with “only” $30 billion in assets wouldn’t find this spending worth it: $1 billion in outlays produces only $300 million in capital gains – a loss of 70%. But someone with $300 billion in assets would gain $3 billion by spending $1 billion on political influence – a profit of 200%. In other words, because buying political influence is expensive, we would expect that the growing concentration of wealth within the plutocrat class will increase that class’s political spending and, therefore, its power.
Second, some forms of de facto political action – such as buying your own global media platform — can only be undertaken by men of truly immense personal wealth. Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter; 20 years earlier there were no individuals with that much money.
Finally, and crucially, billionaires haven’t just spent money to influence policy. They have also spent money to change the rules in ways that make money more powerful. Years of plutocratic investment in institutions from the Heritage Foundation to the Federalist Society prepared the ground for the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which then opened the floodgates for vastly increased plutocratic influence.
Something comparably transformative has happened in the past year. Billionaires didn’t just help Donald Trump regain the White House, they helped create new de facto ground rules under which he can use his office for personal enrichment — which hugely expands the influence of those with the means to make him richer.
What are the ultra-wealthy doing with their vastly increased power? They are, of course, twisting policy in ways that will make them even richer, at the expense of everyone else. Anyone who imagines that the unthinkably rich aren’t greedy, because they can already afford to buy whatever they want, doesn’t understand human nature.
That said, even billionaires care about more than their own personal wealth. Unfortunately, their non-monetary goals are often worse than their greed.
Put it this way: Elon Musk hasn’t turned X, the former Twitter, into a platform promoting white supremacy and a safe space for Nazis as part of a strategy to enlarge his fortune. He has done it because it serves his personal agenda and reflects his values.
Today’s post is more about understanding where we are than about a call to action. Still, the obvious question is what can be done in the face of billionaires gone wild. The answer, clearly, is that any project to save American democracy must include a push to reduce the extreme concentration of wealth at the top.
We know that this can be done, because it has been done. In his famous Madison Garden speech of 1936 FDR declared war on “Government by organized money,” and he won that war. Progressive taxation and mass unionization drastically reduced the wealth and even more drastically diminished the power of big money.
To say that a comparable project is impossible today is to say that democracy can’t be saved. And I’m not willing to accept that. Are you?
MUSICAL CODA
I've long been resistant to the idea of accepting sponsorship for my blog. I value my credibility as an independent voice, and I don't want to risk compromising that reputation.
Then I learned about Troy Hunt's approach to sponsorship, which he first wrote about in 2016. Troy runs with a simple text row in the page banner - no JavaScript, no cookies, unobtrusive while providing value to the sponsor. I can live with that!
Accepting sponsorship in this way helps me maintain my independence while offsetting the opportunity cost of not taking a full-time job.
To start with I'm selling sponsorship by the week. Sponsors get that unobtrusive banner across my blog and also their sponsored message at the top of my newsletter.
I will not write content in exchange for sponsorship. I hope the sponsors I work with understand that my credibility as an independent voice is a key reason I have an audience, and compromising that trust would be bad for everyone.
Freeman & Forrest helped me set up and sell my first slots. Thanks also to Theo Browne for helping me think through my approach.
Tags: newsletter, blogging, troy-hunt
SWE-bench February 2026 leaderboard update
SWE-bench is one of the benchmarks that the labs love to list in their model releases. The official leaderboard is infrequently updated but they just did a full run of it against the current generation of models, which is notable because it's always good to see benchmark results like this that weren't self-reported by the labs.The fresh results are for their "Bash Only" benchmark, which runs their mini-swe-bench agent (~9,000 lines of Python, here are the prompts they use) against the SWE-bench dataset of coding problems - 2,294 real-world examples pulled from 12 open source repos: django/django (850), sympy/sympy (386), scikit-learn/scikit-learn (229), sphinx-doc/sphinx (187), matplotlib/matplotlib (184), pytest-dev/pytest (119), pydata/xarray (110), astropy/astropy (95), pylint-dev/pylint (57), psf/requests (44), mwaskom/seaborn (22), pallets/flask (11).
Correction: The Bash only benchmark runs against SWE-bench Verified, not original SWE-bench. Verified is a manually curated subset of 500 samples described here, funded by OpenAI. Here's SWE-bench Verified on Hugging Face - since it's just 2.1MB of Parquet it's easy to browse using Datasette Lite, which cuts those numbers down to django/django (231), sympy/sympy (75), sphinx-doc/sphinx (44), matplotlib/matplotlib (34), scikit-learn/scikit-learn (32), astropy/astropy (22), pydata/xarray (22), pytest-dev/pytest (19), pylint-dev/pylint (10), psf/requests (8), mwaskom/seaborn (2), pallets/flask (1).
Here's how the top ten models performed:
It's interesting to see Claude Opus 4.5 beat Opus 4.6, though only by about a percentage point. 4.5 Opus is top, then Gemini 3 Flash, then MiniMax M2.5 - a 229B model released last week by Chinese lab MiniMax. GLM-5, Kimi K2.5 and DeepSeek V3.2 are three more Chinese models that make the top ten as well.
OpenAI's GPT-5.2 is their highest performing model at position 6, but it's worth noting that their best coding model, GPT-5.3-Codex, is not represented - maybe because it's not yet available in the OpenAI API.
This benchmark uses the same system prompt for every model, which is important for a fair comparison but does mean that the quality of the different harnesses or optimized prompts is not being measured here.
The chart above is a screenshot from the SWE-bench website, but their charts don't include the actual percentage values visible on the bars. I successfully used Claude for Chrome to add these - transcript here. My prompt sequence included:
Use claude in chrome to open https://www.swebench.com/
Click on "Compare results" and then select "Select top 10"
See those bar charts? I want them to display the percentage on each bar so I can take a better screenshot, modify the page like that
I'm impressed at how well this worked - Claude injected custom JavaScript into the page to draw additional labels on top of the existing chart.
![Screenshot of a Claude AI conversation showing browser automation. A thinking step reads "Pivoted strategy to avoid recursion issues with chart labeling >" followed by the message "Good, the chart is back. Now let me carefully add the labels using an inline plugin on the chart instance to avoid the recursion issue." A collapsed "Browser_evaluate" section shows a browser_evaluate tool call with JavaScript code using Chart.js canvas context to draw percentage labels on bars: meta.data.forEach((bar, index) => { const value = dataset.data[index]; if (value !== undefined && value !== null) { ctx.save(); ctx.textAlign = 'center'; ctx.textBaseline = 'bottom'; ctx.fillStyle = '#333'; ctx.font = 'bold 12px sans-serif'; ctx.fillText(value.toFixed(1) + '%', bar.x, bar.y - 5); A pending step reads "Let me take a screenshot to see if it worked." followed by a completed "Done" step, and the message "Let me take a screenshot to check the result."](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/claude-chrome-draw-on-chart.jpg)
Update: If you look at the transcript Claude claims to have switched to Playwright, which is confusing because I didn't think I had that configured.
Via @KLieret
Tags: benchmarks, django, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, coding-agents, ai-in-china, minimax
Cradled in red-glowing hydrogen gas, stars are being born in Orion.
I’ll be chatting with Hunter Walker about the Fulton County election office raid and the fringe characters driving the Trump administration’s latest push to interfere in U.S. elections this morning. Join us on Substack Live at 11 a.m. ET. See you there!
President Trump got some decent news on the inflation and jobs front in the January data. There are signs that the January jobs number may just be a positive blip in an overall downcast trend from 2025. The cooling inflation numbers may be offset by price hikes from manufacturers who have been holding off on passing on tariff costs until the new year. Still, for a president with sinking popularity, those numbers are better than nothing. And yet, despite some nods to affordability, there’s really little evidence that Trump is in any way shifting course or doing anything likely to shift the downward pressure on public support which threatens to wash away Republicans’ congressional majorities in November. They made some nods to that in Minneapolis. But we can be confident now that it’s window dressing on a mass deportation program that remains intact and bounding forward. On the contrary, everything we see suggests a pedal-to-the-metal, double-down approach. The main effort focused on the election is not one focused on increasing public support but putting a thumb on the scales with the administration’s so-called SAVE Act to suppress the vote. Everything points to a collision between these two forces, Trump and the American public, in November.
A couple data points caught my attention in recent days. Axios has many shortcomings. But one thing it is very helpful with is knowing when some new idea or datapoint or news permeates the threshold of elite DC opinion. Yesterday they ran a piece about the looming midterms warning for the GOP. The first line of the piece is both arresting and provides some reassurance that the images of recent months have broken through to the public at large. It reads: “Nearly half of Americans would describe President Trump as ‘corrupt,’ ‘racist’ and ‘cruel’ in new polling full of midterm warning signs for Republicans.”
The growing focus on cruelty and corruption shows that Trump’s cratering public support isn’t just about tariff anxiety or affordability. The brutality and corruption of his government, the fulsome rejection of the civic democratic order are breaking through with a broad public. The public increasingly sees the reality of Trump’s rule, and a majority doesn’t like it.
For some time through the middle months of 2025, Trump’s public support was low and perhaps creeping down slowly. But overall the story was one of general stability. That changed about four months ago. Nate Silver’s Trump approval average today stands at 40.9%. G. Elliott Morris’s number (which I use as my canonical data point) is at 38.7%. Trump is now significantly below the abysmal public approval he had at this time in his first term, which is a genuine accomplishment.
It’s tempting to think that Trump has some secret plan to rig or overrule or maybe even cancel the election. But in fact it’s not a secret. He claims he’s going to “nationalize” the election, which actually just means putting his Republican friends in charge of counting the ballots in places he’s upset about losing in prior cycles. Maybe they’ll pass the SAVE Act, though Republicans would need to abolish the filibuster to do that. So that almost certainly isn’t happening.
I don’t think Trump’s plans are going to work. Especially if the opposition is vigilant. What seems more likely is that Trump is falling prey to that common peril of aging strongmen: he’s trapped in a bubble of his own making, in which he hears only the voices of lackeys and sycophants and — when it’s not one of those — people more committed to degenerate ideology than to Trump’s public approval. People like Stephen Miller for instance.
There’s a difference between public opinion and elite conventional wisdom. The latter has assumed for almost the entirety of the last year that Trump can do anything he wants and even get fairly unpopular and none of it matters. Trump can walk through fire, walk on water. He’s unsinkable. The last decade has certainly given us plenty of reasons to be wary of counting Trump out. But that confidence in unstoppability which permeates Trump’s world and most of elite D.C. opinion has clearly convinced Trump and most of his inner circle that he can, quite simply, do anything he wants. But the American public doesn’t seem to agree. And at least D.C. conventional wisdom, if not the White House, seems only now to be waking up to the fact that a broad and intense backlash is brewing against Trump’s war not only on his political opposition but on American liberty itself.
The Jan. 28 FBI raid on Fulton County, Georgia’s election hub brought new urgency to concerns that the Trump administration is trying to interfere in upcoming elections, including the midterms this fall.
And as Hunter Walker explained during a Wednesday Substack Live, “the call is coming from inside the house.” The raid came about thanks to a referral from special government employee Kurt Olsen, and thanks to the analysis of another special government employee, Clay Parikh.
In a conversation with editor Allegra Kirkland, Hunter breaks down exactly who these people are and why the Fulton County raid is so dangerous.
Be sure to check out Hunter’s “mask off” conversation with Parikh about sanitizing his soda with alcohol; the evil cabal inside the government; and how “we haven’t had an honest election in decades.”
Hunter was also on the Posting Through It podcast this week for an extended conversation about the long tail of the Big Lie.
A reader pointed out that the 2026 Formula 1 season starts in Australia on March 8. You will recall from October that Apple TV is now the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 in the U.S. Apple is already dabbling with live immersive sports broadcasting for VisionOS with a limited slate of Lakers games this season. If they have something planned for streaming F1 races live on Vision Pro, with some level of immersion, March 4 would be a pretty good date to demo that experience to the media.
It doesn’t even have to be live race coverage. Technically that’s probably impossible for this season. It would just be a sign of confidence and interest in the platform long-term merely to see some sort of immersive component to F1 on Apple TV, even if it’s not live. Like “ride the track” to experience the turns and elevation changes.
Could just be a total coincidence that the Formula 1 season is starting the weekend after this event. But it seems worth noting.
Paul Ford, in an op-ed for The New York Times (gift link):
All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. The conversation is based around Joe’s new and very good book How Africa Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Last Developmental Frontier. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Joe explore whether population density actually solves development, which African countries are likely to achieve stable growth, whether Africa has a manufacturing future, why state infrastructure projects decay while farmer-led irrigation thrives, what progress looks like in education and public health, whether charter cities or special economic zones can work, and how permanent Africa’s colonial borders really are. After testing Joe’s optimism about Africa, Tyler shifts back to Asia: what Japan and South Korea will do about depopulation, why industrial policy worked in East Asia but failed in India and Brazil, what went wrong in Thailand, and what Joe will tackle next.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Does Africa have a manufacturing future? Is robotics coming, AI, possibly some reshoring?
STUDWELL: Yes. I believe that Africa does have a manufacturing future.
COWEN: But making what? And at what cost of energy?
STUDWELL: They will start, as everybody does, producing garments, producing textiles, which in certain enclaves is already going on in Madagascar, in Lasutu, in Morocco, and they’ll move on to other things. They’ll start with those things because they are the most labor cost-sensitive products.
Africa is now in a position where — depending on which state you’re looking at, and taking China as a reference point — the cost of labor is now between a half and one-tenth of what it is in China. Factory labor is now around $600 a month at its cheapest. In a country like Ethiopia or Madagascar, it’s $60 or $65 a month. So, it’s a 10th of the cost, and that’s already beginning to have a bit of effect, often with Chinese firms moving production to Africa.
So, I think there is a future for manufacturing. It will depend on the extent to which African governments understand that you don’t really move forward fast for very long without manufacturing, that every developed country — apart from a few petro states and financial centers — has gone through a manufacturing phase of development. It depends on the extent to which African governments engage with that, but some, without doubt, will.
The Ethiopians, for instance, have already attempted to do that. What they’re trying to do has been somewhat derailed by the two-year civil war that took place from 2020, but they’re back on it now, and they’re trying to move forward.
