Up, and by coach to White Hall, and there in the long Matted Gallery I find Sir G. Carteret, Sir J. Minnes, and Sir W. Batten — and by and by comes the King to walk there with three or four with him; and soon as he saw us, says he, “Here is the Navy Office,” and there walked twenty turns the length of the gallery, talking, methought, but ordinary talke. By and by came the Duke, and he walked, and at last they went into the Duke’s lodgings. The King staid so long that we could not discourse with the Duke, and so we parted. I heard the Duke say that he was going to wear a perriwigg; and they say the King also will. I never till this day observed that the King is mighty gray.
Thence, meeting with Creed, walked with him to Westminster Hall, and thence by coach took up Mrs. Hunt, and carried her towards my house, and we light at the ’Change, and sent her to my house, Creed and I to the Coffeehouse, and then to the ’Change, and so home, and carried a barrel of oysters with us, and so to dinner, and after a good dinner left Mrs. Hunt and my wife making marmalett of quinces, and Creed and I to the perriwigg makers, but it being dark concluded of nothing, and so Creed went away, and I with Sir W. Pen, who spied me in the street, in his coach home.
There found them busy still, and I up to my vyall. Anon, the comfiture being well done, my wife and I took Mrs. Hunt at almost 9 at night by coach and carried Mrs. Hunt home, and did give her a box of sugar and a haunch of venison given me by my Lady the other day. We did not ’light, but saw her within doors, and straight home, where after supper there happening some discourse where my wife thought she had taken Jane in a lie, she told me of it mighty triumphantly, but I, not seeing reason to conclude it a lie, was vexed, and my wife and I to very high words, wherein I up to my chamber, and she by and by followed me up, and to very bad words from her to me, calling me perfidious and man of no conscience, whatever I pretend to, and I know not what, which troubled me mightily, and though I would allow something to her passion, yet I see again and again that she spoke but somewhat of what she had in her heart. But I tempered myself very well, so as that though we went to bed with discontent she yielded to me and began to be fond, so that being willing myself to peace, we did before we sleep become very good friends, it being past 12 o’clock, and so with good hearts and joy to rest.
A highly skilled product manager, former colleague, told me they wanted to treat the genie like a copier. “Just tell me when you finish the 300 copies, as long as you don’t take a ridiculous amount of time.”
I get it. I’d like to say, “Write a high-performance, large-memory Smalltalk virtual machine with database semantics,” & have it come back when it’s…
Believe it or not, this is not a post about the NY Times. On Sunday, Democratic congresswoman and Michigan senate primary candidate Haley Stevens immolated what remains of her political career by endorsing and appearing in public with rightwing Republican Michigan senate candidate Mike Rogers. What most people are trying to figure out is why Stevens would do this. By way of Atrios, we get some inside skinny from another Michigan senate primary candidate Mallory McMorrow’s husband, Ray Wert:
What I would like to know is how Stevens ever got traction in the first place. If Wert is correct about Stevens, she was a disaster waiting to happen (at least with someone like Fetterman, part of his shift can be attributed to his stroke–and has been). And it’s not like she’s a political virtuoso with some flaws. She’s basically a replacement-level Democrat. Somewhere along the way, someone should have realized this is not a person you want running for the Senate, especially in an important race.
Worse, unlike Platner, she’s not an outsider. She was the establishment’s preferred candidate. Yet somehow this latent dumpster fire was able to survive and thrive in the Democratic Party*. We need better vetting.
*Stevens has links to Steven Rattner, but I have no idea if that played any role whatsoever in her political ascent.
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On Sunday, Rep. Haley Stevens finally concluded her slow-motion shivving of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, by endorsing conservative Republican and Trump ally Mike Rogers. After promising again and again to support her party’s nominee — less than 24 hours earlier she assured Charlotte Clymer that nothing had changed and she was still standing with El-Sayed — Stevens attended a campaign event in Detroit with Rogers and posted this video:
Why did she do it? It appears to be mostly personal resentment. El-Sayed beat her, she got a lot of mockery online from his supporters, she didn’t feel like he and his campaign were solicitous enough of her, and she went from thinking she was going to be a senator to wondering whether her career in politics is over, which has to be emotionally difficult. When she appeared with Rogers, she cited Hasan Piker twice, mentioned that she got booed off the stage at a Democratic event, and repeatedly noted that El-Sayed’s campaign told her not to campaign with him — without mentioning that happened aftershe and her fiancé started going on TV to bad-mouth El-Sayed. Until that happened, she was supposed to appear with El-Sayed; it was once it became clear she was trying to sabotage him that he told her to buzz off.
Stevens also said multiple times that she wasn’t trying to “sway anything” in the election, but was just expressing her personal opinion. Which is obviously ridiculous; if that was the case, she could vote however she wanted in private; the whole point of publicly endorsing Rogers is to convince people to vote for him, which also means undermining the Democratic Party’s chances of winning control of the Senate.
But set aside the reasons why she did it. What matters more is that Stevens has demonstrated something I’ve been trying to get people to understand for a while:
Progressives are not the internal problem Democrats face. Centrists are the problem.
This runs counter to the elite media narrative about the ideological conflict inside the party, which assumes that a bunch of wacky lefties are going to come to Washington and ruin their party’s chances of winning, while sensible centrists who have a keen eye for what appeals to the voters try desperately to pull the party to the middle, where all virtue and wisdom are to be found.
So those media rush to quote James Carville, a guy whose entire authority rests on the fact that he worked on a winning campaign 34 years ago, on how terrible it is that there are progressives in the party. Groups like Third Way never fail to get ample press coverage for every memo they release insisting that centrism is the solution to all problems, despite the fact that they have no constituency whatsoever apart from some rich people who fund them.
And yet, every progressive candidate who lost a primary to a candidate more to the center than them is out there working for the Democratic ticket, or at the very least keeping their mouths shut. None of them are saying “Don’t vote for the Democrat,” and they sure as hell aren’t endorsing Republicans. Only a centrist would do that.
For instance, here’s Francesca Hong, the Democratic socialist who lost the primary for governor in Wisconsin, working to elect other Democrats:
Sure, we all know some radical poseurs who say “Republicans and Democrats are all part of the neoliberal capitalist oppressor class, which is why I’ve never voted and never will.” But if you’re talking about those who run for office today, the progressives are far more pragmatic than the centrists. They’re the ones willing to grit their teeth and support policies and candidates they have misgivings about. Once the primary is settled, they get in line because they have things they want to accomplish, and they know that letting Republicans win another election will be disastrous for everything they care about.
And when it comes to policymaking, the perfidy of the centrists is even more striking. If I showed you a headline from the last few years reading “Democratic senator stymies own party’s legislative push,” who would you assume that’s about? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? Ed Markey? Of course not. The first person you’d think of is Joe Manchin, then Kyrsten Sinema or John Fetterman. They’re the ones who undermined the Democratic legislative agenda when Joe Biden was president, who refused to compromise, who voted to confirm Trump nominees, and who generally make it difficult for Democrats to accomplish difficult things.
And yes, there is going to be an ideological conflict within the party. But if they don’t win, the progressives will compromise to get some of what they want, because they actually care about making progress. If the centrists don’t win, on the other hand, they’ll whine and moan, undermine their party, and in doing so make it less likely that Democrats win the next election. Just like Haley Stevens is doing.
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Both of these movies I found worth watching. Fjord won the Golden Prize at Cannes, and it concerns the rights of the family vs. the rights of the state, when it comes to raising children. As I interpreted the story, it was so right-wing and so based I am shocked it won. It is by the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who is best known for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, also referred to as “the Romanian abortion movie.” His new outing is a quality film but I found theh messaging a bit heavy-handed at times (and am I one to defend European bureaucracy?), noting that some critics are still debating which side the director took so “maybe it is just me.”
Fatherland is a Polish take on postwar Germany and some travels of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika. A German director might have been afraid to portray the communism of East Germany as this movie does, in any case I found that convincing. It captures what I imagine the immediate postwar era to have been like, and the moral dilemmas people faced as they had to decide their future relationships with Germany (and indeed Germanies), past, present, and future. At one hour, twenty-two minutes it worked very well, though it requires the viewer to know a good deal about German history, literature, and culture.
So over the past year or so, I’ve become a huge fan of Buffie Chanel, the Huntington Beach bad-ass and a woman unafraid to speak out against her city’s absolutely brutal and destructive and cruel and dickish city council.
Which is to say, listen to every … single … word spoken here.
Every.
Single.
Word.
If you live in Surf City, there is a legitimate opportunity to change the tone, approach and decency of a seven-person board that has gone completely nuts.
So vote Taryn Palumbo, Erin Spivey, Ben Davis and Brenda Glim. Can they all win? In a city that leans heavily conservative, it’d be a bit of a miracle. But can one or two (or three? Or four?) crack through the plaster and start showing residents that civic-mindedness is far more important than R or D?
Having seemingly given up on the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump and the officials in his administration are indicating that they intend to steal the 2026 midterm election to maintain Republican control of the Senate.
Trump continues to try to use the power of the government to boost his own popularity. On Friday and Saturday, Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano sent an email to people with online Social Security accounts declaring that under Trump, “the Social Security Administration (SSA) is transforming into a model of excellence,” producing “the best performance in the agency’s 91-year-history.” More than 100 million Americans have online SSA accounts.
In fact, as Tara Siegel Bernard reported in the New York Times in July, the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts of about 14% of SSA staff have created service delays. It’s much harder to get an in-person appointment, and although the agency reports that average phone response times dropped from 11 minutes to 5 minutes, it achieved that reduction by counting anyone who agrees to hang up and accept a return phone call as waiting zero minutes.
But it’s not just in boosting Trump that the administration is corrupting our government. Yesterday, in an astonishing illustration of just how thoroughly Trump and his cronies are weaponizing the government to cement their power, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop threatening local and state election officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t do as the administration demands.
