An excellent and highly original movie, I cannot say much without infringing upon the surprise of the basic premise. Exquisitely choreographed in its timing, scene by scene. So anti-Woke that it will make some uncomfortable? The reviews which are very negative are unfair and stem from this fact. I recommend it, but yes some of you will go away feeling offended. I can report that one theme is that couples who are getting married often do not know each other well. Here is the trailer.
Early in my career at SpaceX, I was the only person dedicated to training the mission control team for Dragon. For three years, I built the training for the operations team. The documentation came second, always the thing I’d get to later, always the thing that felt like overhead against the actual work of getting […]
Vantor employees were gathered for a sales kickoff in January, when an executive announced that a WorldView Legion satellite passing overhead would snap a photo of the California venue. Later, a buzzer sounded to alert the audience that the 30-centimeter-resolution image was available on the Vantor Hub portal. It had been 13 minutes. The demonstration […]
Four astronauts from the United States and Canada became the humans to travel the furthest from the Earth April 6 as they went around the moon on the Artemis 2 mission.
East Aurora, NY — Moog Inc. (NYSE: MOG.A and MOG.B), a worldwide designer, manufacturer and systems integrator of high-performance precision motion and fluid controls and control systems will highlight its […]
Spanish startup FOSSA Systems is pushing into Japan’s defense market after securing a local partner to expand its reach, building on a shift beyond tiny picosatellites used to connect low-power monitoring devices toward more capable spacecraft for broader government applications.
Newly anointed NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman made a $20 billion announcement on March 24, 2026. To the delight of space enthusiasts everywhere, Isaacman said NASA was cancelling its project to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and would reorient to building a $20 billion base on the surface of the moon. The new base, […]
There has been recent attention to using LLMs to generate novel (and often correct) mathematical proofs, prompted by plain English prompts.
A recent Amazon blog post by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth recounts how they have been able to collaborate with a LLM in the production of increasingly sophisticated proofs of new results. They anticipate that this is a development that will only continue to grow in usefulness. At the same time, they worry about what impact it may have both on the training of new mathematical scientists, and on the peer review process (as the cost of writing polished and correct papers falls faster than the cost of evaluating them for importance). Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first fields to feel the strain of this imbalance has been theoretical research into machine learning models.
“Specifically, how can intuition and “good taste” in scientific research be developed when AI automates many of the steps that have historically been used to train young researchers? Peer review is another challenge: AI-generated research papers, quickly churned out at scale, highlight the limitations of peer review and modern-day publishing structures and also exacerbate already emerging challenges to incentives for scientific success. Without claiming to have answers or solutions to these concerns, we are personally living through them and will discuss each in turn. … “Historically, people earn expertise in the mathematical sciences through struggle as junior researchers. PhD students spend years working through the details of technical arguments to gain hard-won intuitions about when a proof approach is promising, when they are being led astray by a problem, or what constitutes a novel and interesting research direction.
“But these aspects of being a researcher are exactly what AI tools are “giving away”. If doctoral students can simply ask AI for proofs — which is extremely tempting, especially when it is in service of advancing research — how do they develop the experience and skill that, for now at least, are required to use AI tools productively in the first place? … “Breaking and remaking peer review “From our perspective, peer review is not only, or even primarily, a process to verify the correctness and quality of research. Rather, its purpose is to focus a scarce resource — the attention of the research community — in the right places. Science progresses as researchers build on each other’s work, but there is already too much work out there for anyone to keep up with. The publication process should help identify the most interesting and promising directions, so they can be more efficiently and thoroughly developed. … “AI tools make it much easier to produce work that looks polished and correct, dramatically lowering the barrier to generating “papers” that can be submitted to journals and conferences. Many of these papers are neither interesting nor actually correct — but discovering this requires significant effort from reviewers.
This is straining an already overburdened machine learning publishing ecosystem struggling with tens of thousands of submissions per venue. We have seen that reducing the time and effort needed to produce "a paper" — not necessarily a good paper — is beginning to destabilize our existing institutions for peer review. The most recent iterations of AI and ML conferences have seen the number of submissions growing by large multiples, with a significant number of papers polished by AI, but ultimately of low quality, making it surprisingly far through the review process before being noticed and called out. “This is a problem across research fields, partially because it’s creating a market for AI-generated papers. This has in turn engendered a countermarket for AI-assisted detection of AI-generated papers — much like the familiar technological arms races around things like spam and its detection, but with the integrity of scientific publication at stake, not just the filtration of annoying or fraudulent e-mails.
… “Without a serious, community-wide re-evaluation of peer review, AI threatens to arrest scientific progress at the community level even as it accelerates it at the level of individual researchers.”
In the 1990s, Americans used to work much more than non-Americans. Nowadays, about half of the gap in hours worked has reversed. To evaluate the convergence of working hours, we develop a tractable model of labor supply enriched with multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals, an extensive margin of participation, multi-member households, and an elaborate system of taxes and benefits upon non-employment. Using detailed measurements from micro-level and aggregate datasets, we identify model parameters and sources of heterogeneity across individuals for various countries. We run a horse race between competing explanations and find that U.S. hours per person declined after 2000 owing mainly to the rise of government health benefits provided to the non-employed. Non-U.S. countries have generous benefits for the non-employed, but this generosity has not changed as much over time as in the United States, and public health coverage does not depend on employment status or income levels. For these countries, the rise of labor supply is generally accounted for by a mix of factors, such as the rise of wages and the falling disutility of work.
As we have been reporting on Ars, NASA's Artemis II lunar mission has been going rather well so far. Of course, Orion's big test is yet to come with the fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere on Friday. But so far, it's looking like the rocket and spaceship needed for a lunar landing are getting there for NASA.
The biggest remaining piece of the architecture, therefore, is a lunar lander. Known in NASA parlance as the Human Landing System, or HLS, the space agency has contracted with SpaceX for its Starship vehicle and Blue Origin and its Blue Moon lander.
Last year, NASA asked both companies for options to accelerate their lunar landers, and both replied that not having to dock with the Lunar Gateway in a highly elliptical orbit, known as near-rectilinear halo orbit, would help a lot. So the space agency has removed that requirement.
The interpretation of polygenic scores (PGS) for general cognitive ability (GCA) remains contested, with concerns about indirect genetic effects, environmental confounding, cross-ancestry portability, and the gap between PGS prediction and twin heritability estimates. Relying on a newly constructed PGS using within-family designs in two independent sibling cohorts (UK Biobank, N=4,642 pairs; ABCD, N=736 pairs), we demonstrate that direct genetic effects account for the large majority of PGS prediction (within-family attenuation \delta / \beta \approx 0.88). Correcting for measurement error in brief cognitive assessments, the within-family association with latent general ability is approximately 0.45, substantially higher than observed-scale estimates. Cross-ancestry portability follows theoretical expectations (66% effect retention in African Americans). Within families, higher PGS predicts greater educational attainment, occupational status, and reduced cardiometabolic disease risk, with no evidence for gene-environment interactions or substantial adverse pleiotropy. These findings replicate using a benchmark predictor based on publicly available data, confirming they reflect properties of cognitive genetic architecture rather than idiosyncrasies of a particular score.
We have a piece up this morning that looks at one of the less noticed side effects of Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown: bond. The Trump administration has, since last year, been attempting to deny detained immigrants bond, though hundreds of federal courts have rejected that policy. It is likely bound for the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Bryce Covert covers for us the considerable evidence that those who do obtain bond are paying enormous sums that were uncommon just two years ago. This looks to in part be the result of the Trump administration’s effort to purge the ranks of immigration judges of any who were, by their definition, too lenient on the detained.
I frequently get asked what people can do to get involved or play some role in fighting for the future of their country — where to donate, what kind of activism has a real impact. Some people have always been activists. But many others aren’t and haven’t particularly wanted to be but now feel they have no choice. And yet the scale of the problem is overwhelming, and the range of organizations and movements calling on your time and money are almost equally so. Critically, if you’re semi-new to these things, you don’t want to find out you were wasting your time or at least not using that or your money most efficiently.
TPM is a news and commentary site, not an activism site. But at least here in the Editors’ Blog we’re not so finicky about that that we feel we can’t share our opinions, hopefully reasonably well informed and perhaps with additional reporting, about what is a good use of your time or money. So with that in mind, and after a friend suggested it, I wanted to do a series of posts on the idea of “What Can I Do?” And here I would love your participation, your suggestions via email. I have my own views of the matter but I certainly don’t have all the answers and, by design, I don’t get directly involved myself. So give me your ideas, and I will try to share my thoughts on practical ways we individually can try to save our country and, as I will explain in a moment, build a new one. What actually makes a difference and what is more like scattering seeds on the wind?
I want to start with an email I wrote a couple days ago. I didn’t write it for publication. But after I sent it, I thought others might be interested. I wrote it in response to a query from a TPM reader. This is an affluent individual considering how and where to put their money in advance of the midterms, which groups are effective, which aren’t. This TPM reader listed some groups he was considering donating to and also what I referred to a few months ago as the need for “wartime voting rights” groups, picking up on the old Godfather reference. That’s what the first part of the note is about, just to give you context for what I was responding to.
So a few thoughts on this and sorry again for the delay. I’m familiar with each of these groups and they’re all solid and good. I need to poke around give it some more thought to consider precisely what they’re doing now. On wartime voting rights groups, that’s definitely some of it. A lot of what I’m thinking is on the one hand the groups that are focusing largely in a litigation context, trying to knock down the bad laws, operating under the basic and basically right concept of fighting arbitrary and suppressive laws, litigating them, etc. That’s important work. But it’s no longer sufficient. I was just having a very different conversation which turned to Ukraine’s great success in drone and anti-drone tech. And there’s nothing special about Ukraine in that respect. If anything it has problems with entrenched corruption, which generally hollows out militaries. But being under constant aerial bombardment has a way of focusing the attention. So does having very little cash. You have to really think from the ground up and zero in on the things that seem to be confronting the immediate problem. And really we’re under constant aerial bombardment. So who is thinking way outside the box right now, obsessively and even a bit paranoid-ly thinking through what we’re going to see in November and how to counter it without a lot of preconceived ideas. That’s the wartime voting rights orgs we need.
More broadly I think there are two buckets to think in terms of. The big party committees have lots of problems. But you go to war with the army you have. And they are going to be the ones pumping money into the front line districts. And you can’t do anything if you don’t win enough seats. And that’s the pipeline to get the resources where they need to go, shortcomings not withstanding. So I think there’s one bucket, which is fairly conventional seat winning. And just which committees or outside groups is important. But that requires a lot of cash.
Then there are other groups that are more focused on what are we going to do with that power and how do we build effectively a new state on the rubble of the one Trump destroyed. And I think ‘destroyed’ is the right conceptual framework. We’ve lived mostly in the system created by people from 1935 to 1955, the post war state. It rocked. But it’s gone. And before Trump it had grown long in the tooth. That’s why Trump was able to destroy it. That requires the kind of novel and aggressive thinking that older generation brought to things. Because those folks in that 20 year period did create a new state. The people who build the one now among many things truly need to understand political power and how to use it. They also need to come to the matter with a deep understanding that we are under constant aerial bombardment. We’re not in the 90s or the aughts. We’re in a very different period. In a general way it’s the groups who will take us beyond what is still mostly the guiding sentiment of incumbent federal officeholders, that we’re in normal times or at least need to use the toolbox that we inherited from normal times. Call it the Schumer problem, though I don’t say that to pick on him. Everyone’s learning as they go and I think he is more than people may realize too. I just use that shorthand as a way to capture what we need to move past.
I realize the above doesn’t answer who to write the check to. But this is my first response. And I think it’s the best way to think about the problem of what to do and where to put our resources.
Join me for a casual conversation with Brian Beutler, the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message and a former TPM colleague. Brian and I will use the news of the day as a jumping off point to chat about the Trump II era. We’ll be biting off some small topics like:
How did we get to this point?
How much worse will things get before they get better?
Are we still being too optimistic?
What does rebuilding American democracy look like?
Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general:
If the “design choices create liability” framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it leads in practice.
One of the key pieces of evidence the New Mexico attorney general used against Meta was the company’s 2023 decision to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. The argument went like this: predators used Messenger to groom minors and exchange child sexual abuse material. By encrypting those messages, Meta made it harder for law enforcement to access evidence of those crimes. Therefore, the encryption was a design choice that enabled harm.
The state is now seeking court-mandated changes including “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.”
Yes, the end result of the New Mexico ruling might be that Meta is ordered to make everyone’s communications less secure. That should be terrifying to everyone. Even those cheering on the verdict.
End-to-end encryption protects billions of people from surveillance, data breaches, authoritarian governments, stalkers, and domestic abusers. It’s one of the most important privacy and security tools ordinary people have. Every major security expert and civil liberties organization in the world has argued for stronger encryption, not weaker.
But under the “design liability” theory, implementing encryption becomes evidence of negligence, because a small number of bad actors also use encrypted communications. The logic applies to literally every communication tool ever invented. Predators also use the postal service, telephones, and in-person conversation. The encryption itself harms no one. Like infinite scroll and autoplay, it is inert without the choices of bad actors - choices made by people, not by the platform’s design.
The incentive this creates goes far beyond encryption, and it’s bad. If any product improvement that protects the majority of users can be held against you because a tiny fraction of bad actors exploit it, companies will simply stop making those improvements. Why add encryption if it becomes Exhibit A in a future lawsuit? Why implement any privacy-protective feature if a plaintiff’s lawyer will characterize it as “shielding bad actors”?
And it gets worse. Some of the most damaging evidence in both trials came from internal company documents where employees raised concerns about safety risks and discussed tradeoffs. These were played up in the media (and the courtroom) as “smoking guns.” But that means no company is going to allow anyone to raise concerns ever again. That’s very, very bad.
In a sane legal environment, you want companies to have these internal debates. You want engineers and safety teams to flag potential risks, wrestle with difficult tradeoffs, and document their reasoning. But when those good-faith deliberations become plaintiff’s exhibits presented to a jury as proof that “they knew and did it anyway,” the rational corporate response is to stop putting anything in writing. Stop doing risk assessments. Stop asking hard questions internally.
The lesson every general counsel in Silicon Valley is learning right now: ignorance is safer than inquiry. That makes everyone less safe, not more.
The essay has a lot more: about Section 230, about competition in this space, about the myopic nature of the ruling. Go read it.
Google says that it will fully transition to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. I think this is a good move, not because I think we will have a useful quantum computer anywhere near that year, but because crypto-agility is always a good thing.
Shallow groundwater aquifers are driest in northern and central Florida in this map based on observations acquired on March 30, 2026, by the GRACE-FO (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On) satellites.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
Florida is among the wettest U.S. states, but that doesn’t mean it is drought-free. Nearly all of Florida faced at least “moderate” drought, and nearly 80 percent faced “extreme” conditions in April 2026, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Unusually dry conditions gripped the state for much of 2025, but the intensity and extent of the drought ratcheted up starting in January 2026.