The idea that robotics and AI are going to change the story I personally do not buy, principally for two reasons. One is the cost reason, because whenever people talk about what’s happening with robotics, no one ever talks about the cost of robots. In garmenting, for instance, even a basic robot will cost you in excess of $100,000, and you pay the cost upfront, and you’ve then paid that, whether there’s demand for your products or not. Also, in garmenting and in textiles, robots don’t work very well because they can’t work with material very well. They’re much better at working with solid things.
So, you’ve spent $100,000 for a robot when you can go out in somewhere like Tana in Madagascar and get another skilled — because they’ve been doing it now for 20 years — garmenting employee for $60 or $65 to make the new order that you just got. And if the order doesn’t come through, you can sack them. You see what I’m saying? There’s a point about the cost of robotics.
COWEN: But think of automation more generally — it’s not that expensive. Most countries are de-industrializing. Even South Africa has been de-industrializing for a while, and China maybe has peaked out at industrialization, measured in terms of employment. It’s hard to trust their numbers. But maybe just everywhere is going to deindustrialize, and that will be very bad for Africa.
STUDWELL: I don’t think so. I think South Africa is deindustrializing because the ANC has followed a hyper-liberal approach to economic policy. I don’t think the ANC has ever really understood economic policy, frankly, so South Africa is an outlier in that respect. There are many other states in Africa, whether Nigeria or Ethiopia, which understand they’ve got to have a manufacturing future and intend to pursue one.
Then, as I was saying, the other point is, what people miss is the flexibility with robotics and AI. There’s very limited flexibility with robotic and automated production. When demand goes up, you can’t just stick in more robots, but when demand goes up in a people-operated factory, where the cost of labor is low, you can stick in more people and produce more.
Just one example: during COVID, when everybody was having home deliveries of supermarket goods, the price of a UK firm called Ocado, which runs a supermarket, but was also developing the software and consulting around building blind warehouses went up through the roof, but now it’s down through the floor.
And only last week, Kroger supermarket in the US said, “We’re closing five of these super-modern blind warehouses.” And the reason, fundamentally, is because they lack the flexibility that human labor brings to the job. So, I’m not saying that robots, automation, and AI are not important. They are important. What I am saying is that they are not going to derail a manufacturing future for a number of African countries that aggressively pursue it.
COWEN: But there’re a lot of developing nations around the world — you could look at India, you could look at Pakistan, even Thailand — where manufacturing has not taken off the way one might have wanted. There’re just major forces operating against it. And in the US, manufacturing employment was once 37 percent of the workforce; now it’s 7 percent to 8 percent.
It just seems like it’s swimming upstream for Africa — which again, has quite expensive energy — to think it will do that well. And again, South Africa had very good technology, pretty high state capacity. I don’t see the alternate world state where a wiser ANC would have made that work.
STUDWELL: Well, oddly enough, before the end of Apartheid, the manufacturing performance of South Africa was really not bad at all, with classic industrial policy, quite high levels of protection, and so forth. I think that demand for manufactured goods will continue to be high around the world, and the labor cost will continue to be a prime determinant of where producers go for low value-added goods. So, I think that the opportunity is there for African countries.
COWEN: But say there’re transportation costs internally, energy costs, political order uncertainty. Where’s the place where people really want to put all these manufacturing firms?
Interesting throughout, recommended.
The post My excellent Conversation with Joe Studwell appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Although the aurora borealis, or northern lights, is most often observed in March and September, it can appear at other times of the year if conditions are right. For instance, in February 2026, a minor geomagnetic storm produced a striking display of light swirling across northern skies.
The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired these images in the early morning hours of February 16. The VIIRS day-night band detects nighttime light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, reflected moonlight, and auroras. While these satellite data are displayed in grayscale, auroras appear in various colors to observers on the ground, from green (the most common) to purple to red.
The first image (top) shows ribbons of light that shimmered over the Denmark Strait and Iceland at 04:45 Universal Time (4:45 a.m. local time in Reykjavík). The second image shows the view farther west, where the lights danced above the Canadian provinces of Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador at about 06:30 Universal Time (1:30 a.m. local time in Montreal).
According to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, a minor geomagnetic storm was in progress during this period. Classified as a G1—the lowest level on a scale that goes up to G5—such storms typically make the aurora visible at high latitudes. G1 storms can also cause slight disruptions, including weak fluctuations in power grids and minor impacts on satellite operations.
Later that day, conditions intensified to a G2 storm, likely associated with a coronal hole and a high-speed stream of solar wind. G2 storms are considered moderate in strength and can occasionally push auroral displays as far south as New York and Idaho.
About a week earlier, on February 10, a NASA rocket mission launched from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska, to study the electrical environment of an aurora. The GNEISS (Geophysical Non-Equilibrium Ionospheric System Science) mission’s two sounding rockets gathered data that will help scientists create a 3D reconstruction of the electrical currents flowing from the northern lights. Combined with observations from the ground and space, this information can help researchers better understand the system that drives space weather near Earth.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The glow of city lights, the aurora, and a rising Moon illuminate the night along the northwest coast of North…
The Large Magellanic Cloud—one of our closest neighboring galaxies—is a hotbed of star formation that is visible to both astronauts…
An astronaut captured a moonrise—and much more—in a series of photos taken from the International Space Station.
The post Northern Glow Spans Iceland and Canada appeared first on NASA Science.
Spec-driven or not spec-driven is not the question. The first question is, “What game are we playing?” Here’s the game I’m playing when I develop software, with or without the genie. I call it The Compounding Game:
The first thing we finish will earn the resources for the next thing which will earn the resources for the next.
Here’s The Finish Line Game, a different software development game:
We want software that does X. Once we’ve reached X we’re done. It happens. I have some data. I need it munged. I write a munging script. Finito. I’ll never use that script again.
The hidden assumption behind this style of spec-driven development is that we’re playing The Finish Line Game. Get the spec right. Get the desired software. Done. No need to consider the future because there won’t be one.
If you’re playing The Finish Line Game, you can still fail. Design can be so bad you don’t cross the finish line. Tests can be so bad that you don’t notice that you haven’t crossed the finish line. The “finish line” itself can shift without you noticing.
In the Tidy First world, we illustrate by contrasting “futures” & “features”. Futures are what all you can implement next. The genie is no good at managing futures. If you’re playing The Finish Line Game, you’re betting that features will cross the finish line before futures run out.
This is “better agent.md file” territory. If we leave the genie autonomous, can we nudge its work to be good enough not to fail? Sometimes yes, sometimes no (in my experience). And the genie keeps getting better. But it’s still the same Finish Line Game.
Just as football tactics won’t work on a baseball field, spec-driven development doesn’t work if you’re playing The Compounding Game. A better spec will never get you from dollar sign N to dollar sign N+1 forever. A better agent file won’t extend the lifespan of the system long enough to get from N to N+1. At some point the complexity will exceed the genie’s capacity & it’s game over with lots of dollar signs left to play for.
Instead, playing The Compounding Game requires as much investment in futures as in features. The two alternate. (Hence the “tidy first” connection—tidying is part of investing in the future.)
We’ll talk more about those vertical shifts more as we go along:
What senior engineers do to shift vertically
What junior engineers do to shift vertically
What tools to write
What practices to apply
How to get the genie to help
This is the second in a two-part episode. The first part ended on a ✨cliffhanger!!!✨ — so if you missed the first episode, catch up here:
I was merrily cranking away what I believed to be my last chapter when I asked the internet — YOU guys — for help the first time. “Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use some help,” went up on September 19th, 2025.
The response was overwhelming. I heard from software engineers, SREs, observability leads, CTOs, VPs, distinguished engineers, consultants, even the odd CISO. All these emails and responses and lengthy threads kept me busy for a while, but eventually I had to get back to writing. That’s when I discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that I couldn’t seem to write anymore.
“Well,” I reasoned, “maybe I’ll just ask the internet for EVEN MORE advice" — and out popped Buffy-themed post number two, on October 13th.
Keep in mind, I thought I would be done by then. November was my stretch deadline, my just in case, I better leave myself some breathing room kind of deadline.
As November 1st came and went, my frustration began spiraling out into blind panic. What the hell is going on and why can I not finish this???
A week before Thanksgiving, I was up late tinkering with Claude. I imported all the emails and advice I had gotten from y’all, and started sorting into themes and picking out key quotes, and that is when it finally hit me: I had written the wrong thing.
No, this deserves a bigger font.
I wrote the wrong thing, for the wrong people, and none of it was going to move the needle in any meaningful way.
The chapters I had written were full of practical advice for observability engineering teams and platform engineering teams, wrestling with implementation challenges like instrumentation and cost overflows. Practical stuff.
My inbox, on the other hand, was overflowing with stories like these:
“Many times [competitive research] is faked. One person has their favorite option and then they do just enough ‘competitive analysis’ to convince the sourcing folks that due diligence was done or to nullify the CIO/CTO/whoever is accepting this on to their budget”
“We [the observability team] spent six months exhaustively trialing three different solutions before we made a decision. The CEO of one of the losing vendors called our CEO, and he overruled our decision without even telling us.” (Does your CEO know anything at all about engineering??) “No.”
“Our SRE teams have vetoed any attempt to modernize our tool stack. ($Vendor) is part of their identity, and since they would have to help roll out and support any changes, we are stuck living in 2015 apparently forever.” (What does management have to say?) “It’s been twenty years since they touched a line of code.”
“We’re weird in that most of the company hates technology and really hates that we have to pay for it since they don’t understand the value it brings to the company. This is intentional ignorance, we make the value props continually and well, we just haven’t succeeded yet….We’re a little obsessed with trying to get champagne quality at Boone’s prices.”
“When it comes to dealing with salespeople and the enterprise sales process, the best tip for engineers is to not anthropomorphize sales professionals who are driven by commission. The best ones are like robot lawn mowers dressed in furry unicorn costumes. They may seem cute and nice but they do not care about anything besides closing the next deal….All of the best SaaS companies are full of these friendly fake unicorn zombies who suck cash instead of blood.”
Nearly all of the emails I got were either describing a terminally fucked up buying process from the top down, or the long term consequences of those fucked up decisions.
In other words: I was writing tactical advice for teams who were surviving in a strategic vacuum.
So I threw the whole thing out, and started over from scratch. 😭
As Tolstoy once wrote, “Happy teams are all alike; every fucked up team is fucked up in its own precious way.”
There is an infinity of ways to screw something up. But there is one pattern I see a critical mass of engineering orgs falling into right now, even orgs that are generally quite solid. That is when there is no shared alignment or even shared vocabulary between engineering and other stakeholders directors, VPs and SVPs, CTO, CIO, principal and distinguished engineers — on some pretty clutch questions. Such as:
“What is observability?”
“Who needs it?”
“What problem are we trying to solve?”
And my favorite: “Is observability still relevant in a post-AI era? Can’t agents do that stuff now?”
Even some generally excellent CTOs1 have been heard saying things like, “yeah, observability is definitely very important, but all our top priorities are related to AI right now.”
Which gets causality exactly backwards. Because your ability to get any returns on your investments into AI will be limited by how swiftly you can validate your changes and learn from them. Another word for this is “OBSERVABILITY”.
Enough ranting. Want a peek? I’ll share the new table of contents, and a sentence or two about a couple of my own favorite chapters.
The new outline is organized to speak to technical decision-makers, starting at the top and loosely descending. What do CTOs need to know? What do VPs and distinguished engineers need to know? and so on. We start off abstract, and become more concrete.
Since every technical term (e.g. high cardinality, high dimensionality, etc) has become overloaded and undifferentiated by too much sales and marketing, we mostly avoid it. Instead, we use the language of systems and feedback loops.
Again, we are trying to help your most senior engineers and execs develop a shared understanding of “What problem are we solving?” and “What is our goal? Technical terms can actually detract and distract from that shared understanding.
An Open Letter to CTOs: Why Organizational Learning Speed is Now Your Biggest Constraint. Organizations used to be limited by the speed of delivery; now they are limited by how swiftly they can validate and understand what they delivered.
Systems Thinking for Software Delivery. Observability is the signal that connects the dots to make a feedback loop; no observability, no loop. What happens to amplifying or balancing loops when that signal is lossy, laggy, or missing?
The Observability Landscape Through a Systems Lens. What feedback loops do developers need, and what feedback loops does ops need? How do these map to the tools on the market?
The Business Case for Observability. Is your observability a cost center or an investment? How should you quantify your RoI?
Diagnosing Your Observability Investment
The Organizational Shift
Build vs Buy (vs Open Source)
The Art and Science of Vendor Partnerships. Internal transformations run on trust and credibility; vendor partnerships run on trust and reciprocity. We’ll talk about both of these, as well as how to run a strong POC.
Instrumentation for Observability Teams
Where to Go From Here
Hey, I have a lot of empathy right now for leaders and execs who feel like they’re behind on everything. I feel it too. Anyone who doesn’t is lying to themselves (or their name is Simon Willison).
But the role observability plays in complex sociotechnical systems is one of those foundational concepts you need to understand. You’re not gonna get this right by accident. You’re not going to win by doing the same thing you were doing five years ago. And if you screw up your observability, you screw up everything downstream of it too.
To those of you who do understand this, and are working hard to drive change in your organizations: I see you. It is hard, often thankless work, but it is work worth doing. If I can ever be of help: reach out.
The last few chapters are heading into tech review on Friday, February 20th. Finally. The last 3.5 months have been some of the most panicky and stressful of my life. I….just typed several paragraphs about how terrible this has been, and deleted them, because you do not need to listen to me whine. ☺️
Like I said, I have never felt especially proud of the first edition. I am not UN proud, it’s just…eh. I feel differently this time around. I think—I hope—it can be helpful to a lot of different people who are wrestling with adapting to our new AI-native reality, from a lot of different angles.2
I am incredibly grateful to my co-authors, collaborators, and our editor, Rita Fernando, without whom I never would have made it through.
But there’s one more group that deserves some credit, and it’s…you guys. I asked for help, and help I got. So many people wrote me such long, thought-provoking emails full of stories, advice and hard-earned wisdom. The better the email, the more I peppered you with followup questions, which is a great way to punish a good deed.
I am a tiny bit torn on whether to say “thank you” or “fuck you”, because my life would have been much nicer if I had stuck to the plan and wrapped in October.
But the following list of people were especially instrumental in forcing me to rethink my approach. It made the book much stronger, so if you catch one of them in the wild, please buy them a stiff drink. (Or buy yourself one, and throw it in their face with my sincere compliments.)