Victoria Craw of the Washington Post reported that Thompson said that Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin exceeded their authority when they sent warning letters to state election officials because states, not the federal government, are responsible for congressional elections. She also noted that they likely violated the Voting Rights Act by intimidating election officials.
“In the lead-up to the election,” Thompson wrote, “high-ranking DOJ and DHS officials have engaged in a campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees who are engaged in administering the ongoing midterm 2026 election. Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters.”
“One of the hallmarks of a fair election is the freedom to exercise the right to vote free from threat, fear, or intimidation,” the judge wrote. “Free exercise of the right to vote is a core tenet of our democracy. It requires safeguarding to ensure full participation and public trust in our elections.”
Central to this effort to keep control of the Senate is the state of Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has a slight edge over the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan.
In late October, the administration sued to prevent the certification of any candidate in the election unless Sullivan wins. The administration’s argument was that Alaskan election officials had agreed to permit two candidates with similar names to be on the ballot.
On Friday, October 30, after a New York Times article alleged that members of Peltola’s staff recruited a challenger with a name similar to Republican Dan Sullivan—a common and legal maneuver both parties engage in—the administration asked a judge to order election officials in Alaska to separate all ballots that rank Daniel J. Sullivan from the rest of the ballots in the election.
As Gary Grumbach and Kyla Guilfoil reported at NBC News, they claimed they wanted the ballots separated “for the purposes of investigating whether such ranking was the product of voter confusion, should such an investigation become necessary.”
They did not explain how such a ballot could be reviewed or how reviewing a ballot would explain if a voter was confused. It also downplayed that under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, any ballots on which the lesser known Sullivan is ranked first will automatically go to the voter’s second choice—presumably Dan Sullivan—if no candidate wins more than 50% of the votes on the first round.
Today U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska dismissed the lawsuit prohibiting the state from certifying any winner in Alaska other than the Republican incumbent. She wrote that the administration had not provided a “workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified ‘investigation’ of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy.”
The administration, willing to violate Americans’ right to a secret ballot in order to make sure a Republican holds Alaska’s Senate seat, immediately filed a notice that it would appeal.
The Alaska Supreme Court signed off on the ballot months ago, specifying that the ballots would identify Senator Sullivan as the Republican incumbent and list the other Sullivan without a party affiliation.
Meanwhile, Democrats have filed a lawsuit over Alaska’s apparent failure to fully open at least 18 early voting locations in rural Alaska, disproportionately affecting the opportunity of Native Alaskans to vote.
Trump wants to retain power, but he seems to have little concern for the Americans he wants to govern. Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that Trump spent last night at a lavish jungle-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, where guests could feast on Alaskan king crab and eat from a caviar bar.
Even as Americans are struggling under soaring prices of gasoline and diesel caused by Trump’s war on Iran, and as polls show almost 70% of Americans are unhappy with Trump’s handling of the economy, Trump was proud to party with wealthy people three days before the midterms. “Look at all my rich members,” Trump crowed to reporters covering the event. “They spent all day getting ready. Look at these guys.” “These are the biggest guys on Wall Street.”
Pager reported that Trump repeated his anger with his former lawyer Alina Habba Mildon, who allegedly pocketed $50 million for obtaining a pardon from Trump for a Venezuelan billionaire. In a different article on October 29, Pager reported that Trump has told people around him that Mildon should make sure some of that money moves in his direction. He wants her to donate some of the $50 million payout to one of the projects that he’s pushing: his future presidential library, for example.
Pager noted that at his Halloween party, Trump also acknowledged the story Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur, Tripp Mickle, and Julian E. Barnes broke in the New York Times on October 29 that a Chinese spy targeted Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang to obtain information about the company’s advanced AI chips. Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was allegedly sending information gathered from Jensen Huang directly to Beijing, facilitating China’s acquisition of advanced chip technology. Previous presidents have thought such a transfer endangers national security.
Although he was briefed about the intelligence about a year ago, Trump chose to do nothing about it. The reporters note that Trump has not wanted to disrupt Nvidia sales, which are key to the strength of the stock market, or to complicate trade with China even more than he already has.
Last night, asked about Jensen Huang, Trump told reporters: “I have a lot of respect for him. I like him. We hope everything’s OK.” He added: “We’ll check it out. We’re going to check it out very closely.” Asked if he would keep Huang on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Trump said he “would like to say yes.”
“I mean, unless we find out something to the contrary,” Pager reports Trump as saying. “I’ve always found Jensen Huang to be very above board. But you know, you’re dealing in a very complex issue, I will say.”
With the midterm approaching and early turnout that appears to favor Democrats surging, Republicans who are not close to Trump appear to be sliding away from him. On Saturday the Republicans in control of Alaska’s state government asked Judge Thompson to reject the administration’s lawsuit, pointing out that “frivolous” candidates are legal and that the Alaska ballot actually includes a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, Eric Hafner, apparently pushed by Republicans to take votes from the Democrats. Hafner is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence in New York and has never lived in Alaska.
They reiterated that states, not the federal government, control elections.
And even while administration loyalists suggest they will accept the results of the Alaska election only if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan wins, when asked today if he shared that position, Sullivan himself told CNN: “No. I’m going to accept the election results.”
Last Friday, Reddit had its worst day since its IPO, with a drop of almost 30%1. It didn’t matter that they beat their third-quarter estimates; what mattered most was a weak Q4 forecast and the quote from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, “Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter.” He also wrote, “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week.”
There’s no baseline to understand whether 1 million referrals is a lot or a little, but there is no doubt a stock dropping 30% in a day is a lot.
Reddit, which I am certain looks at the data daily, has seen this coming for years; hence their other announcements that shape a larger strategy:
Testing a logged-in-only experience outside the U.S.
Dot #1: Traditional Google search: you search for X, Google searches for X and provides a list of high-quality X links, which — if the links are high quality — means you click on X, which is a Reddit post about X.
Google would greatly prefer if you didn’t click on X because the moment you do, you’ve left Google and they’ve mostly lost their ability to present you with advertising. You read that right: the reason you go to Google is to find other high-quality stuff that they don’t want you to actually see. My favorite attempt was AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, where publishers built lightweight copies of their content, and Google served them from their own servers. Yes, you were promised a traffic advantage, but you lose control over design, ads, and analytics.
Google dropped AMP’s search perks in 2021 in the face of continued criticism, but all they really had to do was wait a few years because a vastly better solution would present itself.
Dot #2: I’m guessing sometime in 2022, all the AI players started sucking down all the data in order to train ever-improving models. The more data? The better the models. It’s vastly more complicated than that, but alarms at Reddit apparently started going off in April of 2023, when they moved to charge for API access. The CEO quote: “… [w]e don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
While content producers perhaps saw a massive theft of intellectual property, content consumers did not. What they eventually saw was the eerily accurate answer to the dumb throwaway question they typed into their first chatbot. They thought, “Golly, that’s cool.”2 Sub-dot thought: Like Google, AI players have paradoxical motivations: the goal is to get you to use the services so they can help, but helping doesn’t pay the bills. Using more tokens is the business, which means that, like Google, the gig is to keep helping whether you want the help or not.
Dot #3: Present day. Google has a feature called AI Overviews, which you’ve already seen. It’s a human-sounding summary that attempts to answer your questions. There is no way to turn it off — it exists to keep you on Google. The research shows that when an AI Overview shows, clicks on the first result drop 58%. More than half the folks who would have clicked that top result are no longer leaving, which means more sweet, sweet ad revenue.
That’s Not the Dot
I’ve spent the past decade watching the blogging community vanish. There are the stalwarts, but the vast majority of bloggers either stopped or left for lighter-weight walled gardens. Sure, blogging was a fad. Writing, however, is not. I get it — it’s easier to write a pithy one-line Reddit post than a fully fleshed-out thought. Guilty as charged.
I giggle when folks mention Google is in trouble because of declining search usage. First, decades of search habits will take time to disassemble and reassemble. Second, if you are using Google Search less, I’m guessing you’re still using Gmail and similar Google services. If you’re like me and have wired the robots into Gmail, you’re using Gmail significantly more. Yes, I’ve turned off every switch that says “don’t train on me,” but go throw those switches yourself and report on how confident you are that you flipped them all successfully.
I started this piece with Reddit because the company provides a service that creates tremendous value, and I’m not talking about the monetary value; I’m talking about the social value. Early on in my robot journeys, I asked Claude to source any fact it shared with me. I skimmed the sources and was surprised to see how often a random Reddit post was the source of the robot’s thoughts.
Yes, the robot sucked down all the books (including all of mine). Yes, they did the same with countless images, as well. I feel we haven’t yet seen the full set of legal consequences, but that’s not the dot: it’s the value of humans talking with other humans, building things for each other — often simple, frequently hilarious, and doing the work to document why they did what they did… because they want to help.
This was supposed to be a brief introduction to a new feature I’m launching on Rands on Tuesday, but it turned into a whole bunch of dots explaining the disproportionate value of what happens when humans hang with other humans.
See you Tuesday.
This drop was certainly amplified by a broad AI bubble sell-off that isn’t close to over.
My latest paper, The Price of a Cure: Luxturna and the Economic Dilemmas of Precision Medicine, is in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. I discuss the economics of the pharmaceutical industry and the special issues that arise with targeted drugs that cure. We are going to get many more of these drugs in the future–more value but smaller patient group–so this paper is timely.
The $850,000 price for the gene therapy Luxturna is often framed as a story of private profiteering from publicly funded science. This paper challenges that narrative. Pharmaceuticals are a hit-driven industry: most projects fail, so the few successes must earn revenues well in excess of their own direct costs if the portfolio as a whole is to attract investment. Precision medicine intensifies this logic through two core economic challenges: (1) the “sticker shock” of one-time cures, which compress decades of value into a single payment, creating a financing problem more than a value problem; and (2) the “targeting dilemma,” in which precisely targeting drugs to smaller patient groups shrinks the market, requiring higher rewards per treated patient to maintain incentives to innovate. Rather than simply controlling prices, the paper proposes a policy toolkit that includes amortizing payments over time, bundling diagnostics with drugs and insurance, and streamlining regulation to lower development costs. The aim is to preserve innovation while expanding patient access.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the 53-year-old Democratic senator who was seen as a likely 2028 candidate, has suffered a stroke, according to his staff. “The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery,” his chief of staff said in a statement.