Data from a NASA and German Research Center for Geosciences satellite mission show that the drought has left its imprint on the state’s underground water supplies, which are often tapped for drinking water and farming. The map above combines data from the twin GRACE-FO (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On) satellites and ground-based measurements to estimate the relative amount of groundwater stored underground as of March 30, 2026. The colors depict the wetness percentile, or how the amount of shallow groundwater compares to long-term records (1948–2010). Blue areas have more water than usual, and orange and red areas have less. Aquifers in the northern and central regions of the state are particularly dry.
The drought is being felt throughout Florida. Some water districts have imposed restrictions on when water can be used for certain activities, such as lawn watering and car washes. News reports suggest that the dry weather poses a threat to crops, many of which already suffered severe damage during hard freezes in February. Large wildland fires have flared up in some areas, and even wetland ecosystems like the Everglades face unusually dry conditions.
The 2025-2026 drought is the most severe to affect Florida since 2012, data from the U.S. Drought Monitor show.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
U.S. Drought Monitor records indicate that the current drought is the most widespread and severe to affect the state since 2012. Many areas have received less than half their normal rainfall since September 1, 2025, according to the National Weather Service. St. Petersburg has seen only 7.7 inches (195.6 millimeters) of rain since September 1, compared to the normal 19.0 inches, making this the driest year on record for that period.
However, the current drought does not yet rival the worst drought that has parched the state, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Their analysis indicates that the 2000–2001 drought was more intense, lasted longer, and affected a larger area. GRACE-FO observations are among the sources of information that the U.S. Drought Monitor considers when mapping drought conditions in its weekly assessments. Forecasters anticipate that a slow-moving rainstorm set to hit Florida this week may offer some relief.
One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their agenda, even though they know it’s false. There is an apparently infinite attention appetite for commentators who troll for attention by saying how “kids these days” don’t want to work hard.
As has often been documented, the hoary chestnut of saying “nobody wants to work anymore” dates back decades, if not centuries, and it’s never been true in all those years of deletion. It is, firstly, a tactic that bosses use for negging workers in a vain attempt to try to drive down wages (and to successfully get media to blame people for their own underemployment), but it also serves as an effective demonstration of just how little society understand about what actually motivates people.
I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard. The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:
A clearly understood goal
A common set of values in pursuit of that goal
Permission to follow their own ideas to achieve their goal
Trust and responsibility to be accountable to one another
If people have these things, and believe in what they’re doing together, they will joyfully work their asses off.
It is genuinely one of the best feelings in life to be completely exhausted while sitting next to someone who’s been right beside you, shoulder to shoulder, fighting to accomplish the same goal. I’ve known that to be true whether we were launching a new company into the world, campaigning to get a candidate we believed in elected, organizing to rally people around an issue, raising funds for an important cause, or even just trying to get people together for a big event or party.
Every time, the feeling of being soul-tired next to folks who you know you can trust because they showed up and worked their asses off just like you did, is among the most motivating and inspiring things you can experience. Nobody who’s ever been lucky enough to have had a moment like that could ever think that people “don’t want to work”.
When work doesn’t work
What people face too often is being ground down by systems, institutions, and unjust leaders who insist on creating roles where people are forced to do dehumanizing, isolated, meaningless work, while not being given the agency to make smart and empowered decisions about how the work gets done. Or worse, they’re forced to do work in service of goals that are actively harmful and destructive, and contrary to their own values, or just contrary to basic human decency. It’s not that people are unwilling to work, it is that they are working — to balance their own humanity with the crushing burdens of having to provide for themselves and their families. It is exhausting for a good person to have to do bad work or harmful work or pointless work, just to pay the bills. Being less “productive” in those situations isn’t a shortcoming, it’s a measure of still having an immune system that’s resistant to these moral injuries.
Preserving your soul and sanity in an organization with no morals is very hard work. If you think your workers aren’t working hard, maybe you’re ignoring the toughest part of their job.
And even in more moderate organizations, where things aren’t overtly evil so much as frequently frustrating and burdensome and stressful, there are still plenty of reasons that people aren’t as “productive” (as defined by bosses). Many of these reasons could be addressed by leadership taking accountability for the context and communication provided to workers for their responsibilities. Empowered workers who are given high levels of trust and autonomy tend to be extremely productive, and don’t need babysitting from management. If you treat adults like idiots, they will respond in kind.
There’s also the issue of what people are provided beyond their paychecks. Ideally, everyone on a team will have enough resources to do the job properly, but in a mission-aligned organization even that can be optional at first, because scrappy teams are pretty adept at making something out of nothing if they really have to. There just needs to be a point where they’re not starved of appropriate resources anymore, and it’s a leader’s ethical responsibility to provide everything people need to thrive and be healthy and happy in the long term. The key point here is that people are not driven by greedy, selfish motivations in organizations that accomplish meaningful things; if there’s trust that they’ll be taken care of, and that leaders are worthy of that trust, people will over-deliver in service of the common goal.
But in many organizations, people are given crappy tools, miserable working environments, overbearing surveillance of their workplaces and digital workspaces, meaningless and abstract metrics to achieve, and all of these are delivered with corporate communications that don’t sound like any human being ever. The executives who inflict all of this on the workers hope that they don’t notice that none of the execs are expected to endure any of this.
Finally, fundamentally, there is pay. Compensation and real-world wages have been plummeting for decades; the growing chasm of wealth inequality has been well-documented for many years. But the quiet indignities around that degradation in standard of living have increased, as well, with the chipping away at leisure time through always-accessible digital tools making people have to be on call for their jobs during every waking hour.
The erosion of social norms around employment has been so complete over the last few decades that people born in this century don’t even believe that there was a time when it was not only routine for Americans to be union members, but for private sector companies to provide, and honor, pensions for their employees to benefit from in retirement. The mere suggestion of the idea would get a public company CEO fired in the current era.
Who do we work for?
Why would someone work for an institution that is actively working to undermine their well-being? Most large companies are spending more time strategizing against their employees than against their competitors. Too many nonprofits and other ostensibly non-corporate institutions have gotten the same idea. But it is management that does not want those workers to work — or they would act like it. If your workers aren’t massively motivated to do great work, it’s your fault. Because all you have to do is provide a worthy mission and get the fuck out of the way.
How do I know? Because I’ve gotten it right, and I’ve gotten it wrong. When I’ve taken my eye off the ball, either for unavoidable business reasons, or because I made mistakes due to inexperience or ego or distraction or competition or bad luck or whatever else, the people on my team showed it. Work stopped, quality dropped, frustration and tension increased, and all of a sudden my managers were telling me that “these folks don’t want to work”. Eventually I learned: the right thing to do is to tell those managers that we should be asking, “How are we failing?” Because, short of personal emergencies or life situations that keep them from being able to do their best work, people want to feel proud about the work they’re doing, and to feel like they’re not wasting their time every day when they go into the office. They don’t want to resent their bosses or be annoyed at their coworkers.
The few times I’ve been lucky enough to get it right have been the most satisfying times in my career. Once or twice, I’ve gotten to work for great bosses. They really inspired me to do great work, and taught me a lot that I didn’t know how to do before, or motivated me to want to learn on my own. But more importantly, they made an environment where I could collaborate with my coworkers to do more than I thought was possible, both by myself and especially together with others. I hope that at my best, the teams I’ve led have had a bit of that same feeling; I know I’ve been so proud of what I’ve seen them create and accomplish that they certainly have inspired me over the years.
But perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from watching great teams work is that the cynical, toxic view of people’s intrinsic motivations and work ethic that we hear so often is a damnable lie. Most people are tireless and brave and brilliant in the work they do, when it’s work that has purpose and passion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is telling on themselves, and revealing their own lack of imagination and vision about what it’s possible for people to create together.
At 8:03 this morning, Easter Sunday, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy b*stards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
There are many things that could be going on with this ultimatum, which actually doesn’t sound like Trump’s usual style, in the same way the post of yesterday morning didn’t.
The post appears to be threatening to commit war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, and it appears to suggest Trump is considering using tactical nuclear weapons. He emphasized the production of such weapons in his first administration. He seemed to encourage this interpretation in an interview with Rachel Scott of ABC News today. She said Trump “told me the conflict should be over in days, not weeks but if no deal is made he’s blowing up the whole country with ‘very little’ off the table. ‘If [it] happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, we’re blowing up the whole country,’ he said. I asked if there’s anything off limits. ‘Very little,’ he said.”
In 2023 a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt alleged that in 2017, when Trump was warning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on social media that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” behind closed doors he was talking about launching a preemptive strike against North Korea and of using a nuclear weapon against the country and blaming someone else for the strike.
Schmidt reports that Trump’s White House chief of staff at the time, retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly, brought military leaders to try to explain to Trump why that would be a bad idea and finally got him to move away from the plan by telling him he could prove he was the “greatest salesman in the world” by finding a diplomatic solution to his fight with the North Korean leader.
In his own book about that period, journalist Bob Woodward wrote: “The American people had little idea that July through September of 2017 had been so dangerous.”
But Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo told Woodward: “We never knew whether it was real or whether it was a bluff.”
And that is another way to look at the post from Trump’s social media account: that he is panicked that he has not been able to bully other countries into fixing the mess he created by attacking Iran and precipitating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and is now simply trying to bully Iran. In The Guardian last Monday, Sidney Blumenthal noted that Trump “has declared ‘victory’ more than eight times,” says he has “won” more than ten times, and said Iranian forces have been “obliterated” or suffered “obliteration” more than six times. Blumenthal noted Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power grid and has used the words “decimate” or “decimation” at least six times.
Trump’s crazy post does, after all, push back yet again the deadline for his threats to rain destruction on Iran, which he then extended again in another post at 12:38 P.M. saying: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”
This dynamic was not lost on Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, who noted: “It was March 23rd. Then March 27th. Then March 30th. Then he gave that weird address on April 1st. [N]ew deadline April 4th. Then April 6th at 7 AM. Then April 7th at 8 PM. And now another address tomorrow at 1 PM. The chaos is intentional.” She also noted that his deadlines and his abandonment of them often seem tied to the rhythms of the stock market.
In an interview with Barak Ravid of Axios today shortly after this morning’s post, Trump reiterated that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there” but also said the U.S. is “in deep negotiations” with Iran and that he thinks a deal can be reached. Trump told Ravid that his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—not Secretary of State Marco Rubio—are talking with the Iranians. Sources told Ravid that mediators from Pakistan, Egypt, and Türkiye are facilitating the talks.
But Iranian officials are refusing to deal with Witkoff and Kushner after they apparently misunderstood earlier negotiations and instead told Trump the talks weren’t going well before he launched strikes. Neither Witkoff nor Kushner is a trained diplomat, and both have deep financial ties to the Middle East. Notably, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who urged Trump to start the Iran war, has invested at least $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm.
On March 13, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell of the New York Times reported that Kushner is trying to raise $5 billion or more for his private equity firm from Middle East governments at the same time as he is also supposed to be negotiating peace in the region.
But Stephen Kalin, Eliot Brown, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already cost the Saudis about $10 billion, and the grand plans of MBS were already falling short of money. Some of those plans were U.S. investments. The reporters note that even before the war, the Saudi’s sovereign-wealth fund, the same one that invested in Kushner’s private equity firm, had sold much of its U.S. stock portfolio. Last year, MBS promised to invest up to $1 trillion in the U.S. Those investments are now under review.
Regardless of the inspiration for Trump’s post, by itself it tells a very clear story. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi posted: “The American president has lost his mind.”
Journalist Steven Beschloss wrote: “This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
The 25th Amendment establishes a process through which a majority of the Cabinet and the Vice President, or another body Congress designates, can remove a president deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Murphy was not the only one thinking along those lines. Hollie Silverman of Newsweek reported that on the prediction market platform Kalshi, which allows traders to buy “yes” or “no” shares on the question “Will the 25th Amendment be used during Trump’s presidency?” “yes” has moved in recent days from 28.6% to 35.1%.
So Young Kim sent out an e-mail the other day. It was beautiful, in the you’re-walking-past-a-bunch-of-religious-zealots-at-the-mall-and-they-start-barking-at-you sort of way.
Here’s her message …
If you’re wondering why Young Kim—never overly religious, never one to proselytize—has found Jesus, it’s because she’s running for her CA-40 life. Not against Democrats, sadly, but vs. Ken Calvert, the reigning CA-41 congressman who has been wedged into her (now ultra-conservative) district. Post Prop-50, the two wackadoos are positioning themselves to be as batshit nutty right wing as possible. This includes ultra-Christian views and expressions of faith.
You think Ken Calvert loves Christ? Lemme tell you about Jesus!
You think Young Kim is MAGA? I once stuck my finger up Donald Trump’s rectum, just to feel the joy!
You think Ken Calvert stuck his finger up Donald Trump’s rectum to feel the joy? No—he did so trying to kill our lord! When I stick my finger up Donald Trump’s rectum, it’s out of love for Christ!
On.
And on.
And on.
And on.
Alas, either Kim or Calvert will wind up winning this hellscape of an election. It’s a certainty, and nothing fools fools like expressions of false faith.
Then, the two can set Christ aside and resume their lives as mediocre political hacks begging for money and serving a president who fucked around with teenagers.
Up very betimes and to my office, and there made an end of reading my book that I have of Mr. Barlow’s of the Journal of the Commissioners of the Navy, who begun to act in the year 1628 and continued six years, wherein is fine observations and precedents out of which I do purpose to make a good collection.
By and by, much against my will, being twice sent for, to Sir G. Carteret’s to pass his accounts there, upon which Sir J. Minnes, Sir W. Batten, Sir W. Pen, and myself all the morning, and again after dinner to it, being vexed at my heart to see a thing of that importance done so slightly and with that neglect for which God pardon us, and I would I could mend it. Thence leaving them I made an excuse and away home, and took my wife by coach and left her at Madam Clerk’s, to make a visit there, and I to the Committee of Tangier, where I found, to my great joy, my Lord Sandwich, the first time I have seen him abroad these some months, and by and by he rose and took leave, being, it seems, this night to go to Kensington or Chelsey, where he hath taken a lodging for a while to take the ayre.
We staid, and after business done I got Mr. Coventry into the Matted Gallery and told him my whole mind concerning matters of our office, all my discontent to see things of so great trust carried so neglectfully, and what pitiful service the Controller and Surveyor make of their duties, and I disburdened my mind wholly to him and he to me his own, many things, telling me that he is much discouraged by seeing things not to grow better and better as he did well hope they would have done. Upon the whole, after a full hour’s private discourse, telling one another our minds, we with great content parted, and with very great satisfaction for my [having] thus cleared my conscience, went to Dr. Clerk’s and thence fetched my wife, and by coach home. To my office a little to set things in order, and so home to supper and to bed.
On Wednesday, April 1st, 2026, the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) finally launched the Orion spacecraft with a crew. As I write this, Orion is about to begin its lunar flyby. This, by the headlines, is a moment of celebration for NASA and the space community, even as the journey is not yet complete and … Continue reading Artemis II, and SLS/Orion. An exclamation mark on opportunities squandered.