Abraham Ingersoll, the aforementioned “odd CISO”, who would be quoted in the book had his advice not been so consistently unprintable by the standards of respectable publications
Benjamin Mann of Delivery Hero, who I would work for in a heartbeat, and not just for the way he wields “NOPE” as a term of art
Marty Lindsay, who has spent more time explaining POCs and tech evals to me than anyone should have to. (If you need an o11y consultant, Marty should be your very first stop).
Sam Dwyer, whose stories seeded my original plan to write a set of chapters for observability engineering teams. (I hope the replacement plan is useful too!)
Many others sent me terrific advice, and endured multiple rounds of questions and more questions and clarifications on said questions. A few of them:
Matthew Sanabria, Chris Cooney, Glen Mailer, Austin Culbertson, John Scancella, John Doran, Bryan Finster, Hazel Weakly, Chris Ziehr, Thomas Owens, Mike Lee, Jay Gengelbach, Will Hegedus, Natasha Litt, Alonso Suarez, Jason McMunn, Evgeny Rubtsov, George Chamales, Ken Finnegan, Cliff Snyder, Robyn Hirano, Rita Canavarro, Matt Schouten, Shalini Samudri Ananda Rao (Sam).
I am definitely forgetting some names; I will try to update the list as I remember them.
But seriously: thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I loved hearing your stories, your complaints, your arguments about how the world should improve. Your DNA is in this book; I hope it does you justice.
~charity
💜💙💚💛🧡❤️💖
It’s ironic (and makes me uncomfortably self-conscious), but some of the worst top-down decision-making processes I have ever seen have come from companies where CEO and CTO are both former engineers. The confidence they have in their own technical acumen may be not wholly unfounded, but it is often ten or more years out of date. We gotta update those priors, my friends. Stay humble.
On the other hand, as my co-founder, Christine Yen, informed me last week: “Nobody reads books anymore.”
Jesse Jackson died two days ago, and—of course—the living United States presidents issued statements.
Bill Clinton insisted he and his wife had been close with Jackson for more than five decades, and were “deeply saddened” by the loss. Barack Obama recalled Jackson as “a true giant.” “He was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect,” he said, and added that he and Mrs. Obama would always “be grateful for Jesse’s lifetime of service, and the friendship our families share.”
And Donald Trump called him called a “good man” and a “force of nature.”
Um. At least that’s how, oh, 70 percent of the media reported it.
For example …
This, from the CBS News website:
And this, from The Hill:
Here’s USA Today’s headline:
And, of course, Fox News:
Now, as a veteran journalist, I sorta get it. You have an article, you submit it, the person on the news desk scans it over and write the headline. So, in this case, an iconic leader dies, the sitting president says something nice—HEADLINE!
But …
Here is the full Donald Trump statement, RE: Jackson and his death …
And, to be kind, THIS IS FUCKING BONKERS AND UNHINGED. To abbreviate: A revered Civil Rights leader’s life ends. Trump sprinkles in some warm thoughts with a crazy-ass, look-at-me-and-how-great-I-am screed intended to prove a racist can’t possibly be racist. It’s long and weird and irrationally capitalized and overflowing with bullshit. It cites, by full name (intentionally) the United States’ first Black president, who (cough) Trump accused of being foreign-born and Muslim and anti-American.
The story isn’t that Trump said some nice words.
The story is that, yet again, Trump treated an important person’s death as his own masturbatory ode to self.
Let’s stop doing this creep favors.
Please.
Trump’s White House website welcomes visitors with a pop-up that reads: “WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE!” But on this heavy news day a year into Trump’s second term, it is increasingly clear that as his regime focuses on committing the United States to white Christian nationalism, the country is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, and its own economy is weakening.
At the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s endorsement of white Christian nationalism does not appear to have swayed European countries to abandon their defense of democracy and join the U.S.’s slide toward authoritarianism. Instead, as retired lieutenant general and former commander of U.S. Army Europe Mark Hertling wrote, it squandered the strategic advantage its partnership with Europe has given the U.S.
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that the word in Munich was that “Europe needs to emancipate itself from the U.S. as fast as possible.” In Germany, Der Spiegel reports plans to bring Ukrainian veterans to teach German armed forces drone use and counter-drone practices the Ukrainians are perfecting in their war against Russian occupation. Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney is working to reduce Canada’s defense dependence on the U.S., ramping up domestic defense production.
Carney has advanced a foreign policy that centers “middle powers” and operates without the U.S. That global reorientation has profound consequences for the U.S. economy, as well. Canada is leading discussions between the European Union and a 12-nation Indo-Pacific bloc to form one of the globe’s largest economic alliances. A new agreement would enable the countries to share supply chains and to share a low-tariff system. Canada also announced it is renewing its partnership with China. As of this week, Canadians can travel to China without a visa.
Today France’s president Emmanuel Macron and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi upgraded Indian-French relations to a “Special Strategic Partnership” during a three-day visit of Macron to Mumbai. They have promised to increase cooperation between the two countries in defense, trade, and critical materials.
Trump insisted that abandoning the free trade principles under which the U.S. economy had boomed since World War II would enable the U.S. to leverage its extraordinary economic might through tariffs, but it appears, as economist Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute wrote today for Bloomberg, that the rest of the world is simply moving on without the U.S.
While Trump boasts about the U.S. stock market, which is indeed up, U.S. markets have underperformed markets in other countries. Today, Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that the S&P 500, which measures 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., is off to its worst year of performance since 1995 when compared to the All Country World Index (ACWI), an index that measures global stocks.
In May 2023 the Florida legislature passed a law requiring employers with 25 or more employees to confirm that their workers are in the U.S. legally. The new law prompted foreign farmworkers and construction workers to leave the state. Now, the Wall Street Journal reported in a February 6 editorial, employers “are struggling to find workers they can employ legally.”
The newspaper continued: “There’s little evidence that undocumented migrants are taking jobs from Americans. The reality is that employers can’t find enough Americans willing to work in the fields or hang drywall, even at attractive wages. Farm hands in Florida who work year-round earn roughly $47,000, which is more than what some young college graduates earn.” “The lesson for President Trump is that businesses can’t grow if government takes away their workers,” the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board concluded.
Today Florida attorney general James Uthmeier reacted to the Wall Street Journal editorial, explaining on Fox Business that the Republican Party expects to replace undocumented workers with young Americans: “We need to focus on our state college program, our trade schools, getting people into the workforce even earlier. We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly. So I think there’s a lot more we can do with apprenticeships, rolling out, beefing up our workforce, and trying to address the demand that is undoubtedly here in the state.”
Steve Kopack of NBC News reported on February 11 that while the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, the last year of former president Joe Biden’s administration, it added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. That makes 2025 the worst year for hiring since 2003, aside from the worst year of the coronavirus pandemic. Manufacturing lost 108,000 jobs in 2025.
Peter Grant of the Wall Street Journal reported today that banks that have loaned money to finance the purchase of commercial real estate are requiring borrowers to pay back tens of billions of dollars as the delinquency rate for such loans has climbed to a high not seen since just after the 2008 financial crisis. About $100 billion in commercial real estate loans that have been packaged into securities will come due this year and probably won’t repay when they should. More than half of the loans are likely headed for foreclosure or liquidation.
Trump vowed that he would cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” out of the country’s government programs, but cuts to social programs have been overwhelmed by spending on federal arrest, detention, and deportation programs, as well as Trump’s expansion of military strikes and threats against other countries. In his first year back in office, Trump launched at least 658 air and drone strikes against Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
Just today, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck three boats in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean yesterday and killed 11 people it claims were smuggling drugs, bringing the total of such strikes to more than 40 and the number of dead to more than 130. Now Trump is moving American forces toward Iran, threatening to target the regime there.
The administration is simply tacking the cost of these military adventures onto government expenditures, apparently still maintaining that the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations Republicans extended in their July “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and tariffs will address the growing deficit and national debt by increasing economic growth.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week projected that the deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, will be $1.85 trillion. Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal notes that for every dollar the U.S. collects this year, it will spend $1.33. The CBO explained that the Republican tax cuts will increase budget deficits by $4.7 trillion through 2035.
If the American people have suffered from Trump’s reign, the Trump family continues to cash in. Today Trump’s chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Michael Selig, announced he will try to block states from regulating prediction markets, saying they “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes.”
Republicans insist that prediction markets are more like stock trading than like betting, but a group of over 20 Democratic senators warned last week in a letter to Selig that prediction market platforms, where hundreds of millions of dollars are wagered every week, “are offering contracts that mirror sportsbook wagers and, in some cases, contracts tied to war and armed conflict.” They added that the platforms “evade state and tribal consumer protections, generate no public revenue, and undermine sovereign regulatory regimes,” and urged Selig to support regulations Congress has already put into law.
Prediction markets also cover the actions of President Trump, whose son Don Jr. is both an advisor to and an investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshi. Polymarket and Kalshi are the two biggest prediction markets, and both are less regulated than betting sites. The Trump family has announced it is starting its own “Truth Predict.”
David Uberti of the Wall Street Journal reported that Eric Trump is investing heavily in drones, particularly in Israeli drone maker Xtend, which has a $1.5 billion deal to merge with a small Florida construction company to take the company public. The Defense Department has invited Xtend to be part of its drone expansion program.
And yet it is clear the administration fears the American people. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a statewide program that specializes in police shootings, said yesterday that it has received formal notice that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will not allow it any “access to information or evidence that it has collected” related to the shooting death of Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. The BCA says it will continue to investigate and to pursue legal avenues to get access to the FBI files.
Fury at ICE continues to mount, with voices from inside the government complaining about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Jonathan Allen, and Julia Ainsley of NBC News reported today on her alienation of senior officials at the Coast Guard as she has shifted their primary mission of search and rescue to flying deportation flights. Noem’s abrupt removal of Coast Guard commandant Linda Fagan only to move into her vacated housing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling herself also rankled, along with Noem’s lavish use of expensive Coast Guard planes.
Daniel Lippman and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that Noem’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, is resigning.
Marissa Payne of the Des Moines Register reported today that in Iowa, Republican state lawmakers are working to rein in the power of the state governor before the 2026 elections, a sure sign that they are worried that a Democrat is going to win the election.
That fear appears to be part of a larger concern that the American people have turned against the Republicans more generally. Last night, late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert told viewers he had been unable to air an interview he did with a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, James Talarico. “I was told…that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert said. “And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “[T]here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Although Talarico is locked in a tight primary battle with Representative Jasmine Crockett, his message offers a powerful off-ramp for evangelicals uncomfortable with the administration, especially its cover-up of the Epstein files. Without evangelical support, MAGA Republicans cannot win elections.
Talarico has the administration nervous enough that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation of the morning talk show The View after Talarico appeared on the show earlier this month. Lawyer Adam Bonin explained that Carr changed the FCC’s enforcement of the Equal Time Rule (which is not the Fairness Doctrine). It says that when broadcast networks (not cable) give air time to someone running for office, they have to give the same time to any other candidate for that office. The obvious exception is when a candidate does something newsworthy outside the race, in which case a network can interview that person without interviewing everyone else.
For 20 years, that rule has applied to talk shows, but Carr announced last month that if a non-news talk show seems to be “motivated by partisan purposes,” then it will not be exempt. For Colbert’s show, it would have meant that after interviewing Talarico, the network would have had to give equal time to all other Democrats and Republicans running for the Senate seat. CBS could have challenged the rule but chose not to.
Why is the administration worried about Talarico in a state Trump won in 2024 by 14%? “I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said. “Across the state there is a backlash growing to the extremism and the corruption in our politics…. It’s a people-powered movement to take back our state and take back our country.”
As of 10:00 tonight, Colbert’s 15-minute interview with Talarico has been viewed on YouTube 3.8 million times. Forbes says it is Colbert’s most watched interview in months.
—
Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/florida-jobs-employment-immigration-e-verify-ron-desantis-5a9abb89
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/for-europe-its-not-back-to-business-as-usual/686023/
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-and-indo-pacific-blocs-eye-major-new-trade-pact/
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/january-jobs-revisions-trump-rcna258398
https://www.kcra.com/article/manufacturing-jobs-us-tariffs/70304916
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/20/how-a-year-of-trump-reshaped-the-world-in-seven-charts
https://www.cfr.org/articles/guide-trumps-second-term-military-strikes-and-actions
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-issues-warning-iran-high-stakes-nuclear-talks-11532833
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/u-s-budget-hole-set-to-deepen-by-trillions-b5dfe11b
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/17/canada-defense-reduce-us-dependency-00784190
https://qz.com/trump-admin-cftc-state-regulation-crackdown
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-prediction-markets.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/prediction-markets-polymarket-kalshi-online-gambling
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/eric-trump-invest-xtend-drone-company-5d8e61f4
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5728540-equal-time-rule-fcc-the-view/
YouTube:
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mf2mlxj2wq2d
adambonin.bsky.social/post/3mf2oqubn4c2c
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mf2nw2cmks2o
carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3mf2r5lugls2y
anneapplebaum.bsky.social/post/3mf2oll77d224
Up, leaving my wife sick as last night in bed. I to my office all the morning, casting up with Captain Cocke their accounts of 500 tons of hemp brought from Riga, and bought by him and partners upon account, wherein are many things worth my knowledge. So at noon to dinner, taking Mr. Hater with me because of losing them, and in the afternoon he and I alone at the office, finishing our account of the extra charge of the Navy, not properly belonging to the Navy, since the King’s coming in to Christmas last; and all extra things being abated, I find that the true charge of the Navy to that time hath been after the rate of 374,743l. a-year. I made an end by eleven o’clock at night, and so home to bed almost weary.
This day the Parliament met again, after their long prorogation; but I know not any thing what they have done, being within doors all day.
Satellite imagery-to-report timelines would be reduced from hours to minutes
The post Vantor partners with Google AI to automate intelligence reports for government agencies appeared first on SpaceNews.
A new SpaceX initiative to provide space traffic coordination services has attracted attention and praise in part because of the conditions it places on users of it.
The post SpaceX unveils space traffic management system appeared first on SpaceNews.
A long-awaited cap on liability for U.K. launch operators came into force Feb. 18, aiming to make the country’s fledgling rocket sector more competitive as it struggles to get off the ground.
The post UK caps launch liability in timely boost for nascent domestic market appeared first on SpaceNews.
Chinese commercial launch firm Landspace is targeting Q2 for a second orbital launch and booster recovery attempt and aiming for a reuse test in Q4.