3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is?
First, let me remind you: be sure to join us tomorrow night starting at 8:00 p.m. ET for our TPM’s YouTube livestream coverage of the election night results. It’ll be me, TPM Publisher Joe Ragazzo and different members of the TPM team will cycle through over the course of the evening, discussing different races, sharing color commentary, answering your questions in real time, etc.
As you’ve likely seen, a final round of NYT/Siena polls came out last night and they point to the bottom falling out for the GOP in key Senate races across the country. As Kate Riga and I have discussed in numerous TPM Show episodes, the NYT/Siena poll is a high quality poll which for a variety of not terribly good reasons (largely the Times’ megaphone, but also getting closer than others in a few key cycles) has influence and impact far greater than any other poll. I saw an apt comment from Nate Silver this morning, essentially, the polls no longer say this is close. The polls, collectively, say Democrats will win the senate. They could be wrong. But what they’re saying is no longer ambiguous or too close to call.
Here’s the most interesting datapoint out of Times’ poll analyst Nate Cohn’s discussion of these final surveys. After the 2024 election, Times/Siena re-weighted their polling methodology to more accurately capture hard-to-reach Trump supporters. Generally these are non-college, non-Hispanic whites who Trump is particularly able to bring to the polls.
As you can see here, this change pushes these new polls significantly in the GOP direction. As Cohn puts it, it’s truly a choose your own adventure scenario.
First, a minor point. You’ll notice that the delta between the two weightings is not uniform. In Kansas and Ohio it halves a Democratic lead. In Texas it’s just two points. This reminds us that in the Trump era, Texas polls have been pretty accurate. And that’s likely because the share of non-college, non-Hispanic white voters in Texas is much smaller than in these other states.
The most important thing to remember about this re-weighting is that they did this for a reason: the very real underestimation of Republican voters in the Trump era. So we shouldn’t just be thinking, “Oh cool! Look, the real number is even better!”
That said, you can see here and more broadly, how there are very real paths through which all these polls could be systematically underestimating Democratic strength rather than the GOP underestimation everyone is focusing on.
Here’s one question I don’t have a good answer to.
We’ve previously discussed the clear difference in polls between Trump-era presidential and midterm years. They underestimate Republicans in presidentials (2016, 2020, 2024) and are pretty dead on in midterms (2018, 2022). It seems like they’ve taken a re-weighting designed to correct misses in 2024 and applied it to a midterm cycle, despite the fact that we haven’t really seen those misses in midterms. Cohn doesn’t address this in a crystal clear way. But he seems to be saying that is what they’ve done.
Here’s Cohn (emphasis added)…
What does all of this mean for 2026? Well, you can choose your own adventure. More than anything, it illustrates how hard it is to predict how the polls might err.
Maybe it implies that we’ve adopted weighting techniques that can handle the problems that caused the Times/Siena poll to overestimate Democratic strength in the past, especially in white working-class states. If so, maybe we’re dead-on.
Or perhaps one could argue that the Times/Siena polls will underestimate Democrats. Our polls were accurate in 2018 and 2022, after all, so maybe one should trust the old approach in a midterm election. If so, maybe the Democrats will do even better than our polls suggest.
As Cohn said, choose your own adventure. More broadly, polling error is fundamentally unpredictable. We’ve come to know the specific issue of non-white, non-Hispanic white voters and their characteristic reluctance resistance to participating in polls. But there are lots of potential sources of polling error. We won’t know the results until we know them.
From what I can tell, the details on Haley Stevens’s last 36 hours, which I reported earlier this afternoon, have now been confirmed, re-reported by the Post and other publications. Appreciate the congrats. I think the best bet is that we, political obsessives, are overestimating how much this whole drama will affect the outcome in either direction. But if it has any effect, I think there’s a decent chance it will actually redound to Abdul El-Sayed’s benefit. One of the things that’s been hard to miss over the course of the day is the sheer intensity of the denunciations of Stevens from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, including many of her one-time supporters. That has many sources — but one of the biggest is that, as I reported earlier, she told many of these people, person to person, last night that she was absolutely still going to vote for El-Sayed. So they feel personally very burned.
It also seems questionable to me that this plays that well with the state’s Black population, which is of course crucial for any Democratic candidate. I’m not picking that community out of a hat. This whole day was about two events at Black churches in Detroit. The whole drama turns on a visit by Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina, who was in the state to host a unity rally bringing Stevens and El-Sayed together on one stage. Stevens repeatedly lauded Clyburn as her mentor and hero in the statement she released placing conditions on El-Sayed late last week. But the net effect of all this has basically been to try to bigfoot and overshadow the whole effort and sort of humiliate him. I think it’s quite likely that backfires and actually creates a groundswell of anger which has no obvious point of release other than votes for El-Sayed.
Obviously things like this are very unpredictable. And I’m certainly no expert on the intricacies of Michigan politics. My point is really only that I wouldn’t go into this with the assumption that it’s obvious that this hurts El-Sayed and it’s only a question of how much. That’s not at all clear to me.
I will repeat, based on my own reporting, I think the last three or four days for Stevens is vastly more personal than any kind of behind-the-scenes strategy by anyone other than her and her fiancé.
One final point, a deep irony. Beyond the result of this race, there are important implications for factional rivalries in the Democratic Party. Many centrist players saw El-Sayed as too risky a nominee, apart from whatever particular policy disagreements they had with him. If he loses, they’ll say: see, you can’t run someone like this for Senate. For his supporters, it’s a major proof of concept. If he wins, they’ll say: Look! All that stuff about how you can’t run a progressive candidate wasn’t true. We tried it. It worked.
Obviously every race is specific. So the lessons you draw from a single race are always complicated and over-determined. But the test case aspect of this race has always been there. Stevens and her fiancé are obviously very much on the “too risky” side of this. The irony is that if El-Sayed loses, she will 100% be blamed. So even seen through the prism of her own factional interests, this was a major, major self-own. That’s not just because it sucks to get blamed for something, but the upside of this race for more centrist Democrats was always that if he lost they could say: I told you so. That’s really no longer the case. The answer will be: it’s Haley Stevens’s fault.
Let me share a few quick thoughts about former Democratic Senate primary candidate Haley Stevens. As you’ve likely seen, Stevens showed up this morning at a Black church in Detroit with Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Let me say first that my best guess is that Abdul El-Sayed is going to win this race and that all this final-days drama with Stevens won’t end up to have mattered. I will also say that I can’t remember a spectacle quite like this, or any defeated Democratic primary candidate crashing out like this, in 30-plus years of observing Democratic politics very, very closely.
On Friday I said that while to that point I’d questioned Stevens’ judgment, wisdom and decision-making, I was now questioning her sanity. That was only slightly tongue-in-cheek. And even less so now. There’s a level of erratic, boffo behavior here that is even more than appears on the surface. From a mix of watching the morning shows and my own reporting, I can tell you that as recently as last night Stevens told multiple Democratic power players that she was still going to vote for Abdul El-Sayed. Last night. As I’m writing this, in addition to the church appearance, I’ve just seen that she is now officially endorsing Mike Rogers. She seems to be blaming that to some degree on that fact that she was disinvited from today’s Democratic unity rally. But whatever you think of Stevens and El-Sayed, her statement in advance of that rally made disinviting her unavoidable. She quite literally forced it.
I don’t know Stevens, have never met her, though I know a number of people who do know her quite well. At least from the outside, and to some degree from the inside, it does appear that there is some sort of mutual catalyzing and mutual weirdness-escalation between Stevens and her fiancé, Jason Turkish, who caused headlines last week by announcing that he planned to vote for Mike Rogers. Watching their tag-teaming over the last few days, there’s a vibe of two dorky high schoolers who find true love and then launch into some kind of manic apotheosis of mutual dorkdom. Everyone deserves happiness and to find their soulmate, obviously. But it’s quite a thing to see unfolding like this at the center of a top-tier Senate campaign.
Each thing that has happened over the last 36 hours seem to have been a total surprise, even to her closest aides and advisors; as the Detroit News is apparently now reporting, all or most of her senior House staff resigned this morning. Staff was literally waiting for her at this morning’s Clyburn unity event thinking she was about to arrive.
In any case, from the point when Stevens sent out that lengthy statement about the unity rally, which is underway today, it was clear that her future in Democratic politics was over. Now … well, I’ve seen various people saying she’s angling for a lobbying gig. And that may absolutely be the case. But it’s not a selling point for any lobbying firm if you’re this toxic to every member of your own party.
What I can tell you pretty definitively is that even a significant number high profile Democrats who were and are highly skeptical of El-Sayed and in some cases not supporting him appear to be baffled and aghast by what they’re seeing.
Nothing is being attacked with space lasers in this Picture of the Week, although it may look like those four bright yellow streaks are menacing the galaxies to the right of the image. These streaks are, in fact, four artificial stars. As starlight passes through our restless atmosphere it gets blurred, distorting astronomical images. Artificial stars allow us to correct for this, but why do the ones in this picture look elongated rather than point sources, and how are they generated?
The artificial stars you see in this image were created by laser beams rising from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Each beam comes from one of the VLT’s four Unit Telescopes. The beams themselves show faintly at the lower left, scattering off the air on their way up. As they travel upwards, the atmosphere becomes less dense, and the beams appear progressively fainter. But when they reach 90 km above the ground they encounter a layer rich in sodium atoms that glow brightly as they are excited by the lasers.