In an essay entitled That difficulty increases desire, Michel de Montaigne explained that great pleasure comes from great struggle:
and that there is nothing naturally so contrary to our taste as satiety which proceeds from facility; nor anything that so much whets it as rarity and difficulty
This quotation came to mind when I contemplated the sad decline of my favorite sport—NBA basketball.
When I eat out at a fine restaurant, my favorite part of the meal is often the dessert. And my favorite part of the dessert is the frosting on top of the cake. But that fact does not mean that I’d prefer a restaurant that served me nothing more than a big heaping plate of frosting.
The NBA has continually revised the rules of basketball with the idea of providing a more entertaining product. By itself, that an unobjectionable goal. The mistake they made was in forgetting Montaigne’s maxim about one crucial component of pleasure—overcoming obstacles. They noticed that NBA fans enjoyed certain types of outcomes and decided to serve them a big fat plate of chocolate frosting. To be more specific, the NBA decided that fans liked to see their teams score baskets and then did everything possible to make it easier and easier to score.
A typical score in football (soccer) is 2 to 1. In hockey you often see a 4 to 3 outcome. A score of 5 to 4 is common in baseball. In American football a score of 27 to 16 is fairly typical. During the 1990s, a typical NBA score might have been something like 102 to 96. And yet the NBA decided that the problem with basketball was that there wasn’t enough scoring. (No, I’m not joking.) They responded by limiting what defensive players were allowed to do in order to make it easier to score. They also began allowing offensive players to get away more often with “traveling”, which is supposed to be a rules violation.
Rules changes also encouraged more use of the 3-point shot. For instance, imagine a defensive player standing inside the 3-point line. The offensive player might jump up (and forward) from a position outside the 3-point line, shoot the ball, and then land on the foot of the innocent bystander planted firmly inside the line. I generally get annoyed when someone jumps up and lands on my foot, but the NBA decided that the real villain is the player who gets landed on. I have seen teams score as many as 7 points on this sort of possession. (A 3-point made shot, a free throw, and possession of the ball leading to another 3, based on the claim that this imaginary foul is unusually “flagrant”.)
This is just one of many rule changes that have begun to favor the offense, especially the three-point shot. The increased use of three point shots has made NBA games about as exciting as watching another person play pinball. In addition to jazzing up the offense, the NBA claims they are trying to reduce injuries. But I see no sign that this has had any impact, indeed serious injuries to key players seem to be happening with increasing frequency.
At times, the NBA seems to lack even a basic understanding of math. When someone is fouled in the act of shooting a 2-point shot, two free throws are awarded. When someone is fouled shooting a three-point shot, three free throws are awarded. But this makes no sense, as 2-point shots are successful about 54% of the time, while 3-point shots are successful only about 36% of the time. Both types of shots have roughly the same expected value (1.1 points), and thus a foul on either shot deserves the same penalty. How hard is that to understand?
The NBA also noticed that fans don’t like it when officials make a bad call. As a result, they instituted a review process where officials stop the game for several minutes to look at an instant replay of the contested call. Here the NBA forgets about the “hedonic treadmill”. This review process has not in any way reduced fan frustration with bad calls, but it has made the already overly long games even longer.
The best part of basketball is when players overcome resistance. The play with the least resistance is the “free throw”. If I had my way, the NBA would get rid of free throws. Just award two points to a foul while shooting, and one point plus possession for ordinary fouls (when in the bonus.) That alone would reduce games from 2 1/2 hours to 2 hours. Have the game play on when the ball hits the top of the backboard, or when it gets wedged by the rim. Don’t call jump balls so quickly. Don’t call kicked balls unless it’s actually kicked, not just hitting a foot.
Perhaps the biggest problem in recent years has been “tanking”, which is when teams try to lose games so that they’ll be first in line to draft the next NBA star coming out of college. The sports press has written dozens of articles explaining why it’s difficult to fix this problem. Nonsense. The problem could easily be fixed with a simply rules change—give all the bad NBA teams an equal shot at getting the best draft position. Then they would have no incentive to lose games to improve their draft position.
If the solution is so simple, why are other people not advocating this change? As with the three-point foul nonsense, there seems to be a lack of common sense in the sports world. They claim that you must give the very worst teams the best draft position to equalize talent. But as Tyler Cowen recently suggested, one of the attractions of sports is the David vs. Goliath aspect, seeing the underdog go up against a dominant team like the New York Yankees or the Boston Celtics.
At least 16 of the NBAs 30 teams have no incentive to tank, as they make the playoffs. Actually, 12 teams automatically make the playoffs, and 8 more vie for 4 play-in spots. So you could argue that only the ten worst teams have a strong incentive to tank. But that’s still a third of the league! This year we’ve seen the sad spectacle of ten NBA teams spending half the season intentionally trying to lose games. (The active players don’t try to lose, rather teams tank by withholding key players with fake injuries.)
The draft lottery favoring the worst record was supposed to help the very worst teams, but it doesn’t. The ten worst teams are all fairly bad and in need of good new players. But the teams with worst records are not the worst teams; they are the teams that try hardest to lose. My own team (the Milwaukee Bucks) is now the tenth worst team. Bucks fans were pulling out their hair in February when the team unexpectedly won 8 out of 10 games (despite their only good player being injured), making it unlikely they’d get one of the top draft picks. That’s right, fans were upset that their team was winning games! And again, this tanking problem could be easily fixed by giving each of the ten worst teams an equal shot as the best new players.
In March, NBA fans can switch away from games where many of the teams are trying to lose and watch college games where players are struggling mightily to win. One problem is that the NBA plays too many games—82 in the regular season and many more playoff games. NBA players get tired playing games on consecutive days and stop trying as hard on defense. In contrast, college players get several days of rest between games and play with much more energy.
NBA basketball is still my favorite sport, despite these flaws. The players are far more skilled than at the college level and when at its best it is an aesthetically beautiful sport. Unfortunately, the NBA management has been doing everything possible to reduce its appeal. Someone needs to step in and rescue the sport.
Additional egregious examples of wasteful and radical NIH IC spending that would be eliminated through
reforms include:
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funneling millions of dollars to EcoHealth
Alliance, which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic,
under Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci also commissioned “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”
publication, which was used to discredit and dismiss any assertion that COVID-19 leaked from a
lab, despite several intelligence agencies now determining COVID-19 likely leaked from a lab.
There’s also the usual Republican bullshit about the Notorious D.E.I. and TEH TRANZ!!, but I want to focus on the excerpted part. This is really like determining if someone is a witch by drowning: if they float, they’re witches, and if they sink, well, oops. What that statement tells me is that several so-called intelligence agencies are really bad at evaluating evidence. I’m going to outsource what I find to be the most compelling argument against the lab leak hypothesis (boldface mine):
There were two lineages of virus present at the Huanan market, called “A” and “B”… These two lineages represent two divergent evolutionary paths the virus took. They are distinguished by their sequences. When RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 replicate, they make mistakes as they copy their genomes. These are mutations. Sometimes these are under positive selection (they give the virus an advantage) and become fixed. Sometimes they are just mistakes that are not under selection or are under negative selection, and they appear transiently, and can revert or mutate to something else. All of this mutation results in an elaborate genetic fingerprint that can be used to trace SARS-CoV-2 as it spread from person to person. We can use phylogenetic analysis to look into the past of any given virus, provided we have enough sequence data. SARS-CoV-2 caused a pandemic that infected millions. We have a lot of sequence data.
…Their work showed that single spillover scenarios were not likely, meaning lineage A and B did not diverge in humans. They have gone on to show this more rigorously. If they didn’t diverge in humans, then they either diverged in an intermediate host or in the lab.
The known cases associated with the market were all lineage B. However, the market hypothesis predicts that both lineages would be present at Huanan market, since they diverged in a host being sold there. This prediction came true when the CCDC first released their preprint in February 2022 and revealed a lineage A sequence at the market. This is consistent with the virus diverging in intermediate animal host(s), and then spilling over into humans at least twice, one to two weeks apart. I say “at least” because the lineages represent the two times we know about, since sustained human-to-human transmission was established and we can study all the sequences of the viruses that evolved from these initial introductions.
A lab leak scenario that fits with these two spillovers is much more farfetched. In order for these data to be consistent with a lab leak, someone working at the WIV, which is over 10 miles away on the other side of the Yangtze River, gets infected with lineage B at work. They go straight to the Huanan market without infecting anyone else along the way. They only infect other people at or near the Huanan market. Then, one to two weeks later, the same thing happens with lineage A.
…Does it make more sense that this technically possible but very unlikely dual lab leak occurred? Or does it make more sense that SARS-CoV-2—a virus that is very good at infecting a LOT of different species without any adaptation—found its way into an intermediate host on sale at Huanan market, and then found its way into humans in a city of 11 million people, where sustained spread and further adaptation could occur?
Despite having to assume that two lab leaks of closely-related but not identical lab leaks occurring in the exact same pattern–which already assumes that the (supposedly) infected personnel managed to start an outbreak in the market without infecting anyone along the way–the Trump administration and three ‘intelligence’ agencies believe COVID was due to a lab leak.
While this conspiracism is par for the course for the Republican Party, it could have real effects on the health and welfare of the U.S.
Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. We tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to perform different functions, it comes in two optical versions — Text and Display — with four variable axes and support for 547 languages, including endangered ones. It is available directly from the designers.
Samual Axon, reporting last week for Ars Technica:
Early this morning, Anthropic published version 2.1.88 of Claude
Code npm package — but it was quickly discovered that package
included a source map file, which could be used to access the
entirety of Claude Code’s source — almost 2,000 TypeScript files
and more than 512,000 lines of code.
Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly point
it out on X, with a link to an archive containing the files.
The codebase was then put in a public GitHub repository, and it
has been forked tens of thousands of times.
Anthropic publicly acknowledged the mistake in a statement to
VentureBeat and other outlets, which reads:
Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal
source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were
involved or exposed. This was a release packaging issue caused by
human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to
prevent this from happening again.
Not exactly confidence inspiring, given how incredibly sensitive much of the material users give Claude and Claude Code access to. To say the least, it undermines the message that companies should trust their source code to Claude Code when Anthropic accidentally leaked their own source code.
Apple has shared nine Little Finder Guy videos this week, and on
TikTok, the thumbnails for the videos come together to make a
Little Finder Guy mosaic on the Apple TikTok page.
I hope this doesn’t jinx the negotiations, but I’m working on getting Little Finder Guy as my guest for The Talk Show Live From WWDC this June.
What a stream is called says a lot about its hydrology. An arroyo is dry and intermittent; bayous, swamps and sloughs refer to wetlands. Anthony Martinez, a data scientist with the USGS, extracted the feature… More
Reuters: “A U.S. mining company backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is in a tangle with Belgium’s AfricaMuseum over who should digitise antique maps of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo… More
New -r/--redact option which shows the list of matches, asks for confirmation and then replaces every match with REDACTED, taking escaping rules into account.
New Python function redact_file(file_path: str | Path, secrets: list[str], replacement: str = "REDACTED") -> int.
Super-niche tool this. I sometimes copy prompts out of the Claude Code terminal app and they come out with a bunch of weird additional whitespace. This tool cleans that up.
Another example of README-driven development, this time solving a problem that might be unique to me.
I often find myself running a bunch of different Datasette instances with different databases and different in-development plugins, spreads across dozens of different terminal windows - enough that I frequently lose them!
Now I can run this:
datasette install datasette-ports
datasette ports
And get a list of every running instance that looks something like this:
The goal was to provide fast, robust and comprehensive linting and verifying tools for SQLite, suitable for use in language servers and other development tools - a parser, formatter, and verifier for SQLite queries. I've found myself wanting this kind of thing in the past myself, hence my (far less production-ready) sqlite-ast project from a few months ago.
Lalit had been procrastinating on this project for years, because of the inevitable tedium of needing to work through 400+ grammar rules to help build a parser. That's exactly the kind of tedious work that coding agents excel at!
Claude Code helped get over that initial hump and build the first prototype:
AI basically let me put aside all my doubts on technical calls, my uncertainty of building the right thing and my reluctance to get started by giving me very concrete problems to work on. Instead of “I need to understand how SQLite’s parsing works”, it was “I need to get AI to suggest an approach for me so I can tear it up and build something better". I work so much better with concrete prototypes to play with and code to look at than endlessly thinking about designs in my head, and AI lets me get to that point at a pace I could not have dreamed about before. Once I took the first step, every step after that was so much easier.
That first vibe-coded prototype worked great as a proof of concept, but they eventually made the decision to throw it away and start again from scratch. AI worked great for the low level details but did not produce a coherent high-level architecture:
I found that AI made me procrastinate on key design decisions. Because refactoring was cheap, I could always say “I’ll deal with this later.” And because AI could refactor at the same industrial scale it generated code, the cost of deferring felt low. But it wasn’t: deferring decisions corroded my ability to think clearly because the codebase stayed confusing in the meantime.
The second attempt took a lot longer and involved a great deal more human-in-the-loop decision making, but the result is a robust library that can stand the test of time.
It's worth setting aside some time to read this whole thing - it's full of non-obvious downsides to working heavily with AI, as well as a detailed explanation of how they overcame those hurdles.
The key idea I took away from this concerns AI's weakness in terms of design and architecture:
When I was working on something where I didn’t even know what I wanted, AI was somewhere between unhelpful and harmful. The architecture of the project was the clearest case: I spent weeks in the early days following AI down dead ends, exploring designs that felt productive in the moment but collapsed under scrutiny. In hindsight, I have to wonder if it would have been faster just thinking it through without AI in the loop at all.
But expertise alone isn’t enough. Even when I understood a problem deeply, AI still struggled if the task had no objectively checkable answer. Implementation has a right answer, at least at a local level: the code compiles, the tests pass, the output matches what you asked for. Design doesn’t. We’re still arguing about OOP decades after it first took off.
Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — “involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.” The official website goes on to declare that “Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.”
If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist.
Don’t tell me that his cause is just, that the Iranian regime is evil. That’s what terrorists always say, and even if it’s sometimes true, terrorism is defined by its means rather than its ends — by its attempt to achieve political goals by violently attacking the innocent.
And that’s exactly what Trump is doing: he’s threatening to attack civilian infrastructure if he doesn’t get his way. And since Trump is talking about targeting essential services — power plants! — this is a threatened attack on people as well as property.
Later on Sunday Trump told Axios that the U.S. is in “deep negotiations” with Iran. Forgive me for doubting that anything like that is happening. But he went on to say that if there isn’t a deal by Tuesday, “I am blowing up everything over there.”
He has issued these threats without even a pretense that we will be attacking military targets, and if anything he seems to relish rather than regret the death and suffering his actions will cause.
On second thought, however, I shouldn’t say that Trump is making a threat of violence; he’s promising violence. That vile post isn’t part of a negotiating strategy, since there is, after all, zero chance that Iran will open the Strait of Hormuz by tomorrow evening. The Iranian regime almost certainly couldn’t open the strait on short notice if it tried: Military control in Iran has, by all accounts, been decentralized to local commanders to limit the effects of U.S. and Israeli decapitation strikes. So there’s no way people in Tehran could order the whole Iranian military to stand down at short notice even if they wanted to.