The post Landspace targets Q2 for next Zhuque-3 orbital launch and recovery attempt appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – After attracting cubesat customers, Belgium-based Simera Sense is developing higher-resolution optical payloads for larger satellites. To date, Simera Sense customers have sent more than 50 xScape100 and xScape200 cameras into orbit. Most have flown on cubesats ranging in size from 6u to 16u. For larger satellites, Simera Sense is developing standardized optical payloads […]
The post Simera Sense to offer larger cameras and enhanced autonomy appeared first on SpaceNews.
The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree:
In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure) were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the original discovery of all twelve, each found and responsibly disclosed to the OpenSSL team during the fall and winter of 2025. Of those, 10 were assigned CVE-2025 identifiers and 2 received CVE-2026 identifiers. Adding the 10 to the three we already found in the Fall 2025 release, AISLE is credited for surfacing 13 of 14 OpenSSL CVEs assigned in 2025, and 15 total across both releases. This is a historically unusual concentration for any single research team, let alone an AI-driven one.
These weren’t trivial findings either. They included CVE-2025-15467, a stack buffer overflow in CMS message parsing that’s potentially remotely exploitable without valid key material, and exploits for which have been quickly developed online. OpenSSL rated it HIGH severity; NIST‘s CVSS v3 score is 9.8 out of 10 (CRITICAL, an extremely rare severity rating for such projects). Three of the bugs had been present since 1998-2000, for over a quarter century having been missed by intense machine and human effort alike. One predated OpenSSL itself, inherited from Eric Young’s original SSLeay implementation in the 1990s. All of this in a codebase that has been fuzzed for millions of CPU-hours and audited extensively for over two decades by teams including Google’s.
In five of the twelve cases, our AI system directly proposed the patches that were accepted into the official release.
AI vulnerability finding is changing cybersecurity, faster than expected. This capability will be used by both offense and defense.
More.
The Defense Innovation Unit plans to select companies to field and operate spacecraft before transferring them to government control within three years
The post Pentagon seeks commercially built GEO spy satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
With the final GPS III satellite scheduled to launch in March, the United States is completing the most significant upgrade to its positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) infrastructure in more than a decade. GPS III delivers improved accuracy, stronger signals and enhanced anti-jam capabilities for military users. By any technical measure, it is a better […]
The post Why GPS III, and what comes after it, still falls short in modern war appeared first on SpaceNews.
And by D.C., I do not mean Wor-Shing-Tun, but the colonial territory of the District of Columbia.
Because D.C. is a colonial territory and not a sovereign state, Congress has the ability to alter or reject D.C. legislation, and Congressional Republicans did so last week, by overturning D.C.’s attempt to decouple our taxes from federal taxes:
The move also would have a major impact on D.C.’s budget, delaying as much as $400 million in anticipated tax revenue for D.C. Additionally, D.C. would have to cut about $600 million from the city’s budget over the next four years, potentially affecting programs related to child care and low-income tax credits.
When Congress passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislation affected local tax laws. Several states and D.C. decoupled, choosing not to implement some of those provisions.
But Republicans moved legislation to block D.C. from doing that. Democrats have pushed back…
In a letter to Congress, D.C. Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee warned the District “would need to suspend the current filing season” to update tax forms and guidance, a process that would take months.
Bowser and Mendelson sent a letter explaining, “Disapproval at this stage would create huge administrative challenges, require taxpayers to re-file their taxes, render existing guidance and forms obsolete, and necessitate rapid mid-year changes to tax administration systems. It is unclear how quickly commercial tax preparation software could be updated to accommodate such changes, and District residents and businesses would likely experience confusion, as well as delays.”
Some more detail here (boldface mine):
Late last year, the council passed a law decoupling the city’s tax code from 13 provisions of the federal tax code that were changed by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the massive tax-cut package approved by Congress. The move stopped some of the tax cuts — those exempting some tips and overtime work from taxation — from applying under the local tax code, which officials said would have cost an estimated $600 million in lost revenue over four years.
Instead, the council repurposed some of that revenue to expand the city’s match for the Earned-Income Tax Credit and to create a new Child Tax Credit, a decision that advocates say could benefit moderate- and low-income residents and families in the city.
The council’s decision to decouple wasn’t an outlier; at least a dozen states have similarly done so, but only in D.C. can Congress overrule such decisions. (Virginia and Maryland are among the states that chose to decouple.)
The problem is Republicans might have violated federal law (shocking!):
Earlier in the day, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson contested whether or not Congress had acted in time, posting a document on the council’s website indicating that the 30-day period that Congress had to repeal the bill had actually ended on Wednesday night — before the Senate voted. (Every bill passed by the council heads to Congress for a 30-day review, or 60 days if it involves changes to the city’s criminal code.)
According to Mendelson’s office, the bill was sent to Congress on December 30, thus kicking off the 30-day review period — which would have ended on February 11. But the bill didn’t appear in the official congressional record until January 7, when some congressional officials say the actual 30-day countdown begins.
While this is being phrased as a clash between Congressional Republicans and the D.C. territorial government, there’s another party that potentially can be involved: the colonial subjects of D.C. It remains to be seen if any private citizens, such as those who would have received additional EITC funds but now will not, would be willing to sue the federal government for violating the law. In other words, it doesn’t matter what the Council, Congress, or the mayor want, private citizens get a say too, making this even more of a clusterfuck.
D.C. statehood now (and that does not happen, unless Democratic senators, when Democrats regain power, abolish the filibuster).
Links for you. Science:
Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm Halts Sale of Raw Milk Due to Bacteria Concerns
NIH grant disruptions slow down breast cancer research
Finding next-generation antibiotics for the most resistant infections
CDC Deputy Director Unclear On How It’s *His* Job To Prevent Contagious Diseases Like Measles
NIH Director Declines to Fully Rule Out Vaccine-Autism Link During Senate Hearing
HHS Is Making an AI Tool to Create Hypotheses About Vaccine Injury Claims (LLMs + VAERS: what could possibly go wrong?)
Other:
None More Wonderful Than Man: Art, Artists, and MAGA’s Hollow View of Humanity
It’s so much bigger than Epstein
The Minnesota Lawyer Backlog Arises from ICE Kidnappings
Kennedy Center teaches MAGA a tough lesson
But In This Rural Ohio Congressional District, He’s Not Popular At All
“You’re Not Going to Investigate a Federal Officer”
Have You Tried Not Being The World’s Worst Human (lol)
Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them. One of the most prestigious universities in the US offers perks to those who say they have ADHD, night terrors, even gluten intolerance. You’d be stupid not to game the system
Democrats Need to Get Serious About Stopping Trump From Rigging the Midterms
‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers
ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
‘Do You Speak Billionaire?’ and Other Stories From the Fall of the Washington Post
This SpaceX Situation: Not Good!
Zohran Mamdani: Why I’m Endorsing Kathy Hochul
The Washington Post Is No Longer Useful to Jeff Bezos
Republicans Are All In on Boosting Fraud Allegations in California
Trump and Musk Knew Exactly Who Jeffrey Epstein Was
Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Mingled With Silicon Valley Start-Ups
Sherrill Urges New Jersey Residents to Record ICE Action on Their Phones
ICE dragged me from my car after I told agents I’m autistic. I thought, ‘I just have to make it through this alive’
The DOJ Redacted a Photo of the Mona Lisa in the Epstein Files
AI controls are coming to Firefox
Liam Ramos Was Just One of Hundreds of Children at This Detention Center. Release Them All.
The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
How D.C. allowed ‘completely inappropriate’ spending by anti-violence group
Trump’s latest US attorney pick is another real winner
A Shocking Sex Scandal Rocks the Trad Right
Mamdani names jails reformer Stanley Richards to steer chaotic Rikers complex
Antifa used to unmask neo-Nazis, now it’s exposing ICE: ‘Predators don’t get anonymity’
Federal Agents Left Behind “Death Cards” After Capturing Immigrants
Germany’s population is projected to shrink by nearly 5 per cent within 25 years — a significantly steeper decline than previously forecast, according to an Ifo study.
The German economic think-tank on Tuesday revised its forecast for a 1 per cent population decline by 2050 to nearly 5 per cent — a drop that would leave Germany with its smallest population since 1990. The revision is based on updated figures from the country’s statistical office.
“Demographic change will have significant effects on all areas of the economy and society,” Ifo economist Joachim Ragnitz warned in the study.
Here is more from the FT.
The post Germany projection of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I often find the man pages hard to navigate to get the information I want.
Lately I’ve wondering – could the man page itself have an amazing cheat sheet in it? What might make a man page easier to use? I’m still very early in thinking about this but I wanted to write down some quick notes.
I asked some people on Mastodon for their favourite man pages, and here are some examples of interesting things I saw on those man pages.
If you’ve read a lot of man pages you’ve probably seen something like this in
the SYNOPSIS: once you’re listing almost the entire alphabet, it’s hard
Market Design
ls [-@ABCFGHILOPRSTUWabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxy1%,]
grep [-abcdDEFGHhIiJLlMmnOopqRSsUVvwXxZz]
The rsync man page has a solution I’ve never seen before: it keeps its SYNOPSIS very terse, like this:
Local:
rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [DEST]
and then has an “OPTIONS SUMMARY” section with a 1-line summary of each option, like this:
--verbose, -v increase verbosity
--info=FLAGS fine-grained informational verbosity
--debug=FLAGS fine-grained debug verbosity
--stderr=e|a|c change stderr output mode (default: errors)
--quiet, -q suppress non-error messages
--no-motd suppress daemon-mode MOTD
Then later there’s the usual OPTIONS section with a full description of each option.
The strace man page organizes its options by category (like “General”, “Startup”, “Tracing”, and “Filtering”, “Output Format”) instead of alphabetically.
As an experiment I tried to take the grep man page and make an
“OPTIONS SUMMARY” section grouped by category, you can see the results
here. I’m not
sure what I think of the results but it was a fun exercise. When I was writing
that I was thinking about how I can never remember the name of the -l grep
option. It always takes me what feels like forever to find it in the man page
and I was trying to think of what structure would make it easier for me to find.
Maybe categories?
A couple of people pointed me to the suite of Perl man pages (perlfunc, perlre, etc), and one thing I
noticed was man perlcheat, which has
cheat sheet sections like this:
SYNTAX
foreach (LIST) { } for (a;b;c) { }
while (e) { } until (e) { }
if (e) { } elsif (e) { } else { }
unless (e) { } elsif (e) { } else { }
given (e) { when (e) {} default {} }
I think this is so cool and it makes me wonder if there are other ways to write condensed ASCII 80-character-wide cheat sheets for use in man pages.
A common comment was something to the effect of “I like any man page that has examples”. Someone mentioned the OpenBSD man pages, and the openbsd tail man page has examples of the exact 2 ways I use tail at the end.
I think I’ve most often seen the EXAMPLES section at the end of the man page, but some man pages (like the rsync man page from earlier) start with the examples. When I was working on the git-add and git rebase man pages I put a short example at the beginning.
This isn’t a property of the man page itself, but one issue with man pages in the terminal is it’s hard to know what sections the man page has.
When working on the Git man pages, one thing Marie and I did was to add a table of contents to the sidebar of the HTML versions of the man pages hosted on the Git site.
I’d also like to add more hyperlinks to the HTML versions of the Git man pages at some point, so that you can click on “INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS” to get to that section. It’s very easy to add links like this in the Git project since Git’s man pages are generated with AsciiDoc.
I think adding a table of contents and adding internal hyperlinks is kind of a nice middle ground where we can make some improvements to the man page format (in the HTML version of the man page at least) without maintaining a totally different form of documentation. Though for this to work you do need to set up a toolchain like Git’s AsciiDoc system.
It would be amazing if there were some kind of universal system to make it easy
to look up a specific option in a man page (“what does -a do?”).
The best trick I know is use the man pager to search for something like ^ *-a
but I never remember to do it and instead just end up going through
every instance of -a in the man page until I find what I’m looking for.
The curl man page has examples for every option, and there’s also a table of contents on the HTML version so you can more easily jump to the option you’re interested in.
For instance the example for --cert makes it easy to see that you likely also want to pass the --key option, like this:
curl --cert certfile --key keyfile https://example.com
The way they implement this is that there’s [one file for each option](https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/dc08922a61efe546b318daf964514ffbf41583 25/docs/cmdline-opts/append.md) and there’s an “Example” field in that file.
Quite a few people said that man ascii was their favourite man page, which looks like this:
Oct Dec Hex Char
───────────────────────────────────────────
000 0 00 NUL '\0' (null character)
001 1 01 SOH (start of heading)
002 2 02 STX (start of text)
003 3 03 ETX (end of text)
004 4 04 EOT (end of transmission)
005 5 05 ENQ (enquiry)
006 6 06 ACK (acknowledge)
007 7 07 BEL '\a' (bell)
010 8 08 BS '\b' (backspace)
011 9 09 HT '\t' (horizontal tab)
012 10 0A LF '\n' (new line)
Obviously man ascii is an unusual man page but I think what’s cool about this man page (other than the fact that it’s always
useful to have an ASCII reference) is it’s very easy to scan to find the
information you need because of the table format. It makes me wonder if there
are more opportunities to display information in a “table” in a man page to make
it easier to scan.
When I talk about man pages it often comes up that the GNU coreutils man pages (for example man tail) don’t have examples, unlike the OpenBSD man pages, which do have examples.
I’m not going to get into this too much because it seems like a fairly political topic and I definitely can’t do it justice here, but here are some things I believe to be true:
info tool. I’ve heard from some Emacs users that they like the Emacs info browser. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone who uses the standalone info tool.After a certain level of complexity a man page gets really hard to navigate: while I’ve never used the coreutils info manual and probably won’t, I would almost certainly prefer to use the GNU Bash reference manual or the The GNU C Library Reference Manual via their HTML documentation rather than through a man page.
Here are some tools I think are interesting:
tldr grep. Lots of people have told me they find it useful.
Man pages are such a constrained format and it’s fun to think about what you can do with such limited formatting options.
Even though I’m very into writing I’ve always had a bad habit of never reading documentation and so it’s a little bit hard for me to think about what I actually find useful in man pages, I’m not sure whether I think most of the things in this post would improve my experience or not. (Except for examples, I LOVE examples)
So I’d be interested to hear about other man pages that you think are well designed and what you like about them, the comments section is here.
Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”
And this:
Advocates of bans compare social media to alcohol or tobacco, where the harms are indisputable and the benefits are minimal. But the internet, including social media, is more analogous to books, magazines or television. I may not want my sons watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but it would be crazy to ban books and films for kids altogether.
But that is the nature of these social media bans. Australia’s law not only restricted access to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok but also banned kids under 16 from having YouTube, X and Reddit accounts. Even Substack had to modify its practices.
Here is more from the excellent Sam Bowman. And many teens make money through “digital side hustles,” in this day and age that is what a teenage job often means.
The post The mainstream view appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2. Richard Ngo on educational signaling theories.
3. “There is no secular alternative. There has never been one.”
5. Dominicans vs. Franciscans.
7. Is Europe’s problem labor law?
8. Arbitrage in Singaporean aunties? The country is getting more interesting again.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Using its navigation cameras, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured the five stereo pairs of images that make up this panorama on Feb. 2, 2026, the 1,762nd day, or sol, of the mission. A new technology called Mars Global Localization matched this 360-degree view to onboard orbital imagery from the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), enabling the rover to pinpoint its location on the Red Planet for the first time without human help. The rover is in a relatively featureless area dubbed “Mala Mala” on the rim of Jezero Crater.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed Mars Global Localization, which features an algorithm that rapidly compares panoramic navcam shots to MRO orbital imagery. Running on a powerful processor that Perseverance originally used to communicate with the now-retired Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, the algorithm takes about two minutes to pinpoint the rover’s location within some 10 inches (25 centimeters).
Like NASA’s previous Mars rovers, Perseverance tracks its position using what’s called visual odometry, analyzing geologic features in camera images taken every few feet while accounting for wheel slippage. As tiny errors in the process add up over the course of each drive, the rover becomes increasingly unsure about its exact location. On long drives, the rover’s sense of its position can be off by than 100 feet (up to 35 meters). Believing it could be too close to hazardous terrain, the rover may prematurely end its drive and wait for instructions from Earth.
After each drive comes to a halt, the rover sends a 360-degree panorama to Earth, where mapping experts match the imagery with shots from MRO. The team then sends the rover its location and instructions for its next drive. That process can take a day or more. With Mars Global Localization, the rover can compare the images itself, determine its location, and roll ahead on its pre-planned route.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover. JPL also manages MRO for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of its Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
The post Perseverance Pinpoints Its Location at ‘Mala Mala’ appeared first on NASA Science.
These images were part of the first successful use of a new technology called Mars Global Localization, developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using its navigation cameras, NASA’s Perseverance captured a 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain that was matched to orbital imagery, enabling the rover to pinpoint its location on Mars on Feb. 2, 2026, the 1,762nd day, or sol, of the mission. The navcam images were turned into an overhead view called an orthomosaic, forming a circle around the rover. In this animation, the orthomosaic is superimposed on the imagery from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Contrast and hue have been enhanced to increase visibility of terrain features, which align in the ground and orbital imagery.
The rover took the five stereo pairs of navcam images in this relatively featureless location, dubbed “Mala Mala,” an area on the rim of Jezero Crater. The blank area in the upper right of the orthomosaic is where the back of the rover blocked the cameras’ view of the surrounding landscape.
Mars Global Localization features an algorithm that rapidly compares panoramic navcam shots to MRO orbital imagery. Running on a powerful processor that Perseverance originally used to communicate with the now-retired Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, the algorithm takes about two minutes to pinpoint the rover’s location to within some 10 inches (25 centimeters).
Like NASA’s previous Mars rovers, Perseverance tracks its position using what’s called visual odometry, analyzing geologic features in camera images taken every few feet while accounting for wheel slippage. As tiny errors in the process add up over the course of each drive, the rover becomes increasingly unsure about its exact location. On long drives, the rover’s sense of its position can be off by more than 100 feet (up to 35 meters). Believing it could be too close to hazardous terrain, Perseverance may prematurely end its drive and wait for instructions from Earth.
After each drive comes to a halt, the rover sends a 360-degree panorama to Earth, where mapping experts match the imagery with shots from MRO. The team then sends the rover its location and instructions for its next drive. That process can take a day or more, but with Mars Global Localization, the rover can compare the images itself, determine its location, and roll ahead on its pre-planned route.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover. JPL also manages MRO for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of its Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
The post Mars Global Localization Pinpoints Perseverance’s Location appeared first on NASA Science.
In today’s digital landscape, attention is no longer just a byproduct of entertainment — it is the foundation of an entire economic model. Platforms compete not only for money but for time, focus, and emotional engagement. For players in the Netherlands, where online gaming is regulated and increasingly sophisticated, understanding how attention-driven platforms operate is essential for making informed decisions.
Online gaming environments are carefully designed ecosystems. Every visual element, bonus offer, and game mechanic exists for a reason. The goal is not manipulation — it is engagement. The longer users stay, the more value is created. When structured responsibly, this system benefits both the platform and the player.
In traditional markets, physical goods generate revenue. In digital entertainment, attention performs that role. Every click, every round played, and every interaction contributes to measurable engagement.
Gaming platforms rely on:
For Dutch players, clarity is particularly important. The Netherlands has strict regulatory oversight to ensure that gaming remains transparent and fair. This means reputable platforms must clearly communicate terms, wagering requirements, and responsible gaming policies.
When users choose a trusted gaming environment, they are not simply selecting games — they are entering a structured digital economy.
Digital gaming platforms are built on principles drawn from behavioral economics. Variable rewards, progression systems, and milestone achievements create momentum. These elements are not random; they are designed to keep the experience dynamic and immersive.
However, there is an important distinction between engagement and excess. Responsible platforms understand this difference. Clear limits, transparent bonus structures, and accessible account controls help maintain balance.
This is where platform reputation becomes critical. WBETZ Casino betting games and casino bonuses are structured to provide excitement while clearly outlining participation rules. Players can access detailed information before activating promotions, ensuring they understand wagering conditions and payout terms.
Revenue in digital gaming does not come from illusion — it comes from volume and participation. When players engage with games, place bets, or activate bonuses, the platform earns through predefined mathematical models.
Every licensed game has a return-to-player percentage. This figure defines the theoretical payout over time. Transparent platforms disclose this information or make it accessible through providers.
Bonuses are marketing tools, but they are also structured contracts. Wagering requirements, eligible games, and maximum withdrawal limits determine how bonuses function in practice.
Loyalty programs reward consistent engagement. These systems create value for regular players without forcing participation.
For Dutch users, selecting a platform that communicates these mechanisms clearly reduces uncertainty and enhances trust.
The Dutch gaming market emphasizes consumer protection. Players are encouraged to choose platforms that prioritize:
Accessing structured betting games, casino promotions, and bonus programs through https://wbetz1.com allows users to explore a digital gaming environment designed with clarity in mind. Clear navigation, defined bonus conditions, and accessible support channels are essential components of responsible engagement.
Digital platforms succeed because they create immersive experiences. But smart players approach gaming strategically. That includes:
WBETZ Casino betting games, online slots, and bonus offers are structured to support controlled participation. Clear wagering terms and defined promotional mechanics allow players to make informed decisions while enjoying competitive gameplay.
The economy of attention works best when users remain conscious participants rather than passive consumers. Awareness transforms engagement into controlled entertainment.
In a regulated market like the Netherlands, trust is currency. Platforms that invest in transparent communication, fair game providers, and responsible gaming policies build sustainable player relationships.
Short-term incentives attract users, but clarity retains them. When wagering requirements are clearly explained, when withdrawal processes are straightforward, and when support is responsive, players feel confident returning.
Digital gaming is not simply about winning or losing. It is about the structure surrounding the experience. A well-designed platform aligns business goals with player satisfaction.
The true economy of illusion is not about deception — it is about perception. Platforms create environments that feel dynamic, exciting, and rewarding. The responsibility lies in ensuring that this perception is grounded in fairness and clarity.
For Dutch players seeking structured betting entertainment, understanding how attention becomes profit is not a warning — it is a tool. When you know how the system works, you can participate on your own terms.
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The post The Economy of Illusion: How Digital Platforms Turn Attention into Profit appeared first on DCReport.org.
Online casinos in the Netherlands have changed significantly in recent years. What once required a visit to a physical venue is now available on a smartphone within seconds. Players can access slots, table games, and betting markets at any time of day. Convenience has become standard. Speed is expected.
Behind this simplicity, however, stands a carefully structured digital environment. Modern gaming platforms are not random collections of games. They are technology-driven systems designed to capture and retain attention. For most users, this simply results in longer sessions. For some, the boundary between leisure and excessive play may gradually shift.
Unpredictability is the core driver of engagement. Wins do not arrive on a fixed schedule, and that uncertainty strengthens anticipation. Behavioral psychology has long demonstrated that variable rewards create stronger repetition patterns than predictable outcomes.
In real-money gaming, this effect becomes more intense. The combination of financial risk, emotional anticipation, and instant results increases stimulation.
Across online casinos, including BOF Casino, the experience is built around speed and convenience: quick access to games, seamless navigation, and immediate feedback that can make it easier to stay engaged longer than intended.
Online platforms remove almost every delay between decision and action. Registration takes minutes. Deposits are processed quickly. Games launch without interruption. When friction is minimized, continuing to play requires little effort.
Many modern slots and table games are structured around short rounds. Players can place multiple bets within a brief period. Immediate feedback keeps attention focused and reduces pauses that might otherwise interrupt the session.
When symbols stop just one position away from a major payout, the experience can feel surprisingly intense. Near wins often generate emotional responses that encourage another attempt. The visual and audio elements built into digital games amplify this sensation.
Welcome bonuses, reload incentives, and loyalty programs are standard across the industry. At BOF Casino, players encounter promotional offers as part of the overall gaming experience. Such incentives can extend playtime and add variety to sessions, but they work best when approached with clear expectations and a defined budget. Reviewing wagering conditions before participating helps players stay in control of their spending.
Modern online casino platforms focus on intuitive navigation and quick access to games. A well-structured interface allows players to switch between slots, table games, and betting options without interruption.
When browsing casino games, betting markets, and promotional opportunities at https://bofcasino1.com, users experience a streamlined layout designed for fast interaction. Smooth transitions between sections and rapid loading times contribute to immersion, which is why monitoring session length remains important.
Digital platforms rely on data to adapt content to user preferences. If a player regularly selects certain slot themes or betting markets, similar options may appear more prominently.
Personalization improves convenience and relevance. At the same time, it can increase session length by consistently presenting appealing choices without requiring active searching.
The Dutch regulatory framework requires licensed operators to implement protective tools. These measures are not optional; they are part of operating legally within the market.
Players can set deposit limits, receive session time reminders, and activate self-exclusion if necessary. Such tools are designed to support balanced participation, even within highly engaging environments.
Extended play does not automatically indicate a problem. Many individuals participate occasionally and responsibly. However, certain patterns deserve attention: increasing stakes after losses, ignoring preset limits, or playing primarily to manage stress.
Awareness of these behaviors makes a difference. Understanding how rapid game cycles, promotional incentives, and near-win effects function allows players to make more deliberate decisions.
Digital casino platforms are designed to feel effortless. That is why it helps to bring your own structure into the session. Setting a personal budget before you start, deciding how long you want to play, and taking short breaks can prevent the experience from turning into autopilot.
If you notice that you are increasing stakes after losses, extending sessions “just a little longer,” or playing mainly to escape stress, it may be a sign to pause and reset your approach.
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The post From Entertainment to Dependency: Digital Mechanics That Keep Players Engaged appeared first on DCReport.org.
I have to begin by warning you about the content in this piece; while I won’t be dwelling on any specifics, this will necessarily be a broad discussion about some of the most disturbing topics imaginable. I resent that I have to give you that warning, but I’m forced to because of the choices that the Big AI companies have made that affect children. I don’t say this lightly. But this is the point we must reckon with if we are having an honest conversation about contemporary technology.
Let me get the worst of it out of the way right up front, and then we can move on to understanding how this happened. ChatGPT has repeatedly produced output that encouraged and incited children to end their own lives. Grok’s AI generates sexualized imagery of children, which the company makes available commercially to paid subscribers.
It used to be that encouraging children to self-harm, or producing sexualized imagery of children, were universally agreed upon as being amongst the worst things one could do in society. These were among the rare truly non-partisan, unifying moral agreements that transcended all social and cultural barriers. And now, some of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies, led by a few of the wealthiest and most powerful men who have ever lived, are violating these rules, for profit, and not only is there little public uproar, it seems as if very few have even noticed.
How did we get here?
A perfect storm of factors have combined to lead us towards the worst case scenario for AI. There is now an entire market of commercial products that attack our children, and to understand why, we need to look at the mindset of the people who are creating those products. Here are some of the key motivations that drove them to this point.
There’s an old adage from Intel’s founder Andy Grove that people in Silicon Valley used to love to quote: “Only the paranoid survive”. This attitude persists, with leaders absolutely convinced that everything is a zero-sum game, and any perceived success by another company is an existential threat to one’s own future.
At Google, the company’s researchers had published the fundamental paper underlying the creation of LLMs in 2017, but hadn’t capitalized on that invention by making a successful consumer product by 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. Within Google leadership (and amongst the big tech tycoons), the fact that OpenAI was able to have a hit product with this technology was seen as a grave failure by Google, despite the fact that even OpenAI’s own leadership hadn’t expected ChatGPT to be a big hit upon launch. A crisis ensued within Google in the months that followed.
These kinds of industry narratives have more weight than reality in driving decision-making and investment, and the refrain of “move fast and break things” is still burned into people’s heads, so the end result these days is that shipping any product is okay, as long as it helps you catch up to your competitor. Thus, since Grok is seriously behind its competitors in usage, and of course Grok's CEO Elon Musk is always desperate for attention, they have every incentive to ship a product with a catastrophically toxic design — including one that creates abusive imagery.
Another fundamental article of faith in the last decade amongst tech tycoons (and their fanboys) is that woke culture must be destroyed. They have an amorphous and ever-evolving definition of what “woke” means, but it always includes any measures of accountability. One key example is the trust and safety teams that had been trying to keep all of the major technology platforms from committing the worst harms that their products were capable of producing.