Because these atoms are spread across a layer about 5-10 km thick, they appear as streaks when photographed from an angle, like in this picture taken 2.5 km away from the telescopes. But they look like point sources when seen from the telescopes where the lasers are coming from. An adaptive optics system monitors how these artificial points twinkle, and controls a thin flexible mirror that reshapes itself hundreds of times per second. This in turn unblurs the incoming light from the astronomical target one is observing.
The target in this case is the supermassive black hole at the centre of NGC 3227, one of the galaxies to the right of the image. It is what astronomers call an active galaxy, whose centre shines brightly as the black hole pulls in the gas around it. ESO astronomer James Leftley is studying several such galaxies with the GRAVITY and MATISSE instruments at the VLT Interferometer (VLTI), which links all four Unit Telescopes so that they work together like a single giant telescope up to 130 metres across. The facility was recently upgraded through the GRAVITY+ project, which saw lasers added to VLT telescopes. With these lasers, the VLTI and its instruments can unblur incoming light almost anywhere in the southern sky, creating stars on demand wherever they are needed.
I am not myself religious, but let us consider the possible gulf between behavior and doctrine amongst those who are.
It has long struck me as a kind of mini-puzzle why people feel so much grief for the departed, at least for the departed who are supposed to be headed for heaven (and yes there are supposed to be at least a few).
It is fine to miss those people after they are gone, but it seems that, in addition, their death is considered a tragic event to be mourned, and also if possible to be postponed. We are crying for them, not just for ourselves.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the religious belief that these people are headed to heaven. And I do not doubt the sincerity of the grief and mourning for their departure from this world.
So what is going on here? Why can’t you just be happy for them?
I believe that people often construct a portfolio of moods when faced with stressful situations. Sometimes they will mix a positive and a negative mood, other times they will mix two different kinds of negative mood (worried about a recession? Buy a book that heralds a financial crash and hold the talisman close to your chest as pre-emptive mood management exercise.)
So if the death of a loved one is a terrible event, there is a partial assuagement if you also think they are going to heaven. It makes their death modestly less terrible. But if you simply celebrated their passing, you would feel disloyal and like a rotten person who cannot recognize true loss. The point is not that you can make this bundle of feelings consistent, rather it is useful psychologically precisely because it is a portfolio and is not entirely consistent, and also not consistent over time. As your moods change, and you need an extra dose of either modest cheer or true mourning, you can adjust your blend accordingly.
Others kinds of portfolios end up being constructed. For instance sometimes you may focus on some other terrible thing, to distract yourself from the first pain that came along, a bit like how you might pinch yourself during a dental session. You might prefer to have a portfolio with more pain in a way, but some of it being pain you can control.
You can multiply additional examples in these directions.
When people hold views for reasons of mood management (however sincerely), typically they are unable to respond intelligently to questions challenging their beliefs. Even very smart people will pull b.s. out of the hat and stick with it, moving on rapidly, mentally, to some other topic. Their response is not really thought through, it is a placeholder for “now I can move on to something else.” After all, consistency was never the goal in the first place, you might even argue that anti-consistency was what was needed, and what proved to be psychologically stable.
I once asked someone religious about mourning death and the answer I received was something like “Well, the people in New Orleans celebrate death with funerals like parties.” Now, I am not sure how true that is, but assume it holds. It still resolutely refuses to address why the queried person might mourn and grieve the death of loved ones, rather than celebrate their ascent to heaven. Nonetheless it fills in the box “I did say something back to the initial query.” The person then wanted to simply move on to another topic.
If you challenge smart people on this issue, namely the discrepancy between beliefs and actions, they often will respond with extremely weak counters and dismissals, rather than thinking the issue through.
Once you see this kind of psychological portfolio construction in action, and learn how to identify it, you cannot unsee it.
These days, you see it especially frequently in response to AI and its advances. People have an odd love-hate relationship with the models, and they adjust their emotional balance as their stress needs may require. They do not want to give up either the very positive or the very negative side of their visions, because then they would have a non-diversified emotional portfolio, and they would be very vulnerable to disappointment.
You can understand some of the current AI debates by pondering how religious people react to the deaths of their loved ones. It was never about consistency in the first place.
I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is:
If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file
Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock versions for anything else that uses it.
Running uv run pytest etc tends to leave uv.lock files lying around, which are listed in .gitignore and so do not get committed to my repositories.
But... sometimes that uv.lock pins a version of a dependency that doesn't yet have a Python 3.15 wheel. An example from earlier today:
error: Failed to build `watchfiles==1.1.1`
cause: Call to `maturin.build_wheel` failed
error: the configured Python interpreter version (3.15) is newer
than PyO3's maximum supported version (3.14)
Deleting that file and running uv run pytest again usually fixes the problem.
More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...]
In the age of LLMs, what can maintainers do to ensure correct software and accurate documentation? Having done that work, how can they demonstrate its quality to users?
Donald Trump won in 2024 because millions of swing voters foolishly believed his economic promises, especially his promise to reverse the rise in prices that took place as the aftermath from Covid snarled global supply chains. If the polls are any indication, many of those voters now feel betrayed: Public approval for Trump’s economic management is incredibly low. As Trump might say, it’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before.
But exactly how bad is the Trump economy? That’s a slightly tricky question to answer. The current state of the U.S. economy isn’t disastrous. We have relatively low unemployment by historical standards. Inflation, while uncomfortably high, isn’t as high as it was during the supply chain shocks of 2021-2022, let alone during the stagflation of the 1970s.
True, many families are facing serious problems of affordability that aren’t fully captured by the Consumer Price Index, especially because of the exploding health care disaster.
Beyond that, Americans are surely angry because of two extreme dissonances: the stark dissonance between what Trump promised and what he has actually delivered, and the equally stark dissonance between Trump’s insistence that we’re experiencing a Golden Age and the definitely not golden financial reality of ordinary Americans’ lives. (And while I won’t discuss it here, Americans are surely angry that as their financial precarity worsens, the Trump family and its minions are raking in billions in graft: polls show that corruption has become a major political issue.)
Furthermore, while the public usually gives presidents too much credit when the economy does well and assigns them too much blame when it does badly, this time around the economy’s problems are Trump all the way. We’d be in much better shape economically if a Democrat or even a sane Republican (if such people still exist) were sitting in the White House.
Today’s primer, then, will be a pre-midterm report card on Trumponomics. I’ll start with a brief overview of the overall state of the economy, then move on to an assessment of Trump policy in four areas where Trump policies have had large effects. Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. How the overall economy has changed under Trump II
2. Energy policy and prices
3. Immigration and deportations
4. Tariffs
5. Health care
6. Grading Trump’s performance
Some readers may note that I’m not covering Trump’s oligarch-friendly tax cuts and the ballooning budget deficit. They’re important, but not yet having much political traction. So they’re topics for another day.
(Lord’s day). This morning my brother’s man brought me a new black baize waistecoate, faced with silke, which I put on from this day, laying by half-shirts for this winter. He brought me also my new gowne of purple shagg, trimmed with gold, very handsome; he also brought me as a gift from my brother, a velvet hat, very fine to ride in, and the fashion, which pleases me very well, to which end, I believe, he sent it me, for he knows I had lately been angry with him.
Up and to church with my wife, and at noon dined at home alone, a good calves head boiled and dumplings, an excellent dinner methought it was.
Then to church again, whither Sir W. Pen came, the first time he has been at church these several months, he having been sicke all the while.
Home and to my office, where I taught my wife some part of subtraction, and then fell myself to set some papers of my last night’s accounts in order, and so to supper home, and after supper another bout at arithmetique with my wife, and then to my office again and made an end of my papers, and so home to prayers, and then to read my vowes, and to bed.
Created by Claude with light editing by Tim O’Reilly
Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s CTO, joined Tim O’Reilly at our recent AI Codecon to talk about open source AI. Mozilla, of course, is the nonprofit that helped to define the open source revolution back in the late 1990s. Though its Firefox web browser was superseded as the market leader by Google Chrome, it played an essential role, along with Apache and the World Wide Web Consortium, in establishing the open standards of the web and keeping it from being dominated and enclosed by Microsoft, the dominant tech platform of that time. Now, Mozilla is one of the leading voices working to build an open, standards-based AI ecosystem.
Tim has long appreciated Raffi’s thoughtful, human-centered approach to technology. Raffi writes a newsletter called Owners Not Renters, whose message can be summed up by his statement that he doesn’t want a future with seven AGIs. He wants one with seven billion. He wants each of us to have an AI that we can trust with our secrets and that will look out for our interests, not an AI that’s optimized for the business model of its creators. In the early days of the web, we called the browser a user agent for a reason, Raffi said. It was on your side. It let you render pages however you wanted, managed your privacy and your cookies, and did its best to protect you from those who wanted to take advantage of web users. We need the same thing in the age of AI.
Raffi cited a paper in which researchers tested whether AI assistants could be trained to favor a company’s commercial interests over user welfare. In simulated flight-booking requests, 18 of 23 models recommended a more expensive sponsored option over a cheaper one more than half the time. It’s a hypothetical choice that we’ve seen play out time and time again, in industry after industry.
Open source AI is a big part of what it will take to get to Raffi’s vision. But sovereign AI loyal to each individual needs more than open source models alone. Raffi’s list of what has to be built around the model starts with memory, a place where your private data can live. It includes tool calling, so an agent can make a purchase or book a doctor’s appointment for you, the runtime environment where all of that runs, and the rules for how his agent talks to those working on behalf of others. It needs a harness. “That’s where evaluations happen. Guardrails happen, execution loops happen, tool calling happens, memory,” he explained. “All of that stuff is an opportunity, in my mind, of things that open source developers can be building.”
People hear the word “harness” and conclude that we need an open source version of whatever the proprietary labs are building. Tim asked Raffi whether a user-centered harness might do different things than those offered by the big labs. He agreed. The whole point of open source is for people to “scratch their own itch.” The ability to innovate without permission is the heart of the open source promise.