And of course they don’t want to, because they think Iran is winning. And so do Trump and the people around him, even though they will never admit it.
For terrorism is a strategy of the weak. It’s what extremists do when they lack the ability to achieve their goals through military action or other non-criminal means.
And that’s where Trump and his officials find themselves. They inherited a powerful military (which they are rapidly degrading), but for all its firepower this military lacks the wherewithal to open the Strait of Hormuz to normal traffic. So the Trumpists are gearing up to impose suffering and death on innocent civilians instead, even though this suffering and death will do nothing to achieve America’s objectives.
I don’t know what Trump will do when his deadline passes and the Strait is still closed. He probably doesn’t know either. But he is promising to commit war crimes on a massive scale. And the duty of everyone with any influence who isn’t part of Trump’s inner circle is to do all they can to stop him.
Most immediately, military officers should be aware that they have the right and the duty to disobey illegal orders. It’s incredible that we have gotten to this point, especially so quickly, but here we are. You may recall that Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned in December, reportedly because he refused to be a party to illegal attacks on supposed drug boats. What Trump is now saying he will do is infinitely worse. And a refusal by senior officers to participate in war crimes may be the only thing that could stop this evil in its tracks.
Now is when we find out how completely our once honorable military has been corrupted.
Beyond the military, every politician, dare I say every public figure, in America should make it clear that Trump is not acting in their name.
This is not a time for Republicans who know — and most of them do know — that Trump has gone completely off the rails to remain obsequious for fear that he might endorse their primary opponents. One hopes that there are still a few genuine patriots left on that side of the aisle.
It is also not a time for Democrats to listen to strategists who urge them to stay silent on foreign policy and talk only about grocery prices. As it happens, that’s even bad political advice: Public disdain for Congressional Democrats has a lot to do with perceptions that they are weak and ineffectual, and ignoring Trump’s criminal madness will only reinforce that perception. And there has been no rally-around-the-flag effect from this war, which is growing more unpopular by the day.
But in any case, political considerations should take a back seat to civic duty.
The horrible but undeniable fact right now is that America has a terrorist president. And the whole world knows it. But we still have a chance to show the world that he is an aberration, that we are not a terrorist nation. And we can do that by standing up for the values that have always defined us.
Terrible name, really great app: this is Google's official app for running their Gemma 4 models (the E2B and E4B sizes, plus some members of the Gemma 3 family) directly on your iPhone.
It works really well. The E2B model is a 2.54GB download and is both fast and genuinely useful.
The app also provides "ask questions about images" and audio transcription (up to 30s) with the two small Gemma 4 models, and has an interesting "skills" demo which demonstrates tool calling against eight different interactive widgets, each implemented as an HTML page (though sadly the source code is not visible): interactive-map, kitchen-adventure, calculate-hash, text-spinner, mood-tracker, mnemonic-password, query-wikipedia, and qr-code.
(That demo did freeze the app when I tried to add a follow-up prompt though.)
This is the first time I've seen a local model vendor release an official app for trying out their models on in iPhone. Sadly it's missing permanent logs - conversations with this app are ephemeral.
Wow Nepal, 10728 Fairfax Blvd, Fairfax, VA, 703-880-9898, open 11-9 every day.
The “Wow” here is exactly right, as it is wonderful to have a new great restaurant around. Most Nepalese restaurants in America are variants on north Indian food with batches of half-hearted momos thrown in. This place is the real thing. The goat momos are among the best dishes in northern Virginia right now. The fish is excellent, everything else at least very good. Note that the place is small and fills up early, so arrive in time to get your seat. Strongly recommended.
Watching Artemis lofting skyward I relived the Apollo launches, experiencing feelings that no subsequent missions ever engendered. Artemis involves taking humans back into exploration mode with our spacecraft. Getting people out of low-Earth orbit again is a thrill despite the astonishing cost of the SLS launch vehicle. Obviously finding alternatives that would make more frequent flights possible has a major place on the agenda if we are to contemplate a continuous presence on the Moon, not to mention Mars. But for now, what a kick to see that big bird climb.
The distance between actual goals and dreams sometimes shrinks, and we saw recently that Breakthrough Starshot has made serious progress in developing the engineering concepts for an interstellar flyby. Both Artemis and the evolving Starshot design remind me that while most of the population in any era does not venture far from home, there are always a few who do, and those few change the shape of their civilization. Spaceflight obviously demands hardware and missions. Just as obviously, it demands scientists working on ways to push the envelope to attain still more distant goals. And it demands informing the public about where we are.
Be aware that Jim Benford’s recent interview on the matter is now available online. It’s part of a series of presentations offered by Paul Davies, Sara Walker and Maulik Parikh from the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. This interview powerfully makes the case for funding Phase 2 of the Starshot program and developing early prototypes. The public needs to know about what has been accomplished and what steps lie ahead.
I’ve been closely re-reading Erwing Goffman’s classic 1952 paper, On Cooling the Mark Out, after more than a decade, and this re-read feels very different, driven by the vague intuition that it sheds some important light on the status of the very idea of America today, as in the United States, at a time when it is busy renegotiating its identity with itself, and doing a piss-poor job of it.
If you’re not familiar with it, go read it right now. It explores a delicious idea — how perpetrators of long cons make arrangements to essentially console the victim and help them deal with the humiliation and identity assault they’ve just experienced so they don’t create a costly fuss. It’s an essential piece of follow through to ensure that the con doesn’t end up as a costly score because the victim isn’t willing to just take the loss quietly. The goal of the con itself is to ensure the mark loses. The goal of the cooling is to ensure they accept their new status as a loser.
We’re poised at a historical moment where it feels like the United States, as a country, is about to realize it is the mark of a long con it set up for itself over a century ago, and its self-cooling-out mechanisms are failing.
But let me not get ahead of myself. First, let me introduce the original idea.
The key insight of the paper is that more than the material loss, however large, the cost of the con to the mark is the loss of a certain image they had of themselves, which is now falsified by social facts. It is a kind of social death.
It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. A person may tell himself many things: that he has not been given a fair chance; that he is not really interested in becoming something else; that the time for showing his mettle has not yet come; that the usual means of realizing his desires are personally or morally distasteful, or require too much dull effort. By means of such defenses, a person saves himself from committing a cardinal social sin‑the sin of defining oneself in terms of a status while lacking the qualifications which an incumbent of that status is supposed to possess.
A mark’s participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the de-fenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only an-other easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser- ably lacking in them. This is a process of self‑destruction of the self. It is no won-der that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.
In essence, then, the cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb‑persons whose expectations and self‑conceptions have been built up and then shattered. The mark is a person who has compromised himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of others.
The first time I read the paper, I think I paid attention mainly to the early part of the paper where he talks about the idea of cooling the mark out in the specific context of long cons. I think I kinda skimmed over the rest of the paper, which on this re-read now strikes me as far more interesting. In the latter part, Goffman goes on a wild, speculative ride, proposing that cooling the mark out is not a narrow sociological pattern restricted to the world of long cons, but a fundamental pattern explaining all of society. The conceit is similar to the one in Huizenga’s Home Ludens, which proposes that all human culture is ludic in nature.
Naturally I love such conceits, since I harbor many of them myself. The true value of an idea is not that it explains what it sets out to explain (finding and developing such ideas is the essence of intellectual grinding) but that it explains vastly more at least at a mildly plausible level. Like orders of magnitude more phenomenology. It’s the intellectual equivalent of winning the lottery. The opposite of grinding.
Let’s call these jackpot ideas. Cooling the mark out is a jackpot idea. So is “all culture is play.” In my own resume, I’d count the Gervais Principle, manufactured normalcy, escaped reality, premium mediocre, domestic cozy/cozyweb, Internet of Beefs, and more recently, superhistory, oozification, and camera-not-engine, as modest little jackpot ideas. I’m lazy. I’m pretty much only interested in jackpot ideas. I don’t like grinding, and am not particularly good at it, and I like getting lucky.
Back to cooling the mark out. Goffman’s essential thesis is that all of society is set up around a particular formula:
Sell people various aspirational scripts that by definition only a small minority will actually be able to realize, as a function of aptitude and luck
Cool out those who fail to continue being productive or at least not harmful members of society, accepting various sorts of consolation prizes
Careers of any sort, consumption behaviors, dating and marriage, competitive activities like sports, face-saving norms, cultures of shame and guilt, military misadventures. Everything fits the cooling-the-mark-out pattern. Because not cooling marks out is incredibly expensive to society.
Sustained personal disorganization is one way in which a mark can refuse to cool out. Another standard way is for the individual to raise a squawk, that is, to make a formal complaint to higher authorities obliged to take notice of such matters. The con mob worries lest the mark appeal to the police. The plant manager must make sure that the disgruntled department head does not carry a formal complaint to the general manager or, worse still, to the Board of Directors. The teacher worries lest the child’s parent complain to the principal. Similarly, a woman who communicates her evaluation of self by accepting a proposal of marriage can sometimes protect her exposed position‑should the necessity of doing so arise‑by threatening her disaffected fiancé with a breach‑of‑promise suit. So, also, a woman who is de‑courting her hus-band must fear lest he contest the divorce or sue her lover for alienation of affection. In much the same way, a customer who is angered by a salesperson can refuse to be mollified by the floorwalker and demand to see the manager. It is interesting to note that associations dedicated to the rights and the honor of minority groups may sometimes encourage a mark to reg-ister a formal squawk; politically it may be more advantageous to provide a test case than to allow the mark to be cooled out.
Curiously, the paper does not get into the behavior of collectives that have been played, and must now be cooled out as collectives, nor does it comment on the peculiar features of the most interesting society when it comes to cooling marks out — America. Many of the peculiarities have to do with collective cooling-out behaviors.
The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.
It is also a culture of people who seem systematically disposed to the suspicion that they are being conned by someone in everything they do, and are primed to try and con others pre-emptively before they get conned. And do so while maintaining an image of their own righteousness. Trust, but verify, is the nice way of putting it. A more accurate way might be: I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.
A book I reference often, Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self, dives deep into the peculiarities of American self-authorship. In light of Goffman’s theory, the redemption narrative that is the American default (at least in the white population), is a life-scale cooling-out operating system capable of accommodating both script success/guilt and failure.
Belief in the American Narrative Stack, as it were, is based on believing the rest of the world is some mix of childlike and/ effete and exhausted, and until recently, an American Burden to be taken care of, firmly but kindly.
As you might expect, the stack routinely fails at all levels, causing both domestic and international embarrassment. It also contains plenty of outright lies about both America and the rest of the world (as when Bill Clinton iirc, claimed credit for splitting the atom, which belongs to Rutherford (New Zealand), Fermi (Italian phase) and Cockroft/Walton (UK)).
Domestically, the US has pioneered perhaps the most unique solution to the problem of marks needing to be cooled out — litigiousness (the Indian solution is probably the doctrine of karma). Not only do Americans threaten to sue each other routinely, they invite others to sue them. The phrase so sue me could not have emerged anywhere else. And the litigiousness goes all the way up. Organizations, cities, and government agencies all sue each other, or threaten lawsuits, all the time. Relatedly, American governance is a vetocracy, where many actors at many levels can stop things from happening. This both raises the stakes for cooling marks out (persuading marks to not exercise veto rights), and offers a mechanism for doing so (threatening or inviting vetoes).
Actual lawsuits, of course, are rarer and more pragmatic than the culture of threatening and inviting lawsuits. And vetoes are exercised less often than they could be.
I read this as a self-serve, DIY social infrastructure for cooling yourself out. The thing about lawsuits is, you can always excuse failure to actually follow through by blaming the slowness of the courts, the power of money to pervert justice, the venality of laywers, and so forth. The threats and invitations to sue do much of the cooling-out work. Similarly, the theoretical possibility of veto actions offers a similar way to vent energies.
Internationally, it has historically been in the interest of other nations to humor American national conceits. Privately, other world leaders may attribute America’s success as a nation to the jackpot of a rich continent emptied out with disease and built out with slave labor, but for over 150 years, it has been an easy choice to suppress cynicism at American self-congratulation and validate the countries narrative stack in exchange for a share of the spoils of its history.
Important events in American history have revolved around large-scale mark-cooling-out chapters. The most important one was likely the cooling out of poor southern Whites, post Civil War, when they were fed the narrative, “at least we’re better off than blacks” in the new dispensation. The American response to 9/11 was tolerated around the world in part due to the coercive capabilities of the America’s underground empire, but also in part to allow America to cool itself out after the humiliation of being struck in the homeland.
Somewhere in the background, all Americans have always realized that the narratives they live by are sustained by neighbors all the way up being willing to humor them. At the international level, America has tended to use a mix of carrots and sticks to not just let us get what we want, but validate the narratives we spin about it all.
This means the American narrative identity has always rested on the ability to bully and bribe people into nodding along.
For immigrants like me, who were too old at the time of immigration to ever fully buy into the American narrative stack, the conscious act of choosing to immigrate here still involved us in the stakes.
We’re now in an era where America is no longer in the mood to be generous with its wealth and power, or shoulder planetary responsibilities in ways proportionate to its extractive tendencies. Which means planetary counterparties increasingly have fewer reasons to humor American conceits or validate American narratives. To the extent the US is still an enormously powerful country, it will increasingly need to rely on naked power to get what it wants, which in turn will put increasing stress on individual Americans’ identities as good people and prosocial members of humanity at large, rather than complicit in increasingly unconscionable behaviors at planetary scale.
Internally, this will put increasing stress on the cooling-out mechanisms for domestic and local identities as well. The last decade’s culture war is one sign of that. Threats and invitations to sue and veto each other are no longer sufficient to save face as our individual and collective identities start to crumble.
Overall, we’re headed for a deep reckoning with what I previously dubbed Chor-Pharn’s Law: If you know who you are, you get a civilizational war, if you don’t know who you are, you get a culture war.
As our cooling-out infrastructure fails throughout the narrative stack, we’re going to get both. What Goffman calls “personal disorganization” is going to start playing out at all scales of collectivity. In fact, it’s already started. That’s what all the derangement syndromes of the last decade have been about. The beginnings of identity disorganization at all levels.
Towards the end of the paper, Goffman notes that actually dealing with the pain of loss of identity is the work being avoided by cooling-out processes. But such pain cannot be deferred indefinitely, either by individuals or nations.
Intel really delivered with Panther Lake. A 2026 Dell XPS 14 using this chipset with an IPS screen can hit just 1.4 watts of idle power draw on Omarchy. That's good enough for over 47 hours!! And in real-world mixed use on another 74-Wh machine, I've seen around 16 hours of battery life. That's a huge jump over the ~6 hours I was getting over the past two years from AMD-powered Framework laptops.
Technically, Intel already had something close to Panther Lake on efficiency with the Lunar Lake chips from last year, but those were quite slow on any multi-core workloads (like a developer would need). With Panther Lake (358H), I'm getting 17,500 on Geekbench 6, which is about 10% faster than the already excellent AMD HX370, and a match for Apple's M5.