Here, again, Google provides us with useful context. The company had one of the most mature and experienced AI safety research teams in the world at the time when the first paper on the transformer model (LLMs) was published. Right around the time that paper was published, Google also saw one of its engineers publish a sexist screed on gender essentialism designed to bait the company into becoming part of the culture war, which it ham-handedly stumbled directly into. Like so much of Silicon Valley, Google’s leadership did not understand that these campaigns are always attempts to game the refs, and they let themselves be played by these bad actors; within a few years, a backlash had built and they began cutting everyone who had warned about risks around the new AI platforms, including some of the most credible and respected voices in the industry on these issues.
Eliminating those roles was considered vital because these people were blamed for having “slowed down” the company with their silly concerns about things like people’s lives, or the health of the world’s information ecosystem. A lot of the wealthy execs across the industry were absolutely convinced that the reason Google had ended up behind in AI, despite having invented LLMs, was because they had too many “woke” employees, and those employees were too worried about esoteric concerns like people’s well-being.
It does not ever enter the conversation that 1. executives are accountable for the failures that happen at a company, 2. Google had a million other failures during these same years (including those countless redundant messaging apps they kept launching!) that may have had far more to do with their inability to seize the market opportunity and 3. it may be a good thing that Google didn’t rush to market with a product that tells children to harm themselves, and those workers who ended up being fired may have saved Google from that fate!
The third fact that enabled the creation of pernicious AI products is more subtle, but has more wide-ranging implications once we face it. In the tech industry, product managers are often quietly amongst the most influential figures in determining the influence a company has on culture. (At least until all the product managers are replaced by an LLM being run by their CEO.) At their best, product managers are the people who decide exactly what features and functionality go into a product, synthesizing and coordinating between the disciplines of engineering, marketing, sales, support, research, design, and many other specialties. I’m a product person, so I have a lot of empathy for the challenges of the role, and a healthy respect for the power it can often hold.
But in today’s Silicon Valley, a huge number of the people who act as product managers spent the formative years of their careers in companies like Facebook (now Meta). If those PMs now work at OpenAI, then the moments when they were learning how to practice their craft were spent at a company that made products that directly enabled and accelerated a genocide. That’s not according to me, that’s the opinion of multiple respected international human rights organizations. If you chose to go work at Facebook after the Rohingya genocide had happened, then you were certainly not going to learn from your manager that you should not make products that encourage or incite people to commit violence.
Even when they’re not enabling the worst things in the world, product managers who spend time in these cultures learn more destructive habits, like strategic line-stepping. This is the habit of repeatedly violating their own policies on things like privacy and security, or allowing users to violate platform policies on things like abuse and harassment. This tactic is followed by then feigning surprise when the behavior is caught. After sending out an obligatory apology, they repeat the behavior again a few more times until everyone either gets so used to it that they stop complaining or the continued bad actions drives off the good people, which makes it seem to the media or outside observers that the problem has gone away. Then, they amend their terms of service to say that the formerly-disallowed behavior is now permissible, so that in the future they can say, “See? It doesn’t violate our policy.”
Because so many people in the industry now have these kind of credential on their LinkedIn profiles, their peers can’t easily mention many kinds of ethical concerns when designing a product without implicitly condemning their coworkers. This becomes even more fraught when someone might potentially be unknowingly offending one of their leaders. As a result, it becomes a race to the bottom, where the person with the worst ethical standards on the team determines the standards to which everyone designs their work. As a result, if the prevailing sentiment about creating products at a company is that having millions of users just inevitably means killing some of them (“you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet”), there can be risk to contradicting that idea. Pointing out that, in fact, most platforms on the internet do not harm users in these ways and their creators work very hard to ensure that tech products don’t present a risk to their communities, can end up being a career-limiting move.
This is a more subtle point, but explains a lot of the incentives and motivations behind so much of what happens with today’s major technology platforms. The introduction or rollout of new capabilities is measured when these companies launch new features, and the success of those rollouts or launches are often tied to the measurements of individual performance for the people who were responsible for those features. These will be measured using metrics like “KPIs” (key performance indicators) or other similar corporate acronyms, all of which basically represent the concept of being rewarded for whether the thing you made was adopted by users in the real world. In the abstract, it makes sense to reward employees based on whether the things they create actually succeed in the market, so that their work is aligned with whatever makes the company succeed.
In practice, people’s incentives and motivations get incredibly distorted over time by these kinds of gamified systems being used to measure their work, especially as it becomes a larger and larger part of their compensation. If you’ve ever wondered why some intrusive AI feature that you never asked for is jumping in front of your cursor when you’re just trying to do a normal task the same way that you’ve been doing it for years, it’s because someone’s KPI was measuring whether you were going to click on that AI button. Much of the time, the system doesn’t distinguish between “I accidentally clicked on this feature while trying to get rid of it” and “I enthusiastically chose to click on this button”. This is what I mean when I say we need an internet of consent.
But you see the grim end game of this kind of thinking, and these kinds of reward systems, when kids’ well-being is on the line. Someone’s compensation may well be tied to a metric or measurement of “how many people used the image generation feature?” without regard to whether that feature was being used to generate imagery of children without consent. Getting a user addicted to a product, even to the point where they’re getting positive reinforcement when discussing the most self-destructive behaviors, will show up in a measurement system as increased engagement — exactly the kind of behavior that most compensation systems reward employees for producing.
A strange reality of the United States’ sad decline into authoritarianism is that it is presently impossible to create federal regulation to stop the harms that these large AI platforms are causing. Most Americans are not familiar with this level of corruption and crony capitalism, but Trump’s AI Czar David Sacks has an unbelievably broad number of conflicts of interest from his investments across the AI spectrum; it’s impossible to know how many because nobody in the Trump administration follows even the basic legal requirements around disclosure or disinvestment, and the entire corrupt Republican Party in Congress refuses to do their constitutionally-required duty to hold the executive branch accountable for these failures.
As a result, at the behest of the most venal power brokers in Silicon Valley, the Trump administration is insisting on trying to stop all AI regulations at the state level, and of course will have the collusion of the captive Supreme Court to assist in this endeavor. Because they regularly have completely unaccountable and unrecorded conversations, the leaders of the Big AI companies (all of whom attended the Inauguration of this President and support the rampant lawbreaking of this administration with rewards like open bribery) know that there will be no constraints on the products that they launch, and no punishments or accountability if those products cause harm.
All of the pertinent regulatory bodies, from the Federal Trade Commission to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have had their competent leadership replaced by Trump cronies as well, meaning that their agendas are captured and they will not be able to protect citizens from these companies, either.
There will, of course, still be attempts at accountability at the state and local level, and these will wind their way through the courts over time. But the harms will continue in the meantime. And there will be attempts to push back on the international level, both from regulators overseas, and increasingly by governments and consumers outside the United States refusing to use technologies developed in this country. But again, these remedies will take time to mature, and in the meantime, children will still be in harm’s way.
It used to be such a trope of political campaigns and social movements to say “what about the children?” that it is almost beyond parody. I personally have mocked the phrase because it’s so often deployed in bad faith, to short-circuit complicated topics and suppress debate. But this is that rare circumstance where things are actually not that complicated. Simply discussing the reality of what these products do should be enough.
People will say, “but it’s inevitable! These products will just have these problems sometimes!” And that is simply false. There are already products on the market that don’t have these egregious moral failings. More to the point, even if it were true that these products couldn’t exist without killing or harming children — then that’s a reason not to ship them at all.
If it is, indeed absolutely unavoidable that, for example, ChatGPT has to advocate violence, then let’s simply attach a rule in the code that modifies it to change the object of the violence to be Sam Altman. Or your boss. I suspect that if, suddenly, the chatbot deployed to every laptop at your company had a chance of suggesting that people cause bodily harm to your CEO, people would suddenly figure out a way to fix that bug. But somehow when it makes that suggestion about your 12-year-old, this is an insurmountably complex challenge.
We can expect things to get worse before they get better. OpenAI has already announced that it is going to be allowing people to generate sexual content on its service for a fee later this year. To their credit, when doing so, they stated their policy prohibiting the use of the service to generate images that sexualize children. But the service they’re using to ensure compliance, Thorn, whose product is meant to help protect against such content, was conspicuously silent about Musk’s recent foray into generating sexualized imagery of children. An organization whose entire purpose is preventing this kind of material, where every public message they have put out is decrying this content, somehow falls mute when the world’s richest man carries out the most blatant launch of this capability ever? If even the watchdogs have lost their voice, how are regular people supposed to feel like they have a chance at fighting back?
And then, if no one is reining in OpenAI, and they have to keep up with their competitors, and the competition isn’t worried about silly concerns like ethics, and the other platforms are selling child exploitation material, and all of the product mangers are Meta alumni who know that they can just keep gaming the terms of service if they need to, and laws aren’t being enforced, and all the product managers making the product learned to make decisions while they were at Meta… well, will you be surprised?
It should be an industry-stopping scandal that this is the current state of two of the biggest players in the most-hyped, most-funded, most consequential area of the entire business world right now. It should be unfathomable that people are thinking about deploying these technologies in their businesses — in their schools! — or integrating these products into their own platforms. And yet I would bet that the vast majority of people using these products have no idea about these risks or realities of these platforms at all. Even the vast majority of people who work in tech probably are barely aware.
What’s worse is, the majority of people I’ve talked to in tech, who do know about this have not taken a single action about it. Not one.
I’ll be following up with an entire list of suggestions about actions we can take, and ways we can push for accountability for the bad actors who are endangering kids every day. In the meantime, reflect for yourself about this reality. Who will you share this information with? How will this change your view of what these companies are? How will this change the way you make decisions about using these products? Now that you know: what will you do?
Unfortunately, I have another thing for you to worry about.
There are three types of environmental harm. The first kind is local — think air pollution and water pollution. This kind of activity hurts people who are geographically close by — when factories dump crap in the water, it’s local communities who get cancer, and so on. This kind of local pollution is typically solved by a local or national government, using things like regulation, pollution markets, and so on.
In fact, humanity has a pretty good track record when it comes to problems like this. The Environmental Kuznets Curve — the theory that countries pollute less as they get richer — seems to hold true for air and water pollution. As people escape poverty, they demand a cleaner local environment. For example, China used to be known for its toxic, unbreathable air, but in the 2010s it launched a successful cleanup policy:
The second kind of environmental harm — global harm — is a lot harder to deal with. These are things that mostly hurt people in other countries — global warming being the primary example. It’s very hard to solve global warming, because the worldwide nature of the harm means there’s a free rider problem (or, if you prefer, a coordination problem) — no country wants to pay the full cost of decarbonization, because most of the benefit goes to people in other countries. You can try international agreements, but everyone has an incentive to cheat.
Often, the best solution to these problems is technological — you simply invent something better and cheaper that doesn’t pollute as much, and then every country has an incentive to switch. Essentially, you use the positive externality of technology to fight the negative externality of pollution. This is what we did with HFC refrigerants, which replaced the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. It’s how we’re now fighting climate change with solar, batteries, and other green energy technologies.
But there’s a third kind of environmental harm, which is harm to the natural world. When pollution or logging or mining destroys natural habitats, it often doesn’t cause much harm to human beings — at least, not to those who are alive today. When coral reefs get bleached and die from industrial runoff, it might hurt tourism revenue a tiny bit, but overall humans don’t really get hurt. Animals and plants get hurt, but they have no voice in human politics. Future generations might regret not having coral reefs around, but they don’t exist yet, so they can’t complain.
Solving these harms seems like it probably requires some degree of altruism — either people caring about conservation for its own sake, or people who care a great deal about leaving a healthy natural world for their unborn descendants.
Altruism sounds like it won’t go far when matched against brute economic self-interest. But in recent years, I’ve become more optimistic that humans will care more intrinsically about preserving the natural world as they get richer. For example, people in North America, Europe, and East Asia all seem to care a lot about having forests:
This suggests that we won’t see a “race to the bottom” in terms of biodiversity loss, because the most powerful countries don’t seem to be the ones that chop down all their forests. Even Brazil, the worst offender in terms of sheer amount of forest cut down,1 has decreased the rate of Amazon deforestation by quite a lot since the early 2000s.
And that in turn hints at an even more important idea — that societies don’t trend toward greater rapaciousness as they become richer and more powerful. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steve Pinker theorized that people become more altruistic as they become more comfortable and secure; increasing global commitment to biodiversity seems to fit that theory. That might even be good news for the future of superintelligent AI — if rich nations stopped chopping down their forests, then maybe AI won’t kill the human race to use our resources for data centers.
Encouragingly, note the progress in China on the chart above. Some of this reforestation is motivated by the self-interested need to stop soil erosion and desertification, but China’s government has also increased its commitment to biodiversity. As another example of this, China banned fishing in the Yangtze River in 2021, in order to save fish stocks.
But there appear to be limits to China’s altruism here. Even as it took measures to prevent overfishing within its borders, China has continued to overfish much of the world’s oceans.
China’s fishing fleet just keeps getting bigger and bigger. This is from a 2025 report from the environmental group Oceana:
Oceana released an analysis of China’s global fishing* activity worldwide between 2022 and 2024. The analysis shows China’s global fishing footprint, in which 57,000 of their industrial fishing vessels dominated 44% of the world’s visible fishing activity during this period…Chinese vessels accounted for 30% of all fishing activity on the high seas, appearing to fish for more than 8.3 million hours.
In terms of catching wild fish, it’s basically China and Latin America dominating everyone else:
Much of this fishing activity is either outright illegal — meaning Chinese vessels fish in other countries’ waters in violation of their local laws or regional agreements — or unreported. In addition to simply violating laws with impunity, Chinese fleets use a large variety of tricks to get around regulations meant to keep them from overfishing — turning off their transponders, falsifying records, using foreign front companies, and so on. A lot of this fishing activity isn’t just to fuel China’s own increasing fish consumption — it’s an export industry. Here’s a detailed report from the Outlaw Ocean Project. Some key excerpts:
The size and behavior of the Chinese fishing fleet raises concerns…The Chinese government and western seafood companies often dismiss illegality in the fishing industry as an isolated problem. But [our] investigation revealed a wide pattern: Almost half of the Chinese squid fleet, 357 of the 751 ships studied, were tied to human-rights or environmental violations…
More than 100 Chinese squid ships were found to have fished illegally, including by targeting protected species, operating without a license, and dumping excess fish into the sea. The investigation revealed other environmental or fishing-specific crimes and risk indicators, including Chinese ships illegally entering the waters of other countries, disabling locational transponders in violation of Chinese law…transmitting dual identities (or “spoofing”)…fishing without a license, and using prohibited fishing gear. But the most common environmental violation involved Chinese ships poaching fish from other countries’ waters…
About 80 percent of seafood consumed in the U.S. is caught or processed abroad, with China as its biggest supplier.