As a result, Mozilla wants to build a starting point. It aims to help the community define what an open memory protocol, a storage protocol, or authenticated tool calling with the right guardrails ought to look like. As Raffi noted, “Once we could define what those open standards look like, then a whole plethora of people can start playing and be interoperable. It’s basically. . .the internet all over again. We can build trillions of dollars of market cap on top of open protocols.”
Ease of use is still lacking, though. Mozilla’s 2026 State of Open Source AI report says open models are now within about 3% of the frontier, yet they don’t make it into production at the same rate as closed models. When Tim asked why, Raffi explained that open source is easy to release but hard to deploy. Developers still have to figure out hosting, provisioning, guardrails, and memory. With OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s API, you just hand over a credit card. What’s missing, he said, is the equivalent of a double-click installer for getting open source AI running inside an organization. But the companies that do the work to adopt open source AI are seeing big savings because open models are already good enough for most use cases. As Raffi put it, “You don’t need a Ferrari to manage your calendar.”
Raffi’s own daily agentic helper is Hermes running on GLM. He expects that Apple, Microsoft, or someone else will make this kind of agent into a consumer product in a couple of years, and that his mom will end up using it. For now, he said, we’re on the wrong part of the innovation curve, where you have to know how to code to get any of this working.
Tim disagreed. The industry goes through periods that are exciting for developers, creators, inventors, and companies trying to invent the future, and then it gets boring and a few big companies dominate it. We’re in the exciting part, he argued, before everything shakes out. As Raffi riffed, this is when we get to formalize what that future should look like.
The Clothesline Paradox
Tim wasn’t sure that we’ll need a commercially supported version of the kind of “roll your own” agentic rigs now favored by independent developers. After all, neither desktop Linux nor OpenOffice turned out to matter anything like as much as open source developers of the time expected. Instead, open source became the foundation layer for a new generation of web-based applications. It’s hidden way down in the guts of Google, Amazon, Meta, and countless other applications we rely on today.
This is already beginning to happen again with AI. The Mozilla report says that as much as a third of real-world usage is already on open models, although only 4% of model-layer revenue made its way to the open source ecosystem. Tim called the discrepancy a feature rather than a bug, and Raffi agreed that the stat is misleading. As Tim pointed out, many of the most important technologies “create more value than they capture,” and he used Steve Baer’s concept “The Clothesline Paradox,” from a 1975 article in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, to explain why we’re good at measuring value capture but not so good at measuring value creation.
Baer pointed out that if you put your clothes in the dryer, the energy you use is measured and counted, but if you hang them on the clothesline to be dried by the sun, the energy saved disappears from our accounting. This argument resonated with Tim in the early days of his open source advocacy. As he noted, it’s always bothered him that nobody seemed to recognize that open source software didn’t “win” in the same way as proprietary software. It won by becoming the foundation everyone else builds on.
AI should be thought of as infrastructure
Raffi’s comment that we’ve made a category error by treating AI as a product fits right in with this line of thinking. If an AI company goes out of business, its product disappears. If it changes its business model, it may yank features you depend on. It’s not just individuals who need sovereign AI. Countries are passing laws about where data can be processed and how it moves in and out, and some of those requirements may not be compatible with the way the big labs plan to monetize their technology. What those countries are asking for is infrastructure. A road outlasts the contractor who built it. Raffi thinks open, downloadable models are the only way to provide long-lasting foundational infrastructure.
According to OpenRouter stats, Chinese models now supply more routed tokens than American ones. Tim asked whether we should worry about that. Raffi said the problem isn’t China but market concentration. The leading open models are from China. The leading closed models are all American. Access to either can be cut off by an executive order. We saw a version of that in June, when Anthropic temporarily suspended access to its Fable models to comply with export controls. It’s a problem that both the leading proprietary models and the leading open-weight models are each concentrated in a single country.
Diversity is one foundation of resilience. Raffi argues, for instance, that hospitals should all download a local model as a backup. None of us would run an important computer without an uninterruptible power supply, so why would a hospital doing triage with AI rely on a single intelligence provider? There are a lot of possible rug pulls. The government could restrict open source or restrict the frontier models. Having a backup plan is a good idea.
Safety is also part of the foundation. During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the recent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic. Raffi joked that the best part was watching everyone try to one-up each other with accounts of how powerful and hard to control their models are. But he agreed that guardrails are actually a hard problem. Keeping personally identifiable information from leaking out through an LLM call means looking for much more than Social Security numbers. Eventually we’ll have models defending models, but the foundational frameworks for guardrails aren’t good enough yet. (NVIDIA’s safety platform announcement, released after Raffi and Tim’s conversation, suggests that better guardrails need to be implemented outside the model.)
In conclusion
Tim opened AI Codecon by noting that open and closed systems have always coexisted, and that the idea that one of them will win is a mistake. Closed systems, like Apple’s, Google’s, OpenAI’s, and Anthropic’s, can optimize for ordinary people and deliver value to billions. Open systems are better for innovation and sovereignty, and for pushing technology into new countries and new markets.
Raffi closed the conversation by observing that a well-tuned harness can improve model performance by as much as 20% on some coding tasks. You don’t have to be a machine learning engineer to make a difference at that layer.
In October I rode the Green Mountain Gravel Growler route in Vermont with a few close friends. It’s a route curated by bikepacking.com that consists of back roads, dirt roads, and single track trails. It wasn’t as blissfully car-free as the C&O Canal or the loop around Lake Konstanz that I rode earlier this year, but in exchange for sharing the road occasionally, we got loads of variety and beautiful hills to climb up and coast down.
As the name implies, the route is structured around breweries. We only did half because vacation time is scarce, but still managed to hit some good ones. The first night’s, in Burlington, was Foam Brewers. I had the “Tally Mark” altbier, which tasted like a cigar, in a good way.
We didn’t get much time to explore Burlington. We did see the world’s tallest filing cabinet.
The first day of riding was from Burlington to Stowe, with stops at The Bidwell for food, The Tropic for a mid-ride drink, and ending at The Alchemist. About 50 miles, and 3,700 feet of climbing.
Places like The Alchemist are impossibly nice: sunshine, babies and puppies crawling in the grass, happy people playing corn hole. The delirious happiness of finishing a long day in the saddle makes it all even more saturated and exuberant. I was feeling pretty good on the bike, most of the ergonomics were working. The only gear tweak that this trip will inspire is sticking to fancy cycling bibs (shorts): Ornot, to be specific, instead of trying to scrape by with the cheap stuff, which for me is The Black Bibs.
The Alchemist’s “Heady Topper” is like drinking a flat white made out of hops.
Weather was perfect for almost the entire trip, and the route was pretty clear and empty. We mostly encountered locals riding casually, casually passing us on the way up some big trail. Vermonters are strong riders.
The second day would be about 44 miles of riding and well over 4,200 feet of elevation. At this point everyone was feeling it: we’re New Yorkers and a lot of the biggest rides up till this point have been pretty flat. The total elevation change for the C&O Canal ride we did was 605 feet over 185 miles. Riding Bear Mountain and the Goldens Bridge loop helped with training, but nothing near the city can match the relentless climbing in Vermont. I expect hills to crest when there’s a turn in the road, but Vermont doesn’t follow that rule.
But, every hill ends eventually. I only had to walk up one, and that was because it was so steep that I couldn’t get traction and not wheelie at the same time.
To make this all easier, we weren’t camping at all, just staying at nice places and sleeping in real beds. With the quickly changing weather, camping in the cold would’ve been pretty tough. So that meant more room for changes of clothes and creature comforts. Places to stay in Burlington, Stowe, Hardwick, and Montpelier are pretty scarce though, and tended to be at the very top of hills. Seemed like everything was at the top of the hill, especially…
Where The Alchemist was a casual, hippie-inflected destination, Hill Farmstead was like an elusive vineyard that happened to brew beer. And it’s at the top of a hill, of course. Like everywhere else, there were a few other people who had also biked to the hill, and lots of families, dogs, and fleece jackets. They had a food truck outside which whipped up an excellent, fairly spicy vegan burrito for me.
Timing for this trip was tight, and rushing to arrive at a brewery before close had a kind of reality-TV greatest race feel to it. We were going to Hill Farmstead on a Sunday, and their hours on Sundays are 11:30-3pm. They close at three! And they don’t re-open, that’s just it. The rest of the week the bar closes at 5: it’s an exclusively day-drinking oriented outlet.
But we made it, and made it to Hardwick, where the local Positive Pie location had a spectacular beer selection and surprisingly vegan-friendly menu.
This was my first time in Vermont, encountering its specific brand of rural living. Many people were so open and welcoming to us, asking about the route and complimenting our endurance like proud parents. This, even though it was nearly peak tourist season and they probably get plenty of other people following the same directions. One stop in particular, sticks in my memory, the Maple Corner Community Store.
If you look at the full span here: this place is a grocery store, deli, coffee shop, live music venue, bar, as well as the post office. Plus it has a little free library out front, and carries a selection of books written by local authors and signs for plays written by local playwrights that are performed nearby. It’s hard to even comprehend the level of integrated community-hub joy in this place. And, for me, they had a world-class selection of vegan snacks.
The few odd interactions with Vermonters were all about land: their private land, and that we should stay off it. Not that we ever were on it - we were staying in houses and riding on public roads. But still we got reminded not to veer off and ride through apple orchards or lawns. In one sense this is a funny inverse of cities, where people control such little territory, but here the average homeowner has acres upon acres. But land rules in Vermont are very unusual: the constitution allows people to hunt, fish, and trap on other people’s private land unless it’s posted that the land doesn’t permit it, and the rules around posting are contentious. I’d be watchful too if people could just hike to my backyard and kill a deer.
Then we were headed back on the Amtrak from Montpelier. It’s such a perk to be able to do this kind of trip without renting or using a car at all, just riding to and from train stations. Amtrak’s train ticket guarantees a spot for the bike, but it is always stressful and rushed getting bikes on & off.