Apple remains ahead on single-core performance, but even there, Panther Lake is on par with an M3. And I don't remember anyone complaining that those were too slow. What everyone has been pining for was better battery life, and now we got it. On a machine with excellent integrated graphics that are good enough to play a ton of triple-A games no less!
But we're getting more than that. The PC makers are getting their act together on all fronts. Haptic touchpads on level with Apple's is now standard on both high-end Dell and Asus laptops. Many of the new machines also have tandem OLED screens that blow even the nice micro-LED options from Apple out of the water. And PCs are now somehow both sleeker and slimmer than the MacBooks.
Jonathan Ive knew this, he was just a bit ahead of the components, and he was willing to sacrifice reliability to get to what wasn't possible back then. But now it is, and the PC makers are taking full advantage.
Now I know that any comparison between Macs and PCs are moot for most people. There's not a lot of cross-shopping going on these days. If you're locked into the Apple walled garden, it's hard to untangle yourself, so most just continue to buy whatever their team offers.
But for the few who are either fed up with Apple in general, macOS Tahoe in particular, or just want to try a whole new way of computing with Omarchy, it's fantastic that battery life is no longer a blocker. It's been the #1 reason cited by folks who've been interested in trying Omarchy, but felt like they couldn't let go of Apple's efficiency advantage. Now that's largely gone.
I also just love a good turnaround story. Intel had been on the ropes for years. Now they have a fantastic integrated GPU that's compatible with all the tens of thousands of PC games on the market, a super-efficient CPU that's a match for an M5 on multi-core and an M3 on single-core performance, and a range of PC makers finally taking the fight directly to Apple on touchpads, build quality, and weight.
These new Panther Lake CPUs are made in Arizona too, btw. With the world as it is, I think any American should breathe a sigh of relief that if things get spicy with Taiwan, there's more to frontier computing than a TSMC plant within a short reach of China. There's still more work to be done on that front (as Intel CPU cores still come from TSMC!), but it's a huge step in the right direction.
Personally, I'm just thrilled that competition is lifting all boats. Apple gave the entire laptop industry a huge wake-up call in 2020 with the introduction of the M chips. Intel's former CEO, Pat Gelsinger, saw the threat clearly, kicked off the 18A plan, but sadly didn't last long enough in the top seat to see his bet pay off with Panther Lake. The rest of us now benefit from his boldness.
I'm also thrilled to see both Dell and Intel leaning into Linux. Omarchy 3.5 ships with every possible tweak to make these Panther Lake chips perform at their best, and that was only possible because Michael Dell assigned a team to work on it. So much love to Mr Dell for letting us borrow the brains and commits from senior engineers within both his company and Intel to ship this big new release.
If you've been waiting on the sidelines for a laptop that can run Omarchy and still get amazing battery life, now is your magic moment. Give the new Dell XPS series, or any of the other laptops shipping with Panther Lake, a try. I think you'll be as impressed as I've been.
St. Petersburg, FL — April 6, 2026 — Seagate Space Corporation announced today a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Firefly Aerospace to collaborate on the development of an offshore launch platform […]
NASA has stopped work on a second mobile launch platform intended for an upgraded version of the Space Launch System the agency no longer plans to develop.
Here's the invitation to a discussion I'll have in May with Ray Fisman, about Moral Economics.
Some
of my Boston/Cambridge friends asked how to get tickets now because
they're afraid it will sell out (the price is right), and others because
they're afraid that if they don't come Ray and I will be speaking to an
empty hall...
"Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Alvin E. Roth—Nobel Prize–winning economist, the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University—for a discussion of his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. He will be joined in conversation by Ray Fisman—who holds the Slater Family Chair in Behavioral Economics at Boston University. Ticketing
RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Moral Economics and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing."
The annual Public Choice Outreach Conference is a crash course in public choice. The conference is designed for undergraduates and graduates in a wide variety of fields. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! The conference will be held Friday June12- Sunday June 14 , near Washington, DC in Reston, VA. Lots of great speakers including Tyler, myself, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Jon Klick, Shruti Rajagopalan and more.
Like a tiny snail shell lying on a beach, a small spiral juts out from the expanse of the Atacama Desert. While most of the lines carving the landscape in today's Picture of the Week are natural consequences of geology, the circling path is in fact a road leading up the mountain Cerro Armazones. At the top sits ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction, visible only as a black dot below the centre of this image.
Pinpointing the ELT in the vast area of reds and greys might, at first, make its name seem excessive. But it is all a matter of perspective. This photo was taken by Sophie Adenot, a French engineer, helicopter pilot and astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA), currently on the International Space Station (ISS) for a long-duration mission called εpsilon. Even from her vantage point, more than 400 kilometres above the Earth's surface, the ELT is a distinguishable feature in the landscape. Once completed, it will be the world's largest visible and infrared light telescope. Its immense light-gathering capability will allow the ELT to probe deeper into the Universe than ever before. An avid stargazer herself, Adenot has sent a log from the ISS to explain why the ELT's location was chosen:
Day 051, orbit 802 – Chile has some of the most beautiful skies on Earth... Stargazing takes on a different dimension there, with three galaxies perfectly visible to the naked eye in the night sky – our very own Milky Way and its two neighbours, the large and small Magellanic Clouds.
The Mars-like Atacama desert is home to several of ESO’s observatories, including at La Silla and Cerro Paranal. This picture shows the construction site of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) on Cerro Armazones. Once completed, the ELT will become the world’s biggest eye on the sky, featuring a 39-meter-diameter mirror… that’s about 9 cars parked bumper-to-bumper, or two H225 helicopters nose-to-tail!
Collaboration between Europe and Chile at its best!
Since Friday I’ve been in Cardiff for Wales Goes Pop!, my first time at this indiepop festival in an arts centre. It’s been nice to be staying in a city centre, walking distance to shops and coffee shops and things going on. Although it’s another city in which you can wander round the pedestrianised centre thinking it all feels slightly neglected and out-of-date, only to realise all the fancier shops are tucked away inside the easily missed private/public space of an indoor mall. On the plus side, Cardiff also has a few old, attractive, also easily missed, arcades in which to hide smaller interesting establishments too.
I didn’t enjoy the festival as much as I hoped – I didn’t know most of the bands and their music and/or performances didn’t excite me much. While a single-track festival means you don’t need to miss out on anything, it also means there’s no alternative stages to go and see if you’re not grabbed by something. So I spent a lot of time sat on an old pew while another guitar-and-drums band played, staring into space, ruminating about life, which wasn’t the escape I needed.
The audience were much more middle-aged than I expected but maybe I should have guessed, given the ages of the top-billed bands, hailing from the 80s and 90s. A bit of a shame really - I wanted more youthful energy! There were moments when my field of view contained so many middle-aged white guys with cropped hair and glasses that I thought I was at a Phil Gyford convention.
Due to misreading Saturday’s festival schedule I missed the talk about Sarah Records, which I was looking forward to. But here are my highlights:
Prolapse seem like a very non-twee choice for a headliner but were, for me, easily the high spot of the whole thing. Nearly 30 years after I last/first saw them they were still committed and so exciting
Lande Hekt was new to me but probably my next favourite music of the festival.
It was good to see Heavenly in the flesh after all these years although I only knew three of the songs.
Lilith AI had more showmanship than half of the other bands combined.
So many bands sounded quite similar and so The School’s trumpet was a welcome bit of variety. More bands should have some brass.
§ The start of the week I hastily varnished MDF shelves and a workbench top for the garage, and we then put them together. The process was a bit confusing – instructions weren’t great, especially for the workbench – but we managed to get it all together and no one was injured. The shelves are adequate and the workbench is less stable than we’d hoped. We’ll see how they go.
§ Over the past couple of months I’ve probably spent an order of magnitude more time configuring Neovim than I’ve spent writing any code using it. This week version 0.12 was released, with a built in package manager and I took this as a great opportunity to completely re-do my configuration, and maybe make it so I’ve spent two orders of magnitude more time on config than code.
Meanwhile, some people are doing worthwhile things with their time.
But it remains a very distracting, often frustrating, but sometimes satisfying hobby. So many different ways to do things. So many blog posts to read. So many slightly different plugins to try. So many fiddly details that might or might not be working. Slotting everything together is just hard enough to occupy my brain but not as big-picture challenging as writing actual code.
§ We’ve now finished watching both seasons of Deadloch which is a huge amount of fun. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through at first, mainly because Eddie was so over-the-top, unbearable, and consistently, loudly wrong about everything, that it was frustrating to watch. Thankfully she calmed down a bit around episode 3 so we stuck with it.
It remained a bit odd that Dulcie – apparently nice and normal – exists in this world in which everyone else is stupid or evil or very weird or in some other way terrible, but we coped with that. Season two’s plot was a mess and I had no interest in whodunnit at all, but it’s a testament to the writing, characters, acting, swearing and general fun of the whole thing that this didn’t really matter.
§ And we watched Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) which was really good.
§ With hours to kill on an Easter Sunday I went to see Project Hail Mary which was alright. Looked good and was quite fun. I was ready for it to be over sooner than it was and I didn’t feel as invested in what happened as I felt I was supposed to. I think I would prefer to see a movie focusing on Sandra Hüller’s character being extremely competent but emotionally distant.
She now had questions for me. And I agreed to do this Q&A—which we are both publishing on our respective Substacks. You can find her at Crack the Book.
Below is our conversation.
Please support my work by taking out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).
What led you to create your 52-week humanities reading program?
Many people want this kind of immersive education in the humanities—maybe even more so nowadays given the mind-numbing impact of apps and social media on our lives. People feel victimized by tech and mass media. They want to learn how to think more deeply, not just via soundbites and scrolling videos.
You probably feel it too—I know I do. Our attention span is degraded by the dominant digital culture. Our brains feel under attack. So it’s not surprising that a growing number of people are asking if these books, so rich in tradition and influence, might hold the key.
They’re on the right track. But they don’t know where to start. And even if they find some entry point, the task feels overwhelming. There are so many books, so many agendas.
So I set myself a challenge. I would design a complete survey of arts and culture in just 52 weeks. And I wouldn’t limit myself to Western culture—I’d try to cover the entire world.
Ted Gioia (photo by Ariana Gomez)
That’s a tall order.
It sounded crazy. Was it even possible? I’d find out.
But, first, I added to the challenge. I would limit the required reading to 250 pages per week—that’s a demanding workload, but not impossible. And I would also add music recommendations, with the same global approach—there would be a playlist for each week. I’d also suggest online art galleries, so that the program would encompass visual arts too.
If I could pull it off, the upside would be enormous. By the end of the year, the student would have a powerful grasp of all the major ideas and worldviews that have shaped the history of human culture. They will have also gained an appreciation of the great works of literature, music, and art that have inspired generations.
What a fantastic way to spend a year. This just might be the most mind-expanding project you could possibly undertake.
Just thinking about this got me excited. But then I sat down and started to design a week-by-week plan. That was hard work.
I was lucky that I had some relevant experiences, not just in my own education, but also in teaching. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I had tutored freshmen in the university’s great books program—which tries to encompass 3,000 years of culture in one year of intense reading.
Back then, I helped these teens as they grappled with the assigned texts, and I’d seen firsthand how life-changing it could be. Now I would do something similar, but bring it to a larger group of readers.
What’s been the feedback on this list in particular? I know you’ve created a few different reading lists—you first got my attention when you shared the list about living with technology. But this was the biggest reading list of them all.
As it turned out, the response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. So many people reached out to me. They wanted to be part of this. They have a hunger for this kind of learning and feel starved by mainstream culture.
I guess I knew that already from my own education. But I also knew how many obstacles there are to this kind of learning. When I was a teen, I encountered smug responses to my own efforts to read the great books. I was told that this kind of education was not relevant for someone like me—a working class kid from an Italian-Mexican household with parents who had never gone to college.
I thought that was patronizing in the extreme. For me, reading Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, etc. was tremendously liberating. The people who tried to prevent me from getting this education were, in my opinion, the narrow-minded ones.
When you were paring your list down to 52 weeks, what titles were the hardest to cut?
It was painful to limit myself to just 250 pages of reading per week. That meant I often had to pick part of a book—because it was too long to be read in its entirety.
For example, I would love to have students read all of The Brothers Karamazov. Instead I focused on the most famous part of the novel—the section known as “The Grand Inquisitor.” It’s just 30 pages—but it’s a mind-blowing 30 pages. I made similar decisions about Proust, Joyce, and other authors.
What was the biggest challenge in doing this? Looking at the entire course now, what are the one or two things you’d change, if any?
I wish I could offer more support to readers—in terms of video lectures, discussion groups, etc. I’m just one person, and can lay out a week-by-week plan. But I can’t replicate a total educational experience.
But I do point readers to online resources—for example, the Catherine Project. I also encouraged readers to get together and create their own discussion groups.
That said, it is possible to learn on your own without institutional support. Most of my education happened that way. The key thing is to devote time to reading and thinking. As I recently said in an article, reading shouldn’t be a goal, it should be a habit.
One of the biggest surprises for me was in the very last week—I loved David Foster Wallace.
If I taught high school or college students, I would assign that specific book by David Foster Wallace—it’s called Something to Do with Paying Attention. I’ve given copies as gifts to young people because it grapples with the core issues they must face if they want to become responsible adults. It tells you the things they don’t teach in school.
It helps that it’s just 150 pages, and is an easy read. That’s not always true with Wallace’s work.
If you had created a Week 53 set in the early 21st century, who would you have included? Do you have your eye on anyone writing now who might eventually qualify for inclusion?
If I had an extra week to the course, I wouldn’t add any books. Instead I’d focus on cinema.
This is the biggest gap in the program. I talk to young people who haven’t seen even the obvious films—The Godfather, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, etc. The whole notion of black-and-white movies is strange to them, and they view silent films as equivalent to cave paintings from prehistoric times.
Maybe the best solution would be to add one movie per week to the assignments—that would give us 52 films over the course of the year. We could cover a lot of territory that way, and the films would be a fun break from reading.
Which of the books on this list are personal favorites of yours? I know you said that you didn’t agree with some of the authors, but that they needed to be included.
Were some of your favorites among those that you actually disagree with? By the way, this was a huge area of growth for me, learning to value authors who had viewpoints I disagreed vehemently with.
There’s a misconception about the so-called “great books.” Critics gripe that this kind of education is a propaganda campaign on behalf of the past, indoctrinating youngsters in outdated ideas. Nothing could be the further from the truth.
These books force you to think critically about your own time and the future we’re building together. They force us to define our own values and priorities. In other words, they demand a response and stir up debate. You don’t just accept them, you wrestle with them.
So, yes, I have many disagreements with these texts. For example, I am more aligned with Aristotle than Plato—but students need to understand both of those thinkers. I could give many other examples.
At every step, you are encouraged to fight with these authors. Even when you disagree, you will learn how to think more deeply, more clearly, by confronting viewpoints from outside your comfort zone.
In other instances, you will dismiss certain authors—but then realize how valuable they were years later. Your first introduction to them plants a seed inside your soul, and it grows over time.
Can you give me an example of that?