Poor countries in Latin America and Africa don’t have the state capacity or economic leverage to enforce their laws. As a result, their waters are crammed with vast fleets of Chinese fishing boats:
Why is Chinese overfishing bad? Obviously it hurts fishermen in poor countries by taking away their fish. But in addition, it hurts biodiversity and robs future generations of fish. Here’s a good primer from Our World in Data that shows what you would do if you cared mainly about biodiversity, versus what you would do if you cared mainly about sustainability:
The key fact here is that whether you care more about the natural world or whether you care more about future humans being able to eat fish, the world is catching too many fish. An increasing percent of the world’s fisheries are now overexploited:
China’s lack of concern for sustainability plays a large part in this. Chinese fishing vessels are more likely to use various techniques that make them catch more juvenile fish. One of these is bottom-trawling, which drags nets along the seabed. Japan and the U.S. have largely given up on this practice; China has long been the world’s worst offender.
In previous decades, environmental organizations like Greenpeace sounded the alarm over Chinese overfishing. In recent years, with a few commendable exceptions like Sea Shepherd, they have mostly gone quiet. This is unfortunately consistent with the idea that legacy environmental groups are generally drifting from universal values of environmental protection toward a more explicitly leftist stance that focuses exclusively on critiquing the West and ignores environmental abuses by non-Western countries. (You can also see this in climate groups’ stubborn refusal to criticize China, which is by far the world’s worst climate polluter.)
In other words, geopolitics is starting to intrude into environmental debates. Most of the alarms now being sounded about Chinese overfishing come from “China hawks” rather than from environmentalists. And geopolitics is probably a big part of the reason China hasn’t cracked down on its global overfishing practices.
Traditionally, a lot of China’s overfishing has been due to massive subsidies that the Chinese government gives to the industry, mostly in the form of cheap fuel and other support. In the late 2010s, China began curbing those subsidies a bit. But as Ian Urbina reported back in 2020, these efforts have been pretty slow and minor when it comes to international waters, and geopolitics is probably a big reason:
[M]ore than seafood is at stake in the present size and ambition of China’s fishing fleet. Against the backdrop of China’s larger geo-political aspirations, the country’s commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions. Under a civilian guise, this ostensibly private armada helps assert territorial domination, especially pushing back fishermen or governments that challenge China’s sovereignty claims that encompass nearly all of the South China Sea.
“What China is doing is putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push you out, to dare you to hit first,” said Huang Jing, former director of the Center on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.
Chinese fishing boats are notoriously aggressive and often shadowed, even on the high seas or in other countries’ national waters, by armed Chinese Coast Guard vessels…From the waters of North Korea to Mexico to Indonesia, incursions by Chinese fishing ships are becoming more frequent, brazen and aggressive.
In other words, China’s government is becoming increasingly concerned about biodiversity and sustainability for its own sake, and this has resulted in more sustainable fishing practices in China’s own waters. But at the same time, China is using its vast international fishing fleet as a sort of naval militia to press its claims on other countries’ waters. And this is having collateral damage on the natural world — China’s quasi-military subsidies for its fishing fleet are resulting in too much actual fishing taking place.
In one sense, this is actually kind of optimistic. The fact that China is overfishing international waters for military and geopolitical reasons, rather than out of pure economic rapacity, suggests that the Chinese are not an exception to the rule that richer societies start to care more about sustainability — and, perhaps, about the intrinsic value of the natural world as well.
But in the meantime, the bad news is that China’s decision to maintain its fishing fleet as a naval militia means that the world’s oceans are being despoiled and drained of wildlife. That’s not good, and I wish that more environmentalists would pay attention to the problem. As power and wealth shift away from the West, the environmental movement risks making itself irrelevant if it continues its recent practice of letting countries like China off the hook.
Mostly to make room for cattle ranches.
Online casinos are no longer simple collections of games. They operate as intelligent digital systems that analyze user behavior and adapt in real time. For players in the Czech Republic exploring modern platforms, understanding how algorithms shape the gaming experience is essential.
Algorithms track patterns such as preferred slot themes, betting frequency, session duration, and responses to promotional offers. Over time, this data allows platforms to refine recommendations and streamline navigation. The result is a more personalized experience that feels intuitive and effortless.
Digital platforms are structured around what behavioral economists call “choice architecture.” This refers to the way options are presented and how that presentation influences decisions.
On casino platforms, this includes:
These elements are not accidental. Positioning, color contrast, and timing can subtly guide attention. When players see familiar games or offers that match their past behavior, decision-making becomes faster and more automatic.
Modern casino platforms rely heavily on analytics. Every click, bet, and pause provides information that helps refine the system.
If a player frequently chooses live dealer games, similar tables may appear more prominently. If someone prefers high-volatility slots, related titles may be suggested. This personalization reduces friction and enhances immersion.
At Kajot Casino online slots and betting games, the platform experience is structured to align with user preferences, making transitions between games smooth and responsive. Personalization can improve enjoyment, but it also increases session continuity by presenting relevant content without requiring extensive searching.
Digital casino environments are built on psychological principles that encourage sustained interaction.
Unpredictable outcomes are powerful motivators. When wins occur at irregular intervals, anticipation increases. This unpredictability keeps attention focused on the next spin or hand.
A slot result that stops just short of a jackpot can feel almost as stimulating as a win. Near misses create a perception of closeness, which may encourage another attempt.
Fast-loading games and immediate results maintain momentum. When betting decisions lead to quick outcomes, the pace reinforces continued engagement.
When exploring casino games, betting markets, and bonus offers at https://kajot-casino.app, players encounter a streamlined environment designed for quick interaction and uninterrupted gameplay. That smooth structure enhances immersion and reduces delays between decisions.
Algorithms do more than recommend games. They analyze behavior in context. For example:
These adjustments are automated and data-driven. The platform adapts continuously to maximize relevance and engagement.
At Kajot Casino real money casino games and betting options, structured layouts and algorithm-driven recommendations help players navigate quickly between slots, table games, and sports bets. The experience feels intuitive because it is built on accumulated behavioral data.
Personalized digital systems are not inherently negative. They are designed to enhance user satisfaction. However, awareness is important.
Understanding how interface design, recommendation engines, and behavioral triggers operate allows players to maintain intentional control. Setting clear budgets, defining session time in advance, and recognizing emotional decision-making patterns can help preserve balance.
Digital casino platforms continue to evolve, becoming smarter and more adaptive each year. When players understand how algorithms shape the experience, they gain an advantage. Instead of being guided unconsciously, they can choose deliberately, keeping entertainment aligned with their own goals and limits.
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The post When Algorithms Know You Better Than You Know Yourself: How Digital Platforms Shape Player Behavior appeared first on DCReport.org.
In the digital economy, time is no longer just a measurement. It is a resource, tracked, analyzed, and converted into revenue. For online casinos and sports betting platforms, every second a player spends browsing games, comparing odds, or reviewing bonus offers carries measurable value.
For players in the Czech Republic navigating today’s competitive online gambling market, understanding how attention works as currency helps answer an important question: what exactly are platforms optimizing for?
Technology companies have long competed for user attention. Social media platforms measure engagement in minutes. Streaming services track watch time. Online casinos and bookmakers operate in a similar framework, where session duration, return frequency, and interaction depth shape performance metrics.
Every click on a slot title, every visit to a live betting page, and every review of promotional terms generates data. That data allows platforms to refine recommendations, adjust layouts, and present offers that align with user preferences.
This does not mean manipulation. It means optimization. Digital systems are designed to reduce friction and make decision-making smoother. When the path from interest to action is short, users remain engaged longer.
A second may seem insignificant, but in digital terms, it can determine whether a user leaves or stays.
Fast-loading pages and instant game launches reduce hesitation. If a slot takes several seconds to load, attention may drift. If it loads immediately, momentum continues.
Buttons, banners, and highlighted bonuses are positioned intentionally. The human eye follows patterns. Platforms analyze which layouts increase interaction and refine designs accordingly.
Scrolling through betting markets or slot categories involves dozens of rapid choices. Each one consumes a fraction of attention. Together, they create immersion.
On platforms like FunID Casino casino games and sports betting aggregator, the structure of available slots, live betting options, and promotional bonuses is organized to help players compare offers efficiently across multiple operators. The value lies in clarity and speed, allowing users to navigate without unnecessary delays.
Unlike a single casino brand, aggregator platforms serve as intermediaries. They connect users with multiple licensed casinos and bookmakers in one interface. That means their business model depends even more heavily on engagement.
When a user compares welcome bonuses, reads wagering conditions, or checks odds across different betting providers, attention becomes the main asset. The longer a visitor stays to evaluate options, the more likely they are to choose a partner casino through the platform.
When browsing casino games, betting markets, and promotional bonuses at https://funid-casino.com, users access a centralized space where operators, offers, and gameplay categories are displayed side by side. The design emphasizes comparison, transparency, and quick navigation between brands.
Online gambling platforms analyze several key performance indicators:
These metrics reveal how effectively attention converts into action. Even small improvements—such as reducing the number of steps required to access a bonus—can significantly impact engagement levels.
At FunID Casino online slots and betting offers comparison platforms, the presentation of casino reviews, bonus structures, and betting options aims to streamline the decision-making process. Clear categorization reduces cognitive overload and keeps the experience focused.
For operators and aggregators, attention drives revenue. For players, attention shapes experience.
Understanding that platforms are structured to maximize time spent can help users approach gambling more consciously. Quick transitions between games, targeted bonus banners, and real-time betting updates are designed to maintain flow.
That flow is not inherently negative. It enhances convenience and improves usability. However, recognizing how digital environments are engineered allows players to set boundaries more intentionally.
Online gambling environments move quickly. Odds change in seconds. Slot rounds resolve instantly. Bonus timers count down in real time. All of this reinforces urgency.
Players can benefit from simple strategies:
When attention is treated as a valuable resource, decision-making becomes more deliberate. The digital environment may be optimized for speed, but users retain the ability to control how long they stay.
Online casino and betting platforms will continue refining their systems to reduce friction and increase engagement. That is the nature of digital competition. The real question is not only how much one second of attention is worth to the platform—but how much it is worth to the player who gives it.
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The post How Much Is One Second of Attention Worth? appeared first on DCReport.org.
Pain experienced while dying may be partly spiritual.
National Geographic has the story:
These drugs could be a game changer for end-of-life care
Certain psychoactive substances can improve the mental health of terminally ill cancer patients—but few patients can currently access them. By Meryl Davids Landau
"Several years ago in Vancouver Island, Canada, a 32-year-old mother with advanced metastatic cancer was so wracked with pain and a fear of dying she constantly wept in bed. Through a targeted Canadian government program, the woman accessed psilocybin, the main psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms. The day after taking a dose of the drug she was pain-free, able to joke with family members and reconnect with old friends before she died the following week.
...
"The drugs can help with “the existential component of pain that is tied in with spiritual and psychological experiences,” something conventional medicine has few tools to address, says Masuda, a physician with SATA Centre for Conscious Living, who has since facilitated dozens of psychedelic sessions for similar patients.
"Some 400 terminal patients in Canada have legally accessed psilocybin in the past five years via its special programs, and several countries already allow for similar uses. Due to federal drug laws, terminally ill people in the U.S. cannot currently take psilocybin outside of a handful of clinical trials.
"But this may finally change, as government agencies are evaluating whether to allow its use for end-of-life care—thanks to pressure from physicians and years of research. Many palliative care doctors in the U.S. say the change can’t come soon enough."
Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) released a new report on how to modernize the FDA. It has some good material.
… FDA’s process for reviewing new products can be an unpredictable “black box.” FDA teams can differ greatly in the extent to which they require testing or impose standards that are not calibrated to the relevant risks. The perceived disconnect between the forward leaning rhetoric and thought leadership of senior FDA officials and cautious reviewer practice creates further unpredictability. This uncertainty dampens investment and increases the time it takes for patients to receive new therapies.
Companies report that they face a “reviewer lottery,” where critical questions hinge on the approach of a small number of individuals at FDA. Some FDA review teams are creative and forward-leaning, helping developers design programs and overcome obstacles to get needed products to patients, without cutting corners. FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE), for example, is repeatedly identified as a model for providing predictable yet flexible options for bringing new drugs to cancer patients. OCE is now a dialogue-based regulatory paradigm that has facilitated efforts by academia, industry, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and others to develop new cancer therapies and launch innovative programs and pilots like Project Orbis, RealTime Oncology Review.
That’s quite right. In my report with DiMasi and Milne, we show that review times vary markedly within the FDA, across divisions, without clear cause. Put aside the big questions of FDA or no FDA–scaling the practices of the better-performing divisions would likely yield large gains.
Mike Doherty further asks the AI what Alex Tabarrok would think of the Cassidy report. It replies:
Strongest features: It correctly diagnoses FDA as a bottleneck to innovation, emphasizes “least burdensome” evidence, calls for streamlined pathways (505(b)(2)-style for biologics, biosimilar simplification), and worries about U.S. losing early-phase trials to other countries. This is very much in Tabarrok’s wheelhouse: regulation as a hidden tax on innovation and growth.
Weakest features: It rarely quantifies tradeoffs, almost never confronts the “invisible graveyard” of patients who never see therapies because of delay, and treats reforms as marginal tweaks rather than testing fundamentally different regulatory models (e.g., insurance-based approval, private certification, or sunset/experimentation with parallel regimes).
If you imagine this as a draft memo handed to Tabarrok, he’d likely say: “Good directionally; now add 50% more economics, 50% more quantification, and 100% more willingness to experiment with institutional competition.”
Yeah, pretty good.
Addendum: In other FDA news see also Adam Kroetsch on Will Bayesian Statistics Transform Trials?
Addendum 2: FDA has now agreed to review Moderna’s flu vaccine which is good although the course reversal obviously speaks to the unpredictability of the FDA.