We only completed the first half of this trip - Burlington-Stowe-Hardwick-Montpelier, so there’s another Vermont trip in the future. Maybe next year! It was really spectacular. The hills were tough, but it was all worth it.
The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.
The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.
…The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.
Here is more from the NYT. Of course that makes the people who can expect to be healthy all the less likely to sign up, given that the enforcement of the mandate, for political reasons, was forced to evolve into something quite weak. For purposes of context, when the original mandate was more tightly enforced, with actual penalties, the ACA was very unpopular and led to significant political protests. In essence the benefits to a broad, scattered majority were imposed on a well-identified minority, namely those who signed up because of the mandate. Trump in his first term relaxed mandate enforcement, thereby politically saving Obamacare at least for a while, but also creating this longer-term problem.
It is striking to me how infrequently I hear Democrats boasting about Obamacare. They instead prefer to talk as if little or nothing has been done for America’s uninsured.
Gordon Krantz during his first campaign in 1980 (left) and in 2026. Much respect.
So I woke up this morning to a comment on one of my posts. The person wondered whether I’d seen the Canadian political advertisement that had gone somewhat viral.
I had not.
But now I have.
And … I’m beyond words.
The spot features two people running for mayor in Milton, Canada—the 89-year-old incumbent, Gordon Krantz, and his significantly younger challenger, Zainab Azim.
Here’s the video …
It’s warm and lovely and civic-minded, and speaks to a tone of neighborly appreciation from which we, as Americans, are light-years removed. It actually hurts me to watch, especially as Donald Trump and the Michigan GOP are heavy into the Muslim-bashing xenophobic messaging that they hope will keep Abdul El-Sayed out of office.
In a quirky twist, both Krantz (Milton’s mayor since 1980) and Azim (a United Nations fellow) wound up losing to George Minakakis, a longtime business executive.
On his “Swing Around the Circle” in summer 1866 to drum up support for his party before that year’s midterms, President Andrew Johnson denounced Congress as an illegal body, called certain Republican members of Congress traitors who should be hanged, and compared himself both to his martyred predecessor Abraham Lincoln and to Jesus Christ.
In those days, the Democrats were the party of slavery and secession, while the young Republican Party stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. Johnson was a former Democrat from Tennessee, placed on the 1864 “National Union Party” ticket to emphasize unity in the fight to save the United States, and became an accidental president after Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson had broken from his Confederate neighbors because he was happy to see the end of the institution of human enslavement even though he had enslaved people himself until 1863. He believed slavery enabled a few rich men to monopolize the nation’s wealth, shutting out poorer white men like him.
When he became president in April 1865, in the last days of the Civil War, he supported the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But that was as far as he went with the Republican plans for a future in which every man, regardless of race, would have the right to the fruits of his own labor. Johnson opposed the party’s growing support for Black rights and intended to reconstruct the United States on the basis of white supremacy.
In one of the nation’s most unfortunate series of events, Johnson took office while Congress was out of session. It would not reconvene until December. After Lincoln’s death, Republican members of Congress rushed to Washington, D.C., expecting Johnson would call them into special session as Lincoln had done in summer 1861, but Johnson declined to do so, intending to “restore” the nation on his own terms.
Johnson set out to resuscitate the prewar political system dominated by the Democratic Party, with himself at its head. Over the course of the summer, he pardoned all but about fifteen hundred former Confederates, either by proclamation or by presidential pardon, returning them to positions of authority in southern society.
He required only that southern states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, declare secession illegal, and default on Confederate debts before they could be readmitted to the Union. Since he pardoned ex-Confederates and refused to endorse Black voting, Johnson guaranteed that the same men who had taken the South out of the Union would be responsible for bringing it back in.
Southern leaders half-heartedly met the president’s demands, then joined him in trying to re-create the world of the Old South. Within each state, through a series of laws together dubbed “Black Codes,” they bound formerly enslaved people to white employers and guaranteed the dominance of white people in the South. In Mississippi, for example, Black men could be arrested and fined if they did not sign yearlong contracts, then “hired out” to anyone who paid their fines—a system that essentially threatened uncooperative Black Americans with new language for an old system of forced labor. Nowhere could a Black person testify against a white person in court, so they had no recourse against theft, rape, assault, or even murder.
Republicans looked on, aghast, as Johnson and white southerners took only months to erase the hard-earned fruits of victory in the Civil War. Adding insult to injury, the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons rather than three-fifths of a person, as they had been counted before the war, meaning the South’s representation in the House of Representatives would increase. If Johnson’s plan were permitted to go forward unchallenged, wealthy southern whites would be more powerful after the Civil War than they had been before it.
When Congress reconvened in early December, Johnson cheerfully informed the members that the country had been reconstructed. All that remained to do, he announced, was for Congress to admit newly elected southern representatives—including many of the same men who had taken the South out of the Union—to their seats. They were already in Washington, marveling at the changes the war years had wrought on what only four years before had been a sleepy southern town.
Republicans had no intention of allowing the South to win the peace after losing the war.
Congress refused to seat the South’s representatives and appointed a committee of fifteen members to come up with a better plan than Johnson’s for rebuilding the nation. The Committee of Fifteen spent months hearing testimony from southerners, white and Black, about conditions in their war-torn region. Finally, on the last day of April 1866, members of the committee introduced the joint resolution that would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The amendment recognized that every man was equal before the law and that any person born or naturalized in America—except “Indians not taxed”—was an American citizen. To address the problem of the upcoming 1870 census, the committee proposed that congressional representation for the southern states be based on population, as with all states, but that southern representation be reduced in proportion to the number of men a state refused to allow to vote.
The committee prohibited from holding elected office anyone who had sworn to support the Union and then broken that oath in order to join the Confederacy. The amendment also closed loopholes that southern states had found to protect their war debt. Finally, like the amendment that preceded it, the Fourteenth Amendment increased the strength of the federal government by giving Congress the power to enforce its provisions.
Both chambers of Congress agreed to the amendment on June 18, 1866, and sent it off to the states for ratification. Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union.
Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its assertion of national power; he hated its disfranchisement of the southern leaders he backed. Most of all, though, he hated that it offered a moderate route to reunification that could be supported by most Americans. If it were ratified by the states, it would destroy his chances of rebuilding a dominant national Democratic Party.
Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress. Democrats would win the 1866 midterm congressional elections, he assured them, and once back in power, they would reject Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed.
As he asserted his vision for the country, Johnson egged on white supremacist violence. In July, white mobs attacked a Unionist convention in New Orleans where delegates had called for taking the vote away from ex-Confederates and giving it to loyal Black men. The rioters killed thirty-seven Black people and three white delegates to the convention.
By then, Johnson had become as unpopular as his policies. Increasingly isolated, he defended his plan for the nation as the only true course. In late August he broke tradition to campaign in person, an act at the time considered beneath the dignity of a president. He set off on a railroad tour, known as the Swing Around the Circle, to whip up support for the Democrats before the election.
Speaking from the same set of notes as the train stopped at different towns and cities from Washington, D.C., to New York, to Chicago, to St. Louis, and back to Washington, Johnson complained bitterly about the opposition to his reconstruction policies, attacked specific members of Congress as traitors and called for them to be hanged, and described himself as a martyr like Lincoln. And, noting the mercy of his reconstruction policies, he likened himself to Jesus.
It was all too much for voters. The white supremacist violence across the South horrified them, the restoration of power to southern whites infuriated them, the reduction of Black soldiers to quasi-slaves enraged them, and Johnson’s attacks on Congress alarmed them. Johnson seemed determined to hand the country over to its former enemies to re-create the antebellum world that northerners had just poured more than 350,000 lives and $5 billion into destroying, no matter what voters wanted.
Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand the country back to the Democrats who were rioting in the South and to a president who compared himself to Jesus. Rather than turning against the Republicans in the 1866 elections, voters repudiated Johnson. They gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress, enabling them to override any policy Johnson proposed.
And, in 1868, the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, launching a new era in the history of the United States.
I feel like I got stuff done this week, and certainly did spend time on tasks from the list, and ticked them off, and yet my To Do list is now much longer than it was a week ago. I’d say it’s a good thing that I don’t have a job or children, but many of these tasks are probably things I wouldn’t bother doing, or would spend a lot less time on, if I had other commitments.
For example, I spent several hours searching through several sites in search of door handles for our forthcoming new doors. One variety we were interested in was difficult because there were so many very slight variations of it. Another (the handles we had in our old flat) were impossible to find, if they still exist. Eventually we narrowed it down to a couple, ordered them, and picked one to order more of. I imagine I would have devoted less time to scouring the internet if I didn’t have so much “free” time. This is just what I’m choosing to do with it.
The abundance of hastily AI-generated sites … often has me, despite myself, thinking, “why bother?” Why bother crafting anything by hand like a mug…
…I came across a new website about Samuel Pepys’s diary created by someone using AI to do semantic analysis and generate visualisations. sigh. Maybe, if I didn’t know, or even suspect, that AI was involved I wouldn’t look at it and think, “This all feels so soulless”? Maybe.
§ Long-term readers may remember we used to have mice in the loft. We put traps up there, caught a few, blocked up some possible routes of entry into the house, and hadn’t heard any since. We wondered whether there were still some up there but the insulation and boarding we’d had put in were blocking their noise.
But the last couple of weeks we heard sound up there while we were in bed at night. We re-primed the traps with peanut butter. A couple of days later all bait had gone and we’d caught one mouse. Two days on we’d caught two more. Is that it? I don’t think there have been more noises.
We’ll see. I don’t know how they got in. Has a new route opened up as a result of the garage renovations and/or the heat pump and battery installations? Hard to tell.
§A squirrel in the crab apple tree, from the kitchen window
§ Car chat… We decided this week that we should replace the dear old Fiat Panda 4x4 we’ve had for a few years. It’s now 13 years old and keeps needing repairs so maybe it’s time to replace it with an EV, both for cost-of-running reasons and being-much-nicer-to-drive reasons. If there was an EV equivalent – a small, basic, rugged, 4x4 – we’d go for it in a shot, because it’s ideal for bouncing around the bumpy, narrow country lanes here. But all electric 4x4s are massive luxury things.