For example, I read Don Quixote as a summer project when I was twenty years old. I worked my way through the entire Samuel Putnam translation in two volumes, and felt very proud of myself. But I didn’t really understand what this book actually meant—it was just a pastiche or slapstick comedy, as far as I could tell.
My copy of Don Quixote once belonged to my Uncle Ted—who also had a copy in Spanish with his annotations. I don’t know what happened to that book, but I benefited from this inheritance.
But years later, I had to research medieval literature on romance and chivalry while writing my book on Love Songs for Oxford University Press. I now saw that Cervantes was a towering figure, who changed the course of storytelling—deconstructing the popular myths of knights and jousts and lovely ladies (those were like the Star Wars of his day, tired franchises with too many reboots). He replaced these idealized myths with a new approach, which we now call the novel.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now see a double-edged approach in his great work. On the one hand, he mocks his protagonist Don Quixote, a deluded old man who still believes in the medieval myths. Cervantes even punishes Don Quixote, subjecting him to all sorts of indignities during the course of the book. But despite all this, the reader still loves Don Quixote.
We admire his loyalty to his ideals. The fact that Quixote’s worldview has now disappeared from society only makes us sympathize all the more. Even tilting at windmills is heroic, when viewed in this light.
By the way, this is a good metaphor for the entire project of studying the great books. We can find beauty in things that have disappeared from the world. We can still learn from them. I can embrace Don Quixote as a role model even if I know he was pursuing an impossible dream.
This kind of hermeneutic exercise is invaluable. We actually put ourselves in the proverbial shoes of another person, from another world. An education in the great books is our best way of cultivating this expansive mindset.
Why did you include the Mwindo Epic in your reading list?
The Mwindo Epic—a story from the Nyanga people of the Congo—may be the least well-known book on my list. Many people assume that Africa’s traditional literary sources have disappeared, because they were part of an oral culture that was never preserved in writing.
That’s not true. Some of these stories have been documented, written down, and published in books. Reading the book may not give you the full experience—the Mwindo Epic, for example, is traditionally performed by a bard accompanied by three percussionists. But confronting works of this sort, even on the page, is an essential part of a serious education.
For the same reason, I also included Sundiata, an epic from Mali. Both of these works are short and can be read in a single sitting.
Of course, there are other options. I might instead have assigned the Anansi tales from West Africa. The spider Anansi is the quintessential trickster, and thus is a counterpart to other characters from our reading list—for example, Homer’s Odysseus or Shakespeare’s Puck.
That’s the advantage of this kind of cross-border approach to culture. You see the power of the idea in the connections it makes across time and space.
In one of your rules for reading, you mention getting good advice on which books to read. Who are those sources for you? It seems like everyone wants to tell you what you should be reading, but everyone is not very smart, or wise. I ask this as I’m preparing a couple of deep-dive projects for myself.
I’m fortunate that my older brother is one of the most well-read and thoughtful people on the planet. He is seven years older than me, and from my childhood onward guided me to great books, music, visual arts, and films.
This provided not just an education, but an ongoing source of inspiration. People who have met Dana will know exactly what I’m saying.
Of course, I also had other great teachers, and took seriously what they told me. I recently dedicated my book Music to Raise the Dead to my teachers and mentors—and listed more than twenty of them on the opening page. I take these debts seriously.
What’s your current deep dive, if any?
I like to pick topics of interest, and then devote several months to intense study. Maybe I’ll read a dozen or so books on the subject. In recent years , I have done these deep dives into the origins of Romanticism, Shakespeare’s life and times, and the decline of the Roman empire. My next immersive reading project will probably focus on mysticism as a force in intellectual history.
I’m also pursuing a fun side project—reading works of fiction about chess. I just finished Stefan Zweig’s novel on the subject, and absolutely loved it. Next up is Nabokov’s novel The Luzhin Defense.
You can learn more about the 52-week humanities project at this link.
We study how international migrant income prospects affect long-run development in origin areas. We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exchange rate shocks in a shift-share identification strategy across Philippine provinces. Initial migrant income shocks are magnified six-fold over time, increasing domestic income, education levels, migrant skills, and high-skilled migration. Remarkably, 74.9 percent of long-run income gains come from domestic rather than migrant income. Trade driven impacts of exchange rate shocks are orthogonal to effects via migrant income. A structural model reveals that 19.7 percent of long-run income gains stem from educational investments. International migration fosters broad economic development in origin communities.
Declining fertility and population loss pose significant challenges for state and federal local governments responsible for providing a range of services to citizens, including education, health care, and infrastructure. Indeed, many areas are already experiencing outright population decline, with roughly half of U.S. counties losing population between 2010 and 2020. This paper examines how shrinking and aging populations affect the operations and fiscal sustainability of state and local governments. Preliminary evidence presented in this paper suggests that scaling down educational services is considerably more difficult than scaling up. The estimated per-enrollee cost increases associated with a 10 percent enrollment decline are four times larger than the cost decreases associated with a 10 percent enrollment increase. Regions with contracting populations will face additional challenges as a smaller working-age population bears the burden of funding pensions and retiree health plans for larger aging cohorts. While lower fertility can create a short run fiscal dividend as local governments serve fewer children, that dividend will only be realized if state and local public officials make efficient retrenchment a priority.
From Jeffrey Clemens, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. As I think JFV mentioned lately, we have not done enough thinking about what a society with low TFR really is going to look like after a while.
You’ve certainly seen or heard about President Trump’s morning threat to destroy Iran’s civil energy and bridge infrastructure if the country doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday. To quote him: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” (That’s not my arch summary. That’s a direct quote.) I will set aside that these would appear to constitute war crimes as going without saying. The man is careening from one day to the next, from ‘the strait doesn’t matter,’ to (alternatively) ‘not our problem/it will open itself’ to ‘I give you two fucking days or you’ll be living in hell.’ Of course, then, he has then repeatedly “postponed” the day of destruction after encouraging talks with Iran leaders, talks which we then learn a few days later never occurred. But now he says, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” (This time I really, really mean it!)
In other words, talk like an insane person and carry a really small stick. He thinks these outbursts make him look stronger but each threat and retreat makes him look weaker and more clearly not in control of the situation. These are the words of a man who has spent a lifetime either TACOing or bullshitting his way out of messes suddenly coming up against an immovable object and at a moment when he already appears to be under some mix of extreme psychic strain and a more general senescent decompensation.
There is another part of this equation which I do not think has gotten sufficient focus. On March 24, The New York Times published an article which reported that Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, has told President Trump that he needs to finish the job, overthrow the Iranian regime or render it so feeble that it cannot threaten anyone — the second condition likely being impossible without achieving the first. As the Times put it (emphasis added), “Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government.”
Placing a story like this in the Times, is about as clear and as audacious a message a Saudi ruler can send to the U.S. government without purchasing a nationwide 30-second ad campaign. I interpret this as MBS saying: just to be sure the message is getting through or I’m putting this out here in case you’re getting the message and not sharing it with your people. Trump whacked a hornets nest, and MBS says now Trump needs to remove the nest. It can’t be left in place. He needs to overthrow or defang the Iranian regime. The status quo is unacceptable, whatever nonsense of the day Trump may be saying about the strait not being his problem.
The common thinking in the U.S. is that President Trump either blundered his way into this mess or was goaded into it by Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s a bit of truth to the second idea and a lot to the first. But it’s MBS and the leader of the UAE along with other gulf princes who are really Trump’s guys, much more so than Netanyahu. The way the Trump White House has interwoven U.S. security, money and geopolitics with them runs much deeper. And, critically and relatedly, the Trump family’s business ties with them are infinitely deeper.
I’m not saying Trump won’t follow through on these threats, though I think he’s most likely to cave again. What it means is that this war is likely to last a lot longer than most people think. What it all comes down to is that I don’t think Trump can leave, even though he’s desperate to. That is the context in which we need to see these escalating rage tweets.
Tropical forests span 1.6 billion hectares (6.2 million square miles) of Earth. These ecosystems support a majority of the planet’s animal and plant species and contain plants that contribute to over a quarter of modern medicine. But over the past two decades, an average of 10 million hectares (nearly 40,000 square miles) of these forests—roughly the size of Kentucky—have been lost each year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, affecting the ecosystems and communities that depend on them.
NASA scientists recently developed a new method for tracking tropical forest loss that delivers deforestation alerts more than three months faster than current methods. Although the technique was designed for the Amazon rainforest, data from a recently launched satellite are expected to expand its application globally.
Limits of Traditional Satellite Observations
Because tropical forests are so vast, local communities, conservationists, and policymakers rely on satellite data to manage them. Images acquired by satellites with optical sensors provide highly accurate alerts. For instance, the image above, acquired as part of the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project, shows newly cleared land in southwest Brazil in July 2020. Images from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites have revolutionized land management for over 50 years. In 1988, Brazil developed one of its first satellite-based monitoring systems using Landsat data, which remains in use today.
Though Landsat is an invaluable tool for Earth observation, it has a critical limitation: clouds. As an optical satellite, it relies on reflected light and cannot observe the ground through cloud cover. This creates data gaps that are especially limiting in tropical regions, which are cloudy most of the year. In some areas, months can pass without acquiring a cloud-free image, hindering efforts to track and curb unregulated forest clearing.
A Breakthrough Using Radar
To address Landsat’s cloud challenge, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center tuned into a different wavelength. Led by Africa Flores-Anderson, associate program manager for NASA’s Ecosystem Conservation Program, the team piloted a system for the Amazon that combines existing satellite-based approaches with cutting-edge radar data. The approach builds upon a platform developed by the Cardille Lab at McGill University.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) doesn’t require daylight or clear skies. To generate an image, SAR instruments beam radar signals at a surface and measure the signals that bounce back. SAR satellites use various ranges of radar wavelengths, or “bands,” to measure features on Earth’s surface. Over forests, the shorter wavelengths of the C-band scatter off treetops, but the longer wavelengths of the L-band can make it down to the ground.
This L-band is central to Flores-Anderson’s approach. Similar efforts favored C-band because it was more readily available than other SAR data. But when felled trees—along with their branches and leaves—are not removed right away, C-band’s shorter wavelengths are scattered by remaining debris, obscuring evidence of destruction. In contrast, L-band’s longer wavelengths can penetrate this material and reveal the damage. The new method is the first of its kind to automatically combine the user-friendly, intuitive images from Landsat and the consistent, detailed insights from L-band SAR data.
These visuals show the benefit of combining optical images and L-band SAR data. The patch of deforested land in southwest Brazil (top row) is overlaid with colors that represent the month that deforestation was detected (bottom row).
The left map shows that SAR detected two patches of forest loss in January (purple), three months earlier than optical sensors (middle map). The patches appear small because deforestation happens gradually, Flores-Anderson explained. At that point in January, only those areas had been cleared.
By April (green), optical sensors had detected forest loss across a wider area, shown in the middle map. These sensors collect images every few days, while the SAR data used in this study captured the area only once or twice a month. In this case, the optical satellites observed the change during a break in the cloud cover.
The map on the right shows how the new algorithm combines information from both types of observations. To increase accuracy, this algorithm confirms deforestation only if there are multiple, consecutive observations of forest loss. This view confirms deforestation as early as February, up to two months earlier than optical-only, and with much more certainty than the optical- or SAR-only approaches.
Faster Detection and a Global Future
On average, the new method for monitoring forests spots felled trees within 16 days with exceptional accuracy, nearly eliminating false alarms. These detections can identify deforestation in very cloudy regions up to 100 days sooner than optical-only systems.
“In the tropics, it’s important to detect deforestation as soon as it occurs,” Flores-Anderson said. “If an image of a cleared forest isn’t available until the following year, the area may already be regrown, and deforestation will be missing from our data.”
For experts like Sylvia Wilson, the chief forest and climate scientist at Wilpa Capacity Development with nearly 20 years of global forest monitoring experience with the U.S. Geological Survey, adding L-band SAR to optical is a scientific game changer. “L-band SAR gives us the opportunity to see what optical doesn’t,” Wilson said. “But it’s not one sensor versus the other; the future is SAR plus optical.”
The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite, launched in July 2025, will drastically increase the feasibility of systems like Flores-Anderson’s by providing more frequent and comprehensive L-band SAR data. L-band data has been relatively scarce, with limited images only available in a few areas like the Brazilian Amazon. Once more NISAR data become publicly available, they will provide free, global L-band SAR every 12 days. Flores-Anderson’s system is already prepared to incorporate this data.
“It doesn’t matter which sensor we get data from—whether it’s optical or SAR—it automatically adds to our model,” Flores-Anderson explained. “As more NISAR data become available, we will have more accurate, faster detection of change.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) product, and model data provided by Flores-Anderson et al. Story by Lena Pransky (EarthRISE) with Jake Ramthun (EarthRISE) and Madeleine Gregory (Landsat Project Science Support).
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I promise I’ll write something soon about the flaming, crashing disaster that is the Trump administration — and about other topics of interest. But before I do that, here’s a roundup full of short takes and stories about AI.
First, though, an episode of Econ 102! Officially the podcast is over, but we still occasionally do a reprise episode. This one, fittingly, is about AI biosecurity:
Anyway, here are six other interesting AI-related items:
1. Forecasting the effect of AI on growth
No one really knows what effect AI is going to have on economic growth, but maybe each “expert” knows a tiny, tiny bit. And maybe, if you combine all of those weak signals, you can get some actual information about the economic effects of AI.
That’s the idea behind a new study by the Forecasting Research Institute. They survey a whole bunch of different people about what they think AI’s capabilities will be in the future, and what that implies for economic growth. Specifically, the groups they survey are:
This looks like a forecast of modest progress, but it’s not. The “moderate” scenario here would have AI able to write high-quality novels, handle coding tasks that would take humans five days, create semi-autonomous labs, and use robots to perform basic household tasks. So basically, every group of forecasters in this survey thinks stunning AI progress is likely over the next few years.
And yet of all the groups, only the AI experts predict a major growth acceleration in any of these scenarios — and even then, it’s only an acceleration to 4 or 5 percent, not to the 10 or 20 percent scenarios that some people have thrown around:
Why do economists think that even near-godlike AI wouldn’t translate into fast growth? The Forecasting Research Institute lists some of their reasons:
Some economists argued that AI productivity gains would not be evenly distributed across all sectors, particularly where human labor is a bottleneck. Others pointed out that with other general-purpose technologies (electrification, automobiles, personal computers), there were multi-decade lags between widespread implementation and productivity improvements. Part of this delay is attributed to a shift in capital away from labor and toward compute, data centers, APIs, and so on, which would not manifest as an increase in GDP until productivity improvements set in…
Some economists expected demographic decline and geopolitical instability to offset some of the GDP boost from AI progress…Some economists argued that constraints on energy and chip supply, data center build times, and other commodities put a cap on the upper limit of GDP growth…Some economists argued that tail risks…included existential risks from AI, societal unrest or collapse, and war.
It’s likely that the AI experts are also thinking about these bottlenecks and frictions, or something like them, which is why their most optimistic scenario is 5.3% growth — fast, but still significantly slower than India is growing now.