The post The Cassidy Report on the FDA appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
- Errors now use exit code 2, which means exit code 1 is just for for check failures. #15
- New
rodney assertcommand for running JavaScript tests, exit code 1 if they fail. #19- New directory-scoped sessions with
--local/--globalflags. #14- New
reload --hardandclear-cachecommands. #17- New
rodney start --showoption to make the browser window visible. Thanks, Antonio Cuni. #13- New
rodney connect PORTcommand to debug an already-running Chrome instance. Thanks, Peter Fraenkel. #12- New
RODNEY_HOMEenvironment variable to support custom state directories. Thanks, Senko Rašić. #11- New
--insecureflag to ignore certificate errors. Thanks, Jakub Zgoliński. #10- Windows support: avoid
Setsidon Windows via build-tag helpers. Thanks, adm1neca. #18- Tests now run on
windows-latestandmacos-latestin addition to Linux.
I've been using Showboat to create demos of new features - here those are for rodney assert, rodney reload --hard, rodney exit codes, and rodney start --local.
The rodney assert command is pretty neat: you can now Rodney to test a web app through multiple steps in a shell script that looks something like this (adapted from the README):
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
FAIL=0
check() {
if ! "$@"; then
echo "FAIL: $*"
FAIL=1
fi
}
rodney start
rodney open "https://example.com"
rodney waitstable
# Assert elements exist
check rodney exists "h1"
# Assert key elements are visible
check rodney visible "h1"
check rodney visible "#main-content"
# Assert JS expressions
check rodney assert 'document.title' 'Example Domain'
check rodney assert 'document.querySelectorAll("p").length' '2'
# Assert accessibility requirements
check rodney ax-find --role navigation
rodney stop
if [ "$FAIL" -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Some checks failed"
exit 1
fi
echo "All checks passed"Tags: browsers, projects, testing, annotated-release-notes, rodney
I suggest looking at whether real estate prices in a particular locale have been rising or falling. If immigration is “ruining” a particular city, we would expect homes and other property values in that place to become much cheaper.
Home values have historically served as a strong indicator of the health of a city. Consider Detroit. It was one of the premier American cities in the mid-20th century, but the region lost a lot of its automobile industry to foreign competition, and crime rose precipitously. The city also was poorly managed. The result in real estate markets was a collapse in prices. If anyone asked you to point to quantifiable evidence for the decline in Detroit, it was easy to do so.
Detroit has undergone a renaissance since its nadir. New businesses have opened, crime rates have fallen, and the city feels more lively again. And since that turn of fortune, often dated around the 1990s, Detroit real estate has made a major comeback, putting aside the price collapse of the Great Recession in 2008. Home prices are not a perfect measure of how the city is doing, but they do pick up major and radical trends, both on the downside and on the upside.
The nice thing about market prices is that they show how buyers weigh the benefits of immigration against costs. Say some new immigrants have moved into your community and the quality of the schools has declined somewhat and traffic is modestly worse. At the same time, there are new businesses, the streets feel more lively, and it is easier to get a good local plumber. In the abstract, it is hard to tell which effects might be most important. But individuals, when bidding for homes or deciding to sell, make their own judgments. What happens to the home prices is a reflection of the collective judgments of people with major decisions about their lives on the line.
Of course in most of the Western world, including Malmo, real estate prices are healthy and very often rising. Here is the full Free Press link, by yours truly. The piece of course does cover the usual caveats, such as bubbles and busts, but note NIMBY factors will not alone reverse the basic conclusions.
The post A simple test of how immigration really is going appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Sonnet 4.6 has a "reliable knowledge cutoff" of August 2025, compared to Opus 4.6's May 2025 and Haiku 4.5's February 2025. Both Opus and Sonnet default to 200,000 max input tokens but can stretch to 1 million in beta and at a higher cost.
I just released llm-anthropic 0.24 with support for both Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6. Claude Code did most of the work - the new models had a fiddly amount of extra details around adaptive thinking and no longer supporting prefixes, as described in Anthropic's migration guide.
Here's what I got from:
uvx --with llm-anthropic llm 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' -m claude-sonnet-4.6
The SVG comments include:
<!-- Hat (fun accessory) -->
I tried a second time and also got a top hat. Sonnet 4.6 apparently loves top hats!
For comparison, here's the pelican Opus 4.5 drew me in November:
And here's Anthropic's current best pelican, drawn by Opus 4.6 on February 5th:
Opus 4.6 produces the best pelican beak/pouch. I do think the top hat from Sonnet 4.6 is a nice touch though.
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, claude-code
Can AI be liberal? In what sense? One answer points to the liberal insistence on freedom of choice, understood as a product of the commitment to personal autonomy and individual dignity. Mill and Hayek are of course defining figures here, emphasizing the epistemic foundations for freedom of choice. “Choice Engines,” powered by AI and authorized or required by law, might promote liberal goals (and in the process, produce significant increases in human welfare). A key reason is that they can simultaneously (1) preserve autonomy, (2) respect dignity, and (3) help people to overcome inadequate information and behavioral biases, which can produce internalities, understood as costs that people impose on their future selves, and also externalities, understood as costs that people impose on others. Different consumers care about different things, of course, which is a reason to insist on a high degree of freedom of choice, even in the presence of internalities and externalities. AI-powered Choice Engines can respect that freedom, not least through personalization. Nonetheless, AI-powered Choice Engines might be enlisted by insufficiently informed or self-interested actors, who might exploit inadequate information or behavioral biases, and thus co5mpromise liberal goals. AI-powered Choice Engines might also be deceptive or manipulative, again compromising liberal goals, and legal safeguards are necessary to reduce the relevant risks. Illiberal or antiliberal AI is not merely imaginable; it is in place. Still, liberal AI is not an oxymoron. It could make life less nasty, less brutish, less short, and less hard – and more free.
The post Liberal AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:
Apple invited select members of the media to the event in three major cities around the world. It is simply described as a “special Apple Experience,” and there is no further information about what it may entail. The invitation features a 3D Apple logo design composed of yellow, green, and blue discs.
It is notable that Apple is specifically using the word “experience,” rather than “event.” Unlike a full live-streamed event from Apple Park, the March 4 event in other cities is likely to be smaller in scale.
Among the products expected soon — either by annual schedule predictability, or via the rumor mill — are the iPhone 17e, an updated iPad Air (going from the M3 to M4), an updated base-model iPad (going from A16 to A18), updated MacBook Pros with the M5 Pro and Max, updated MacBook Airs (going from M4 to M5 — the M4 models were released in early March last year), and, per Gurman, the long-rumored new lower-cost MacBook with an A18 chip (a “MacBook e”, if you will, although I certainly don’t think that will be the name — my guess is Apple will just call it “MacBook” without an adjective).
What strikes me is that March 4 — the “experience” day — is a Wednesday. So my spitball guess is that they announce all these products via Newsroom press releases, day-by-day. Like, say, the iPhone 17e on Monday, new iPad(s) on Tuesday, and new MacBooks on Wednesday. And then the “experience” will be a hands-on thing with in-person demos. Spread the announcements out across a few days, but then have in-person events for members of the media to get a hands-on experience with all of them, station-by-station, without needing to produce an Apple Event keynote film.
For the second time in two weeks, a powerful tropical cyclone struck Madagascar. On January 31, Fytia battered the remote northwestern coast of the island with destructive winds and torrential rains that displaced thousands of people. Less than two weeks later, Gezani made a direct hit on one of the island’s largest cities before sweeping past areas that Fytia had just flooded.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of Gezani as it neared Madagascar on February 10, 2026. At the time, the storm was undergoing rapid intensification. Its sustained winds peaked at 200 kilometers (125 miles) per hour before making landfall at Category 3 hurricane strength.
According to meteorologists with the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, the storm developed amid conditions “highly favorable” to strengthening, including sea surface temperatures above 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit), wind shear below 20 kilometers (12 miles) per hour, and an unusually moist atmosphere. As the storm passed near Toamasina, Madagascar’s second-largest city, satellites that contribute to NASA’s IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM) product measured rain rates up to 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) per hour.
The deluge caused widespread flooding in Toamasina and several other parts of the island. Preliminary damage assessments from Madagascar’s National Office for Risk and Disaster Management linked the storm to dozens of deaths, hundreds of injuries, and damage to more than 27,000 homes. Reports from news outlets and humanitarian groups described chaotic conditions in Toamasina, with widespread power outages, numerous collapsed roofs, and a lack of clean water.
Before and After
January 29, 2026 – February 14, 2026
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this false-color image of severe flooding near Brickaville, just south of Toamasina, on February 14, 2026 (right). For comparison, the left image shows the same area before the storm. Villages and farmland along the Rongaronga River appear particularly hard hit. Crops commonly grown in this area include rice, vanilla, lychees, black pepper, cloves, and cinnamon, according to researchers from the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development.
Madagascar is one of the most cyclone-prone countries in Africa, with about six storms typically affecting the island each year and two making direct landfall. The cyclone season generally runs from November through April, with peak activity between January and March.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
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A rare tropical cyclone dropped torrential rains on the Indonesian island, fueling extensive and destructive floods.
The super typhoon headed for Guangdong province after lashing Taiwan and northern Luzon in the Philippines.
The tropical cyclones are close enough in proximity that they may influence one another.
The post A Second Cyclone Slams Madagascar appeared first on NASA Science.
Last week I got to meet Martin Fowler for the first time in person. This was an exciting moment for me. Martin ranks high on my personal pantheon; he is, so far as I can tell, hardly ever wrong.
After letting me know that he “only hugs on this side of the Rockies” (noted), the topic of writing books came up, to which he drawled,
“The second edition should always be shorter. I always made my second editions shorter. Shorter books are better books.”
God dammit, Martin.. Now you tell me. 🙈
In related news, our last few chapters for “Observability Engineering, 2nd edition” go out to tech reviewers this week! This puts us on track for dead tree publication in June, although chapters will be available earlier for O’Reilly subscribers as well as behind an email gate on the Honeycomb site.
Almost everything. The only chapters that carry over some material are the ones on sampling, retriever (columnar store), and a smattering of the SLO stuff—maybe 10% all told? And we’ve added a monstrous amount of new material.
So no, it will not be shorter than the first edition. It is almost twice as long.1 (Sorry!)
On the bright side, I do think it will be clearer, more usable, and useful to a wider range of contributors, all over the org chart, than our messy little first edition ever was.
Books, as I understand, are like children; if you made them, you are not allowed to say you aren’t proud of them.
So fine, I won’t say it. But I think we can all privately agree that the first edition was a bit of a hot mess.
No shade on my wonderful co-authors, Liz and George, or our O’Reilly editors, or myself for that matter. We did our best, but now, with the clarity of hindsight, it’s easy to see all the ways the ground was shifting under us as we wrote.
When we started the book in 2018, Honeycomb was the only observability company, and our definition of observability—high cardinality, high dimensionality, explorability—was the only definition. By the time the book came out in 2021, everyone was rebranding their products as observability, Gartner had waded into the fray.. it was a mess.
Perhaps the mature thing to do would be to have gone back and rewritten the book in light of the evolving market definition. But while I won’t speak for my co-authors, after 3.5 years, I was pretty fucking desperate to be done.
I swore I would never go through that again. And when O’Reilly first approached us about writing a second edition, my first reaction was blind panic.
But once my lizard brain calmed down, I realized two things. Number one, it absolutely needed to be written; number two, I definitely wanted to help write it.
SO MUCH has changed. SO MUCH needs saying. When we met up in June to pull together a new outline, it seemed to just flow out of us.
A few of the many things that were not at all clear in 2018, but are crystal clear today:
Who we are writing for (software engineers)
What they are doing (instrumenting their code and analyzing it in production, with and without AI)
What observability means to analysts and the market at large (literally anything to do with software telemetry)
The integrations game is over, and OpenTelemetry has won
Most companies still don’t have real observability. And they don’t know it. 😕
I am excited and incredibly grateful for the opportunity to take a second whack at this book in the era of AI. Not how I thought I’d feel, but I will take it.
We brought Austin Parker on as a fourth co-author very early, with a special emphasis on topics related to OpenTelemetry and AI.
We also invited a number of people we admire to contribute in a variety of formats… guest chapters, use cases, stories, embedded advice, and more:
Jeremy Morrell on how to instrument your code effectively
Hanson Ho and Matt Klein on observability for mobile and frontend
Kesha Mykhailov and Darragh Curran from Intercom on fast feedback loops and developing with LLMs
Dale McDiarmid, Xander Garbett, and Rory Crispin on how to use Clickhouse for observability workloads
Rick Clark on the mechanics of driving organizational transformation in order to build and learn at the speed of AI
Frank Chen, a returning champion from our first edition, wrote about ontologies for your instrumentation chain
Phillip Carter wrote about eval pipelines and instrumenting LLMs
Mat Vine has a case study about moving ANZ from thresholds to SLIs/SLOs
Mike Kelly on managing telemetry pipelines for fun and profit
Hugo Santos on how to instrument your CI/CD pipelines
Peter Corless made our chapter on “Build vs Buy (vs Open Source)” immensely better and more well-rounded
What a fucking list, huh? 🙌
Truly, this book is a veritable rogues gallery of engineers and companies we look up to (including some of our own direct competitors 😉). The one thing all these people have in common (besides being great writers with a unique perspective, and people who are willing to return our emails) is that we share a similar vision for observability and the future of software development.
In addition to the sections written for software engineers on “Instrumentation Fundamentals” and “Analysis Workflows”, both with and without AI, we have a section on “Observability Use Cases” and another on “Technical Deep Dives”, which lets us cover even more ground.
Which brings us to the last section, the one that I personally signed up to write.
When we met in June, I successfully pitched Liz and George on adding one final section: “Observability Governance”. Unlike the rest of the book, these chapters would be written for the observability team, or the platform engineering team, or whoever is wrestling with problems like cost containment and tool migrations.
I sketched out a few ideas and started writing. July passed, August, September…I was cranking out one governance chapter per month, right on track, planning to wrap up well before November.
In September, halfway through my last chapter, I reached out to the internet for advice. “Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use some help.”
The response was ✨tremendous✨; my inbox swelled with interesting stories, bitter rants, lessons learned, and practical tips from engineers and executives alike.
But when I tried to finish the chapter, my engine stalled out. I could not write. I kept doggedly blocking off time on my calendar, silencing interruptions, staring at drafts, writing and rewriting, trying every angle. Four weeks passed with no progress made.
Five weeks. Six.
Tomorrow I’ll publish the second half of this story, in which the due date for my chapters comes and goes, and I end up throwing away everything I had written and starting over from scratch. Good times!
Edited to add: the second half is up!!
If we ever write a third edition, I swear on the lives of my theoretical children that it will be MUCH shorter than this one.
"A ghost in the Milky Way…” says Christian Bertincourt,