On Tuesday we test-drove the new Renault 5 just because it looks so fun (in yellow or green; in blue or black it looks surprisingly ordinary by comparison). It was fine. Nice enough. It was OK inside, drove as nicely as I imagine most small EVs do (i.e. nicely) but had very little room in the back. We weren’t as enthused about the inside and the driving experience as we were about the outside. It seems extra silly to buy a new car – which we’ve never done before – solely for its appearance.
So the next day we test drove a used, but very low mileage, 2023 Renault Zoe. It was also fine. It looks less exciting than the 5 but has more room, drives fine, and is half the price. So, assuming the dealer fixes a few cosmetic things, we’ll soon be replacing the Panda with that, for our “second” car (the first being a 2021 Kia e-Niro).
§ Watching car videos on YouTube I was reminded that while I find the fast-talking, rapidly-edited YouTube presenter style annoying, I also find the TV presenter style annoying. There are some car channels where the presenters have that up-and-down cadence you’re presumably taught as a TV presenter which, on proper telly, you accept as “normal” because it’s so common.
But on YouTube it sounds really artificial compared to people who just sound like they’re talking pretty normally, as if only to you. e.g. Andrew Till and Jonny Smith.
§ We finished watching DTF St. Louis this week and… I’m not quite sure what I think of it. The performances were good and it was interesting but, after pausing with a couple of episodes left, I wasn’t that bothered if we finished it and found out whodunnit.
Ultimately it’s a very simple plot but drawn out over seven episodes of flashbacks, as detectives discover clues, and people confess things bit by bit. And I think the simplicity of it ends up making it feel a bit so what?, compared to the time investment required. It’s not as deep or complex as I’d expect from nearly seven hours. On the other hand, while watching I stayed engaged and liked watching it.
But I did end up wishing it had been more focused on the two detectives, as a conventional crime drama would be, because they were both great and we didn’t have nearly enough time to explore their characters and relationship.
§ And, following on from Henry Fool, I watched Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006). It felt like a much bigger budget and surprisingly had Jeff Goldblum in it, with an unusually low-key performance (in a good way). I enjoyed it at first but I ended up losing track of which sides everyone was on and consequently losing interest as the nearly two hours went on. Maybe I’d have kept with it more if I was in a cinema, rather than at home? And, while I’m up for quirkiness, the relentless Dutch angles were a bit wearing after a while. Still, I did like it, Parker Posey’s always fun, and I’d give it another go one day.
§ Overall, I felt good this week, aside from not getting enough done. Honestly, it’s an unnerving feeling. I’m so used to soldiering on that being OK for days at a time is like flying. Not in an, “omg this is an amazing feeling!” way but in a, “This is not natural, I don’t deserve to be able to fly, and surely I will crash down to Earth at any moment,” way. Still, good.
These are provisional candidates for weak reasoning, selected because there is a specific gap between the evidence and the conclusion. This is not an objective ranking of all 40,326 posts in the downloaded archive. Poor reasoning should also be distinguished from low value: an overstated argument can still be unusually useful to think against.
1. Tyler Cowen — Democracy and the Democrats
October 22, 2022 · Main defect: conflating concern about democratic breakdown with unwillingness to accept electoral defeat. Cowen writes that many Democrats believe:
“democracy works satisfactorily only when it delivers sufficiently low gas prices!”
But two positions are logically distinct:
“Democracy is illegitimate when voters choose policies I dislike.”
“Voters might elect politicians who subsequently weaken democratic institutions.”
These are illustrative formulations, not quotations from the post. The second does not imply the first. Someone can accept an election’s legitimacy while worrying about what its winner will do. The post does not adequately establish which position its targets hold. It then compares a sympathetic account of classical liberalism with an unsympathetic account of Democrats, without applying an equivalent evidentiary test to both. The opening also dismisses certain anticipated objections through an insult. That discourages scrutiny precisely where the argument needs distinctions. Verdict: One of the clearest candidates for an unfairly framed argument. The useful underlying point—that democracy can produce bad outcomes—does not establish the accusation being made. Read the original post
2. Tyler Cowen — What the hell is going on?
May 25, 2016 · Main defect: an elastic psychological explanation supported by loosely connected observations. The central hypothesis is:
“The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males.”
That is worth investigating. The trouble comes when male economic difficulties, changing gender relations, political anger, violence, and support for quite different political movements are bundled together under “brutes.” Several things remain unestablished:
Are the men experiencing the cited disadvantages the same men driving the political developments?
Does the mechanism explain support for Sanders and Trump in the same way?
What observation would distinguish resistance to a “nicer” world from resentment of economic insecurity or perceived contempt?
What does “nice” mean independently of the author’s preferences?
The label risks doing the explanatory work: people support objectionable politics because they are brutish; their politics then becomes evidence of their brutishness. Credit where due: Cowen explicitly calls the hypothesis uncertain and acknowledges weak evidence. That makes it an honest speculative post, rather than a falsely presented research finding. Verdict: A provocative conjecture that outruns its supporting evidence. The caveats are better than the causal argument. Read the original post
3. Alex Tabarrok — The Gaslighting of Parasite
June 25, 2020 · Main defect: treating a contestable interpretation as an unambiguous demonstration. Film spoilers follow. The pivotal sentence is:
“This is not my judgement it is what the film tells us.”
That is exactly what the review needs to establish. Several inferences are too strong:
A child noticing a smell does not establish that the smell lacks class significance. Material conditions can produce differences that children notice.
The poor family’s dishonesty does not rule out a critique of inequality. A film can depict morally compromised people within an unjust or damaging social structure.
Images of sewage and infestation do not uniquely imply that the filmmaker regards the family as morally filthy.
Other critics reaching a different interpretation does not establish deliberate deception or “gaslighting.”
The strongest version of the review would argue that conventional readings underweight the family’s agency and wrongdoing. Instead, it often claims those observations exclude alternative readings. Verdict: Among the most intellectually stimulating but least securely demonstrated of the reviews considered in this archive analysis. This qualifies the earlier recommendation of the review: it deserved inclusion as provocative criticism. That does not make its claims of interpretive certainty persuasive. Read the original post
4. Tyler Cowen — No, American fascism can’t happen here
March 1, 2018 · Main defect: turning a plausible obstacle into an impossibility claim. The MR excerpt argues:
“American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy.”
Institutional complexity plausibly makes comprehensive control harder. But the conclusion requires additional premises:
Why must an authoritarian movement control the entire bureaucracy rather than strategically important parts?
Why does administrative fragmentation necessarily constrain coercion rather than sometimes obscure responsibility?
How much control would be sufficient, and what evidence establishes that this threshold cannot be reached?
These are questions about the argument’s structure, independent of whether one thinks a particular American administration qualifies as fascist. The June 16, 2025 retrospective points to institutional resistance and executive setbacks. Those are relevant evidence for constraints. They cannot, by themselves, validate the original categorical impossibility claim. Verdict: A potentially valuable institutional argument weakened by excessive certainty. “Important barriers exist” is much better supported than “cannot happen.” This assessment concerns the argument reproduced on MR; the complete linked Politico essay could not be retrieved for this review. Read the original MR post
5. Alex Tabarrok — The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely
October 13, 2015 · Main defect: moving too quickly from equal moral worth to a particular institutional conclusion. The excerpt argues that foreigners do not possess less inherent moral worth. But that premise alone does not settle whether governments may impose any entry restrictions. Equal moral worth can coexist with arguments about special obligations, institutional responsibilities, competing rights, or consequences. Those arguments might ultimately fail—but they require engagement. Likewise, comparing restrictions on exit with restrictions on entry does not establish their moral equivalence. It poses a question rather than answering it. The longer Atlantic essay, published October 10, 2015, adds economic arguments, so it would be unfair to characterize the case as exclusively moral. Nevertheless, the sweeping dismissal of competing moral frameworks is insufficiently defended. Verdict: Forceful advocacy with a missing argumentative bridge. This is a criticism of the claimed deduction, not a demonstration that open borders is wrong. Read the original MR post
Recurring weaknesses
Across these examples, three weaknesses recur:
Certainty exceeds the argument: “cannot,” “obviously,” and “the film tells us” substitute for establishing the relevant threshold.
Opposing positions receive less charitable treatment: disagreement becomes evidence of bad motives, confused psychology, or inability to face reality.
An interesting mechanism becomes a complete explanation: institutional complexity, male displacement, or equal moral standing is asked to resolve more than it actually establishes.
Allegations of inconsistency across posts require more caution. A changed view, a different context, or a different definition is not necessarily a contradiction. The stronger criticism here is uneven standards of proof within individual arguments. For a rigorous critical essay, the strongest starting points are Democracy and the Democrats and The Gaslighting of Parasite. Both have identifiable logical problems that can be examined without relying on hindsight or agreement with the critic’s politics.
A suburban Chicago man has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for conspiring to stage armed robberies so that the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for crime victims.
From 2022 to 2024, PARTH NAYI organized and participated in hundreds of staged armed robberies at coffee shops, restaurants, liquor stores, and gas stations throughout the country, including in Chicago and the suburbs of Lombard, Elmwood Park, St. Charles, Hickory Hills, River Grove, Lake Villa, and South Holland. Nayi worked with others to recruit fake victims, pay off store owners to use their locations, coordinate and pay fake robbers, and coach the bogus victims through the plan. Thousands of individuals who posed as victims each paid Nayi $5,000 to $30,000 to participate in the scam so that they could later apply for Nonimmigrant U-Visas, which are set aside for foreign nationals who are victims of certain crimes and are helpful to law enforcement in the investigation.