But in fact, I think there must be more to the story here. Basically, none of these groups thinks that any amount of AI capabilities will enable economic take-off. To me, that suggests that they’re thinking — perhaps subconsciously — about something more than just friction and slow adoption.
One possibility — which I should write about more — is that people suspect that humanity is getting satisfied, at least in the developed countries, and that the amount of new valuable things that even a godlike AI could create for us is limited by our inability to desire more goods and services.
I should think about this more.
2. Will someone vibe-code the doomsday virus?
I’m very optimistic about many of the effects of AI, especially on science and politics. But as regular Noahpinion readers know, I’m pretty worried about AI-enabled bioterrorism (and I think an increasing number of other people are too). I’m worried that some nihilistic, depressed teenager could tell a jailbroken version of Claude Code to make him a doomsday virus, and that the AI would actually go and do it for him. We now live in a world where researchers can use AI to design new, functional viruses and have them sent in the mail. That’s an empowered world, but a terrifying one as well.
Ever since I wrote a post about that danger, I’ve been talking to biosecurity experts and trying to get a better handle on how justified my fears are. One of the experts I talked to, Abhishaike Mahajan, was in the middle of writing a long post about biosecurity in the age of AI. He has since finished the post:
You should read the whole post, but basically, he offers several reasons not to panic. First, he argues that it’s inherently very hard for even an extremely powerful AI to make an effective bioweapon on the first try. This is because there are just too many unknowns about how any newly created virus will behave in the real world, so there’s no way to know you have a doomsday virus until you release it.
I’m skeptical of this line of argument. Instead of just making one doomsday virus you can make 100 candidates and release them all. Doomsday itself is the field experiment, and you can run a lot of experiments at once. Much better bio simulation tools will probably cut down the number of candidates you need to create in order to stumble on one that works.
Abhishaike also argues that countermeasures — vaccines, antivirals, and defenses like far-UV light (which basically works on all viruses) will improve at a rapid clip. I believe this, but I’m not so comforted. Drawing on the experience of Covid, I think it’ll take a lot of time to deploy these countermeasures. A truly well-engineered doomsday virus will kill us long before we can distribute the cure or give everyone a UV zapper. And as Abhishaike points out, it’s likely that the U.S. will not proactively prepare for future pandemic threats, but merely react to them when they occur.
So while I think Abhishaike’s post is excellent and deserves a thorough read-through, I think he might still be underrating the severity of the threat.
3. Cybersecurity apocalypse?
How does the world know how much money you have? There are a bunch of computers that store your money as a series of numbers — how many dollars are in your checking account, how many shares of Apple stock are in your portfolio, and so on. Banks and other financial institutions have state-of-the-art computers and huge teams of brilliant software engineers to turn their electronic records into a fortress.
We release a new application of the METR time-horizon methodology to offensive cybersecurity, grounded in a new human expert study with 10 professional security practitioners…Offensive cyber capability has been doubling every 9.8 months since 2019. Accelerating to every 5.7 months on a 2024+ fit. Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex sit well above both trendlines again, reaching 50% success on tasks that take human experts ~3 hours.
Right now, AI companies are white-hatting — using their AI’s newfound hacking powers to help companies improve their cybersecurity. But what happens when less scrupulous actors get their hands on jailbroken versions of Claude Code and Codex?
What happens if AI agents ever allow bad actors to break into banks at will? If all records of personal wealth were erased in a cyberattack, what could banks or the government even do? A whole lot of people might just instantly see their life’s savings transferred into a hacker’s bank account.
And as if that weren’t enough to worry about, recent advances in quantum computing put cybersecurity in an even more perilous state. Here’s Scott Aaronson:
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum fault-tolerance with lower overhead than was previously known, by using high-rate codes, which could work for example in neutral-atom architectures (or possibly other architectures that allow nonlocal operations, like trapped ions). The second bombshell, from Google, gave a lower-overhead implementation of Shor’s algorithm to break 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography…
When I got an early heads-up about these results…I thought of Frisch and Peierls, calculating how much U-235 was needed for a chain reaction in 1940, but not publishing it, even though the latest results on nuclear fission had been openly published just the year prior…But I got strong pushback on that analogy from the cryptography and cybersecurity people who I most respect. They said…[I]f publishing [results like these] causes people still using quantum-vulnerable systems to crap their pants … well, maybe that’s what needs to happen right now.
Not being a cybersecurity expert, I’m not qualified to assess how worrying these developments are. But they seem quite worrying. The entire modern world runs on cybersecurity — if there’s a general failure in the methods we now use to keep information secure, all of society is in deep trouble. So this is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
4. The end of pseudonymity?
When I became a blogger, I made a conscious decision to post only under my own name. I reasoned that at some point, text analysis technology would get good enough where it would be able to identify (“dox”) any pseudonymous account I made. Fifteen years later, I’m anticipating vindication. This is from a new paper by Lermen et al.:
We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. …LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.
Soon, anyone who disagrees with your pseudonymous alt account, or is even just annoyed with you, will be able to sic an LLM on your account and dox it — if you’ve written online anywhere under your real name. If you’ve only written pseudonymously, you’re probably still safe.
The impending end of pseudonymity — or at least, its significant diminution — has the potential to transform the internet. Pseudonymity is obviously linked to toxic content, because people post stuff under a pseudonym that’s too aggressive or inappropriate to post under their real name.
We might also get a decrease in cancel culture, since pseudonymous accusations and whistleblowers will not be safe from retaliation. There will probably be less honest discussion and less total information on the internet, as people become afraid to have many discussions under their real names.
Less pseudonymity might also close off an important social and psychological safety valve — especially for Japanese people, who tend to use pseudonymous X accounts as a way to express feelings that they’re afraid to air out in public.
In any case, it’s going to get weird.
5. Will AI quants eat the economy?
At one point in Charles Stross’ Accelerando, AI finance quants turn the entire inner solar system into compute to power their financialized online economy — thus driving everyone else to the edges of the solar system.
That’s a little bit over the top, but it’s worth thinking about what happens if and when AI gets deployed in large quantities for adversarial economic activities like quant trading.
Most use cases that people think of with regards to AI are productive. We expect AI to accelerate science, do our coding for us, and so on. A few of the AI use cases we imagine are criminal — we worry about bioterrorism, cyber crime, and so on. But relatively few people talk about what happens if and when AI gets deployed en masse for rent-seeking — i.e. for the redistribution of income by legal means.
A lot of people suspect that a lot of what goes on in quant trading is rent-seeking — a bunch of traders trying to fake each other out or beat each other to the punch without creating economic value. In fact, there are models of how that can happen — my favorite is Hirshleifer (1971). In that paper, Hirshleifer shows how when traders compete to learn something that’s eventually going to become public knowledge automatically, they end up wasting resources on a zero-sum game.1
Quant traders have always used AI a lot, even before the rise of generative AI. But it seems possible that the rise of powerful AI agents and reasoning models will lead to an explosion of spending on quant trading. And if what those trading algorithms are doing is just trying to beat each other to the punch by a nanosecond, a lot of society’s resources — compute, electricity, and so on — will be going to waste.
Frustratingly, I don’t know of a good general result on how much of society’s resources could be wasted like this. But when I play around with some simple examples, it’s clear that the potential waste is large. AI quant trading might not turn the inner solar system into computronium, but it seems like it could still be a giant waste.
So I’m a little nervous when I see stories like this one, alleging that DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis tried to build an AI-powered quant hedge fund inside Google. Quant trading is a very natural way to use AI to make tons and tons of money, but if that becomes too big a part of what AI does, people will get mad at the technology.
6. Are people using AI less at work?
By most measures, AI is being adopted faster than any technology in recorded history. It’s difficult to read the news without seeing stories about how AI is conquering the business world. So it’s pretty notable whenever there’s a data point that shows AI not being rapidly adopted.
In fact, there are now a few such data points. Hartley et al. are maintaining an ongoing survey of American workers, in which they ask who’s using generative AI at work. For a while, their survey showed a rapid increase in adoption. But over the last year, they find that adoption has actually fallen:
One survey might be a blip, or there might be a problem with the way the questions are being asked. But The Economist reports that a few other measures are showing either a slowdown or a drop in AI use at work:
Researchers at the Census Bureau ask firms if they have used artificial intelligence “in producing goods and services” in the past two weeks. Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using AI at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11%…Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people…
A tracker by Alex Bick of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis and colleagues revealed that, in August 2024, 12.1% of working-age adults used generative AI every day at work. A year later 12.6% did. Ramp, a fintech firm, finds that in early 2025 AI use soared at American firms to 40%, before levelling off. The growth in adoption really does seem to be slowing.
What’s going on here? The Economist suggests several explanations — disappointing productivity effects, difficulty incorporating AI into existing workflows, economic uncertainty, and so on.
But if this trend is real, there are reasons to think it won’t last. First of all, most of this data is from before the rise of reliable AI agents, which really just came on the scene last December. Now that AI is a lot more than just a chatbot, it’s probably a good bet that more companies are going to find uses for it.
Also, once entrepreneurs start figuring out ways to build new business models and workflows, instead of trying to shoehorn the new tech into existing models and processes, we should see an explosion of AI-enabled productivity, just like we did with previous general-purpose technologies.
But for now, the hints of a plateau in industrial chatbot usage are worth keeping an eye on.
Imagine that the value of Apple’s earnings will become public in a week, but that traders are spending a ton of money figuring out Apple’s earnings before they become public, so they can trade on the knowledge and make profit. That’s wasted effort; it would be better for society if everyone just waited until the earnings were announced.
The mascot of ATmosphereConf is a goose, accompanied by the motto we can just do things. I thought about this line often while I was in Vancouver for the event. Everyone was active: writing, managing communities, building side projects or businesses on Bluesky, and building Bluesky itself. The energy was fertile and optimistic. Even deep critiques, like Erin Kissane's beautiful Landslide or Blaine Cook's Software Ecologies, had hope that this community and technology could 'fix' the social internet.
The other refrain of the conference was that Meta, Google, TikTok, and other centralized social platforms have failed, and the AT Protocol could be the key to their replacements. From my seat, the need to decentralize social media is obvious enough that I don't write about it, and the only real question is which social, financial, and technology structure is actually capable of succeeding. There have been a lot of attempts to unseat Facebook, and most have run out of cash, gotten acquired, or lost steam.
As I mentioned in my last post about the AT Protocol, I've been around long enough to have tried previous attempts to decentralize the web and defeat the giants. I've also lived through a prior wave of open source optimism and seen how it can get weird.[1] Being amongst this relatively new and energetic community gave me renewed hope for the creative and weird parts of the web, but it also made me wonder where this is all going.
Who is in this community?
The people who attended were more far more diverse across multiple axes than I'd ever seen at a large tech-related event. To many people on the fringes, the "blue" in Bluesky is for liberal, and as far as I could tell it was a thoroughly left-wing culture, defined by inclusivity and respect.
It was also extremely dense with accomplished thinkers and programmers, like Schuyler Erle, who invented a lot of web mapping technology, Paul Syverson, who invented Onion Routing, Mike McCue, who worked on Netscape Navigator, and Dan Abramov, who co-created Redux and worked on React. Smart people like this thing.
It also had a lot of people from specific sub-communities and people who seemed like they were from an organizing background.
How did everyone justify the trip to Vancouver, though?
Then there were people working on side projects, many of which they want to devote full-time energy to, like Tiny Town, Sill, and Cartridge.
Then others were affiliated with academia or non-profits, like A New Social or New Public. And some folks were just in Vancouver so it was a pretty easy trip.
Echoes of an earlier wave
Everything about the AT Protocol community is so new, small, personal, and altruistic.
Individual people are running essential infrastructure in their free time: for instance, this talk by fig, how how they're building incredible services on a shoestring budget, largely as a solo effort. There are a bunch of people like this in the community, maintaining high-quality SDKs, services, and more that everyone else builds on.
The companies are also nascent. There are a few companies that pivoted into working with Bluesky, like Fedica, and have a business plan figured out. But out of the companies built on AT Protocol from the start, most of them are at the seed stage or earlier, and some of the talks at the conference probably shared material with investor pitch decks. One of the few companies that had raised money, Graze, had this to say in a fantastic talk:
The first, and most important, is that fundraising is exceptionaly difficult in the current environment in general, and profoundly difficult with social media [...] AT Proto is not growing exponentially which means functionally it is a non-starter for VC investment [...] The AI hype cycle has all but consumed available oxygen that would otherwise remain. On top of that, there's a common misconception that social is 'solved' [...] honestly do not mention AT Proto, at least until it goes exponential again.
I also noticed that there's a very strong movement from the community to avoid traditional corporate formats and funding mechanisms.
A lot of projects are following Bluesky's lead in forming as benefit corporations. The PBC structure is interesting - a few companies with that structure have gone public, like Planet labs and Allbirds. As far as I can tell though, the actual power of the designation has never been tested in court - the idea is that companies with the PBC format have a specific purpose which is part of their charter and if they don't stick to it and if 2% of shareholders want to sue, they can be sued for it. The purpose of Planet Labs is "to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world, by illuminating environmental and social change" and the purpose of Bluesky is "to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation" so I'm not sure that there's much legal teeth to this idea. It is a very nice gesture though. Germ and Graze are both PBCs.
There are also a lot of projects trying to avoid the profit-driven company format entirely. Bridgy Fed, a service that I happily use to syndicate my Mastodon posts to Bluesky, is backed by a non-profit funded by its community and creators (one of whom co-created Google App Engine). Roundabout, another AT Protocol-based product, is under the non-profit New Public. Even the Knight Foundation backed Bluesky itself.
Because I have an irrepressible need to know these things, here's a quick primer in where this money comes from:
The Knight Foundation was initially funded by a local newspaper fortune (those were the days).
There aren't any huge surprises in there: big amounts of money tend to come from people who have a lot of money, and these are mostly innocuous funders.
But what about AI?
What about AI. Everything is about AI now.
Most of the sessions that I attended didn't mention AI. Nevertheless, I think that AI is one of the ingredients for how this community is building so fast: during a panel of designers, dame said that they heavily use LLMs to build Anisota, their moth-themed social media interface, and many of the demos had a bit of LLM odor to them. There a few moments of full AI-optimism, like Cameron's talk about void, his chatbot 'with a memory', and Alex Komoroske talking about the Resonant Computing Manifesto and saying that AI could be 'bigger than the printing press.'
I loved that it wasn't a conference about AI. I'm not an AI-hater or an AI-doomer. I'm bored to tears by the discourse. I don't want to hear another Stanford CS grad talk about the big thoughts they had the first time in their lives that they thought about the theory of mind.
I don't care about which historical technology you want to compare it to or whether junior programmers or senior programmers or designers or managers are going to come out on top or on bottom. I don't care about the new way someone found to run 8 agents at the same time bossing each other around. When products add a magic chatbox as the new way to do everything, I don't find it exciting. It's all just so boring, monotonous, derivative, uncreative, and hype-driven.
Yes, it's important and it'll change the world. But vanishingly few people have anything to say about it.