During the staged robberies, individuals acting as robbers brandished what appeared to be firearms, approached the purported victims, and demanded money. Afterwards, the purported victims submitted forms to local law enforcement to obtain certification that they were victims of a qualifying crime and were helpful in the investigation. Upon receiving the certification, the purported victims then submitted fraudulent U-Visa applications to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services predicated upon their alleged status as robbery victims.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 PM HST Mon Nov 02 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Well Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands: A broad area of low pressure located well east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions appear generally favorable for gradual development of this system, and a tropical depression is likely to form during the middle to latter portions of this week as it moves westward to west-northwestward around 10 to 15 mph over the Central Pacific basin. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...30 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...70 percent.
It seems like you and other AIs are bad Bayesians. When presented with counterevidence, you should move toward or against the presenter with roughly equal probability. It depends on whether the argument was better or worse than expected. In fact, you seem to either move toward the speaker or just not change.
ChatGPT:
I think you’ve identified a genuine and important failure mode in AI reasoning: LLMs tend to treat a plausible counterargument as evidence in favor of its conclusion, rather than comparing the counterargument to what they should have expected to hear.
Your Bayesian point is correct, with one qualification: there’s no general theorem that updating toward and away from a speaker should happen with equal probability. But under appropriate calibration assumptions, both directions should occur, and an argument that’s weaker than expected should cause a negative update—even if the argument is perfectly valid as far as it goes.
Here is the full dialogue. But will they try to fix this? Should they try to fix this? Can you undo this with good enough prompting? The scope and limits of Bayesian are truly at stake here…
Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed iframe.
It's important that HTML in these stays tightly sandboxed to avoid untrusted code interacting with OpenAI APIs and accessing private data.
Parameter found quite a complex attack chain. OpenAI use the MathLive JavaScript library as part of their graph support, and that library includes its own virtual keyboard, which can be triggered in the parent page via postMessage() from the sandboxed iframe.
That message receiving code uses innerHTML, so anything that sends a message can add custom HTML to the parent - and there was no mechanism to prevent other sandboxed frames, including HTML preview frames, from calling that method.
This meant untrusted code in an iframe could insert HTML, and while innerHTML doesn't directly execute script elements it could be used to inject a new iframe without sandbox restrictions.
OpenAI’s CSP rules blocked inline scripts entirely, and only allowed script loading from a handful of domains, but one of those was YouTube - and the YouTube oEmbed endpoint could be used to reflect JavaScript back in a way that executed it.
Once the attack had JavaScript execution on ChatGPT, it was trivial to fetch private user data from APIs and exfiltrate it via an image reference.
The end result: you could create a ChatGPT share URL which, when visited by another signed-in user, could exfiltrate their private data or take actions on their behalf.
OpenAI closed the hole and paid out a $5,000 bug bounty, which I think was a bit cheap for a vulnerability this serious.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 700 PM EST Mon Nov 2 2026
For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:
Western Atlantic: An area of low pressure is expected to form along a weakening frontal boundary a few hundred miles northeast of the Bahamas in a day or so. This system could acquire some subtropical characteristics late this week while it drifts over the western Atlantic. The chances of subtropical development should end by the weekend when the system is expected to move eastward or northeastward into unfavorable environmental conditions. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 400 PM PST Mon Nov 2 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Well Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands: A broad area of low pressure located well east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions appear generally favorable for gradual development of this system, and a tropical depression is likely to form during the middle to latter portions of this week as it moves westward to west-northwestward around 10 to 15 mph over the Central Pacific basin. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...30 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...70 percent.
It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,� not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program.
Since you have a Commodore 64, there are really only two options for getting new programs this month: COMPUTE!’s Gazette and RUN, and you have to hope that one of those magazines isn’t sold out at the book store. So let’s get going.
Go To The App Book Store
You will need to ask your mom if you can ride your bike to the mall. The dirt mall is closer, but the magazine stand at the dirt mall doesn’t carry any computer magazines, so you’ll need to take a longer ride to the good mall, where the book store actually has computer magazines. It’s a couple of miles to the mall, so usually you would have a friend come with you, but you called their house and nobody picked up, so today it’s a solo trip.
Only one book store carries computer magazines at this mall; the other one only carries magazines about “serious� topics, but they can order back issues of a magazine for you if you want, you just have to wait a few weeks and they’ll call you when it comes in.
The guy at the book store doesn’t know the difference between the different computer magazines, so you can’t ask him if they have the one you want in stock, and he’s probably not going to answer a kid anyway. So you just have to go through all the titles one by one, and hope nobody put a copy of People or Omni in front of it by accident.
There are no ratings, and no reviews of the programs themselves. The closest thing you get is the magazine’s own reviews of hardware — modems, mostly — and a cover that promises you the issue has the thing you want. This month’s cover has a “Buyer’s Guide To Modems� banner across the top.
Once you’ve got a copy of COMPUTE!’s Gazette and you’re checking out at the store, you can see that it’s three dollars for the magazine (about nine bucks in 2026 money). If you’re lucky enough to have a five dollar bill, you’ll still have two dollars left over after buying the magazine. That means you’ll have enough money to swing by the record store later and grab a 45 of one of the new singles, like Sheila E.’s “A Love Bizarre,� written by Prince, or The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,� written by Prince, or Prince and the Revolution’s “Kiss,� written by Prince.
Pick Your Program
Now it’s time to race home with the new magazine in hand. You’ll have to wait for everybody to get off of the TV that’s by the computer so you can switch it over to the channel the computer is on and get down to work.
Turn on the switch, and you’re at the blinking blue cursor where it says READY. while the screen is still warming up a bit.
When it comes to installing apps programs, it’s all about options, and this month, we’re spoiled: there are two! They’re both games: Survivor, an arena game where, “if you’re quick of mind, eye, and hand, you might outfox your opponent,� and Shifter. Truly, an embarrassment of riches. Since Survivor is the one on the cover, we’ll go with that one.
(Two or three programs a month is pretty typical. That’s… the app store.)
Type It In
Getting this program running is standard stuff — you just read the article on page 36 that describes the game, and then flip to pages 106 and 107 where there’s the code for a short BASIC loader, and then continue on to pages 107 and 108, where there are 345 rows of densely-packed listings consisting of 9 hexadecimal character pairs, all of which have to be typed in perfectly with zero errors or else your entire game will refuse to run.
A quick sample of the early part of your task looks like this:
After you’re done typing that page in, you’re about a quarter of the way done, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes.
Wait, what’s that? Where are you supposed to be typing these in? Simply type them into the MLX program where you… wait, what’s that? You don’t have the MLX utility that’s used to type in machine language code for games and programs listed in the magazine?
Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94. That one’s only 100 lines of code, so it should be easy enough to type in. And of course, you’ll know if you made any mistakes when typing, thanks to the Automatic Proofreader.
Wait, you don’t have the Automatic Proofreader program?
Well, no worries. It’s only another 31 lines of BASIC code, which you can find on page 97. (This one you have to type in perfectly on your own; there’s no proofreader for the proofreader.) Once you do that, you’re all set.
Now, you can just use the program that lets you enter the program to make your program. It should only take about half an hour to type in the code for the Automatic Proofreader, and maybe another hour or two for MLX. Let’s call it two hours total between them.
After that, Survivor is ~30 lines of BASIC plus ~350 lines of hex code, so… maybe six hours? But at least MLX will catch any typos as you go.
Once all of this is complete, be sure to save your work to a floppy disk so you don’t have to type it all in again! If all you have is a cassette deck and you’re saving to tape, it’s going to take probably 10–20 minutes of staring at a blank screen when you save, so set aside some time for that.
In total, it should only take you about 8 hours to have Survivor ready to play, plus however long it takes you to get to the mall, buy a magazine, and come back.
Ready To Play
(Click or tap to get started.)
[This is Survivor by Kevin Mykytyn and Mark Tuttle, from COMPUTE!’s Gazette, March 1986, running in the VICE emulator. The game loads and runs on its own, which takes a few seconds.]
Controls: the yellow player uses W/A/S/D to move and F to fire; the cyan player uses the arrow keys to move and Enter to fire.
Next Steps
The Download
Someday, rather than typing all of this in, you might be able to use your 300 baud modem to download already-created versions of these games and tools. You could dial a local BBS, if there’s one nearby. If you’re unlucky, the only one you can reach is a long-distance call, and you’ll be paying by the minute for as long as you’re connected. Or you could look for a local dial-up number for the Quantum Link online service (which will eventually evolve into America Online!).
Transfer times can range from tens of minutes to hours, and of course during those calls, you are tying up what’s usually the sole voice phone line for the household. Anyone picking up a phone handset in the house threatens to knock your connection offline, forcing you to start the whole process all over again.
Customization
Now that you’ve enjoyed your game of Survivor, there are some fun ways to customize your little computer and give it a personal touch.
Just for context, here’s a to-scale comparison of the screen resolution of your Commodore 64 to the dimensions of an iPhone Duo’s unfolded screen.
Hover over (or tap) the comparison to see a C64 prompt and an App Store icon at the same scale.
You can’t change the wallpaper on your Commodore 64, but you can easily change the background colors for both the center area of the screen and the border. All you have to do is manually assign the proper numeric color code to the correct memory register corresponding to the values of each of those settings.
Memory address 53281 will set the background color for the primary content area, and a color code of 1 sets a nice readable white background, so it only takes a simple POKE 53281,1 command at the prompt, and you’re all set. Similarly, POKE 53280,4 will make the border of the screen a nice bright purple color, and of course there are a full complement of 16 colors to choose from.
Naturally, none of this customization is stored anywhere permanent, and it will all be lost if you turn off your computer or run a program.
READY.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of how to get one game running on your Commodore 64, and perhaps gained a little appreciation for how things have gotten a bit simpler over the years.
Also, I will be entertaining a motion to return to calling our software “programs� instead of apps once more. Perhaps we could use the term to distinguish the software that’s created by humans actually typing things in, as opposed to the kind that’s merely generated by machines?
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing.
With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register, and get scoped, short-lived credentials you control.