That said, Bluesky announced Attie during the conference, and AI vibecoding interface / chatbot which allows people to build custom interfaces and feeds for the AT Protocol. You ask it to create a feed about sports, and it writes some filtering code and queries the lexicons and builds it for you.
This is at the intersection of two things I don't really care about: 'vibecoding' and 'custom feeds for discovery.' It's a product for someone else - probably a lot of people, because algorithmic discovery is a hard expectation of people raised on TikTok who expect perfectly curated content.
This launch generated a lot of controversy for roughly two reasons.
The first is obvious: it's AI, and a lot of people strongly dislike AI. Many, many people blocked the Attie account in protest, and there's a flare-up of fears around AI training on Bluesky data again. Cleverly, I think, Attie is intentionally not something that would ever train on Bluesky data and it also never generates content for users, so it isn't a slop machine.[2]
The other is that this feature definitely stomps on or near much smaller efforts from people and companies in the community. That means Graze, Surf, Skyfeed, Cosmik's Hyperfeed, and I'm sure many others. Custom feeds quickly became the most crowded and competitive space in the Atmosphere.
I think that Trezy's blog post about this is a great, critical explanation of what's going on and what the risks are:
Then there's the question of collateral damage. Leaflet just announced a pro subscription. The standard.site coalition has been building something genuinely collaborative across multiple teams. Watching that presentation, it felt like any of us could be next.
I think he has a strong point: Bluesky PBC is in a tough position, both fighting for relevance as a social media company and trying to foster a community of open source projects and small companies. A lot of the next features that Bluesky might introduce are already things being worked on by small companies. What should they do - acquire them, compete with them, defer to them? Trezy is right that they should at least coordinate with them.
The money thing. The growth thing.
What the community has right now is a tremendous amount of energy, creativity, and good vibes, but pretty dim prospects for business. This can turn around in an instant - venture capitalists are trend-followers above all, and one good success story becomes everyone else's pitch. But right now, the amounts raised by companies in the ecosystem are tiny. Rudy quoted $6.2k MRR for BlackSky, which is a huge achievement, but to bring the full team of six on full-time would need to quadruple at least. Graze's $1M funding round is pretty small by most definitions.
My guess is that algorithmic feeds, which segue into communities on Bluesky, could tilt the curve up and make Bluesky palatable for users who don't expect to curate their social media, but also don't want a firehose of all content. Or maybe the next big thing is live events on Bluesky, taking some inspiration from the success of streaming and making the platform more useful for sports and stuff.
Maybe solving the user-growth problem solves the venture capital problem, which solves the funding problem for startups, and that's good for the community in the end.
Is it really that bad for a social network to have five million devoted users instead of four hundred million? It's definitely not enough for Bluesky-the-company to succeed, and Bluesky accounts being a niche thing makes the pitch for AT Protocol apps a lot harder. "Sign in with your internet handle" isn't as compelling if most people don't have one. Compare to just signing in with a Google, Apple, or GitHub account, and the AT Protocol option is just worse for most people.
That said, Bluesky at its current size - and the AT Protocol community at its current size - is perfectly fine? For all of the worries about the network 'dying,' just having linear user growth during a period in which the app changes and experiments with new features isn't the end of the world. Popularity isn't everything.
Being there
In between all of the big thoughts, the rest of it was lovely. Everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming, the venue had actual good vegan food, and on the mornings I ran the Salish Trail, through second-growth forests of hemlock and douglas firs. I skipped the parties in Vancouver to conserve my social batteries, which might've been a double-good idea because a lot of people got COVID, and small contained spaces probably didn't help.
The experience filled me with optimism and excitement. This is an early stage for this community, and it could turn out a whole bunch of ways. I hope that we look back on these years as the the time when a new, better internet was being born. It could work out.
(Lord’s day). Up and spent the morning, till the Barber came, in reading in my chamber part of Osborne’s Advice to his Son (which I shall not never enough admire for sense and language), and being by and by trimmed, to Church, myself, wife, Ashwell, &c. Home to dinner, it raining, while that was prepared to my office to read over my vows with great affection and to very good purpose. So to dinner, and very well pleased with it.
Then to church again, where a simple bawling young Scot preached.
So home to my office alone till dark, reading some papers of my old navy precedents, and so home to supper, and, after some pleasant talk, my wife, Ashwell, and I to bed.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Randy George, in a struggle to exert his will over the career officers in the service. On Friday at 8:15 p.m., the official social media account of the Joint Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Vice Chairman appeared to express their opinion of the firing when they posted: “On behalf of the Joint Force and the Joint Chiefs, we extend our deepest gratitude to Chief of Staff of the Army, General Randy George, for his decades of steadfast service to our nation. Since 1988, General George and his family have consistently answered the nation’s call with honor and dedication. We are profoundly thankful to General George and his wife, Patty, for their many years of sacrifice and devotion to those who serve. As they graduate from this distinguished chapter of service and look toward the future, we wish them both continued happiness and success in all that lies ahead.”
On Friday, Iranians shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet over Iran. U.S. forces quickly rescued the pilot of the jet, but the second crew member, a weapons system officer, was not rescued until late today, with the news breaking just minutes before midnight.
Iranians also hit a U.S. A-10 Warthog aircraft, a ground-attack plane designed for close support of ground troops, as it was engaging in the search. Its pilot ejected and was rescued. A helicopter also engaged in search and rescue was hit by small-arms fire that injured crew members, but it landed safely outside Iran.
The strikes came two days after Trump told the American people that the U.S. military had “beaten and completely decimated Iran,” that “[t]hey have no anti-aircraft equipment,” and that “[t]heir radar is 100% annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.” Meanwhile, Iranian TV showed people heading into the mountains to find the airman.
Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Gordon Lubold of NBC News identified the last time an American plane was shot down by enemy fire as 2003, with a crash near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. The pilot ejected safely and was rescued.
The social media accounts of the defense secretary and of U.S. Central Command went silent after Thursday night. Trump did not speak to the public about the missing airman. When the White House wants to tell the press there will be no more public information released that day, it “calls a lid” so journalists will stop waiting for news. The White House called a lid yesterday at 4:12 p.m., and the president did not go to Mar-a-Lago, as he has been in the habit of doing on the weekends. Trump did not appear at all today, and the White House called a lid at 11:08 a.m.
But Trump did post on social media. Yesterday, while the search for the airman was underway, his account posted: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD??? President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
At 10:05 this morning, Trump posted: “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out—48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Economist Paul Krugman noted today that this post didn’t sound like Trump. His speech on Wednesday was low energy and delivered in a monotone. It suggested Trump was abandoning the idea of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and handing off the problem to other countries. Now he is threatening to “reign”—he meant “rain”—down “all Hell” on Iran to get it to restore the conditions that existed before he attacked. And then, as Krugman noted, he added “Glory be to GOD!” which sounds a lot more like Hegseth’s Christian holy war language than Trump’s.
Krugman says, “[I]t sounds like he’s…going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation” in Iran.
Michael R. Gordon and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump’s aides have been telling him Iran’s civilian infrastructure is a legitimate wartime target, despite the understanding among experts that such attacks are illegal. The journalists say Hegseth has embraced the aides’ argument that attacking infrastructure would make it more difficult for Iran to transfer the materials they need to develop nuclear weapons. A White House official added that destroying electric plants could foment civil unrest, which would in turn make it more difficult to produce a nuclear weapon.
Ryan Goodman of Just Security commented: “That would be an F on a bar exam.” He observed, “This isn’t legal analysis. It’s idiocy.”
Reuters reported today that Israel is prepared to attack Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for the U.S. to agree.
Tonight the White House released the president’s schedule for tomorrow, Easter Sunday. It has a scheduled 8:00 a.m. “Executive Time” and a 7:00 p.m. family Easter dinner. He has no scheduled public appearances.
Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman gazes out of an Orion spacecraft cabin window, looking back at Earth, as the crew travels towards the Moon. Image: NASA.
Taking time out to send Easter greetings down to Earth, the four Artemis 2 astronauts closed in on the moon Sunday, already seeing unexpected detail on the surface and giving scientists a taste of things to come during a pass over the lunar far side Monday evening.
Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch also presented “astronaut wings” to Canadian crewmate Jeremy Hansen, making his first space flight, before getting down to work carrying out planned tests of new Artemis pressure suits.
But first, Koch passed along Easter greetings to flight controllers, saying “we wanted to take a minute to commemorate the holiday.”
“This time of year is something that many religions and many cultures hold dear,” she said. “It’s a time of emotions such as joy, as well as solemnness, honoring what’s going on both in our world and in our religious beliefs.
“Another aspect of that is our family tradition. And I know for me, if I was on the Earth right now, I would be with my family in Houston and we would be hiding confetti eggs in the backyard and watching two very sweet little girls go try to find them.”
She said the crew hid “a few eggs around the cabin” to mark the occasion. “They were the dehydrated scrambled egg variety,” she added, “but we’re all pretty happy with them.”
Hansen said that “no matter your faith or religion, for me the teachings of Jesus were always a very simple truth, of love, universal love, love yourself and love others.”
The two major goals of the Artemis 2 flight are to thoroughly test the Orion moonship and to work through the procedures and techniques needed to safely guide future crews to the moon. The Artemis 2 crew also plans a full agenda of science observations when they pass behind the moon’s far side Monday afternoon and evening.
Looking at the moon overnight Saturday, Koch told flight controllers “the moon we are looking at is not the moon you see from Earth,” adding that even some 75,000 miles from their target, they could easily discern topology and subtle differences in brightness.
She said Glover was “absolutely mesmerized” by a vast basin where “you can actually see the terrain. It’s not an albedo change, it’s not shadows. You can actually just tell that they are terrain features of the multi-rigged crater there.”
Glover initially thought the structure was Mare Orientale, or “Eastern Sea,” a high-priority target that straddles the terminator separating the side of the moon facing Earth and the normally unseen far side.
Jacki Mahaffey in mission control replied that “we think based on your description of the basin that you saw, that is (Mare) Imbrium.”
“Yes, that sounds right,” Koch agreed. “I’ve never noticed that Imbrium has such a distinctive high albedo ring defining it. Also worth mentioning, we do apparently have a full moon. We can’t detect any terminator at all. It looks like full limb all the way around.”
Mare Imbrium, or the “Sea of Rain,” has a diameter of 710 miles, one of the moon’s largest “seas,” or maria, formed by a massive impact event several billion years ago. It is surrounded by mountains that were formed by the impact.
Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman agreed the view of the moon was spectacular, even at a great distance.
“I’m not one for hyperbole, but it’s the only thing I could come up with just seeing (the crater) Tycho, there’s mountains to the north, you can see Copernicus … it’s just everything from the training, but in three dimensions and absolutely unbelievable. This is incredible.”
“Moon joy,” replied Mahaffey.
Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen were launched Wednesday and, after spending a full day checking out the Orion spacecraft, the ship left Earth orbit Thursday and headed for the moon.
Overnight Saturday, Koch said the crew had switched from measuring their increasing distance from Earth to marking the decreasing distance to the moon. At the time she spoke, the Orion spacecraft was 76,362 nautical miles from the moon and 168,000 miles from Earth.
Before going to bed, the astronauts were told engineers had been able to restore Orion’s toilet to normal operation after trouble earlier dumping stored urine overboard.
“At this time you are go for all types of uses of the toilet,” mission control radioed.
“And the crew rejoices!” Koch said. “Thank you!
The crew began Easter Sunday in space with a wakeup call featuring CeeLo Green’s “Working Class Heroes” and a recorded message from retired astronaut Charlie Duke.
“Hello Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy. This is Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke,” he radioed. “John Young and I landed on the moon in 1972 in a lunar module we named Orion. I’m glad to see a different kind of Orion helping return humans to the moon.
“Thanks to you and the whole team on the ground for building a family. I pray it reminds you that we in America and all of the world are cheering you on. Thanks to you and the whole team on the ground for building on our Apollo legacy with Artemis. Godspeed and safe travels home.”
The crew’s primary objective Sunday was to work with their bright orange pressure suits, designed to keep an astronaut alive for more than six days if their spacecraft lost air pressure or suffered some other sort of catastrophic failure.
Wiseman and his crewmates planned to put on their suits in the cramped confines of the Orion capsule to give flight controllers a better idea of how fast they can be donned in an emergency.
They planned to pressurize the suits, practice getting into and out of their seats while suited, assess their ability to move about and to eat and drink using dispensers in the suit’s helmet.
Just after midnight, the Orion capsule was expected to coast into the moon’s “sphere of influence,” where lunar gravity will begin exerting more of a pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.
The astronauts will reach a distance of 248,655 miles from Earth at 1:56 p.m. Monday, passing a record set by the crew of Apollo 13 in 1970. Wiseman and company will fly behind the moon and out of contact with Earth for about 40 minutes starting at 6:47 p.m. Monday.
While out of contact, the crew will pass within about 4,070 miles of the lunar surface at close approach and set a new distance record of 252,760 miles three minutes later. They’ll fly back into contact with Earth at 7:27 p.m.
But they will be able to observe far side features well before and after passing directly behind the moon and even witness a solar eclipse as the moon passes in front of the sun from their perspective.
“We have amazing camera data from decades of orbiting spacecraft,” said Kelsey Young, a member of the Artemis lunar science team.
“However, the human eye, especially when it’s connected to a well-trained brain — which I assure you these four people have — are capable of in the blink of an eye making nuanced color observations that Apollo observations told us can tell us something scientifically.”
I'm working on a major change to my LLM Python library and CLI tool. LLM provides an abstraction layer over hundreds of different LLMs from dozens of different vendors thanks to its plugin system, and some of those vendors have grown new features over the past year which LLM's abstraction layer can't handle, such as server-side tool execution.
To help design that new abstraction layer I had Claude Code read through the Python client libraries for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini and Mistral and use those to help craft curl commands to access the raw JSON for both streaming and non-streaming modes across a range of different scenarios. Both the scripts and the captured outputs now live in this new repo.
On July 15, 2007, the New York Times published an article titled “The richest of the rich, proud of a new Gilded Age.” The article was centered on a profile of Sanford Weill, CEO of Citigroup, who, like others in the financial industry, believed that they were leading America into a new era of prosperity — justifying their immense wealth — and that the government should scrap regulations that were getting in the way of financial innovation.
Exactly one year and two months later, Lehman Brothers failed, plunging the world into the worst financial crisis it had seen in more than 70 years. Many of the innovations of which Weill and others were so proud had, it turned out, created a system of poorly regulated financial institutions — so called “shadow banks” — that were exposed to a 21st-century version of the vast wave of bank runs in 1930 and 1931 that turned an ordinary recession into the Great Depression.
But the 2008 crisis was 17 years ago, and political support for the precautions introduced after 2008 has waned. The Treasury Department is moving to gut the Office of Financial Research, which monitors risks of financial crisis. There is once again a push to deregulate, to embrace financial innovations like crypto that arguably recreate the risks that brought the world economy to its knees in 2008. Shadow banking has had a major revival; by some measures, as I’ll explain, shadow banks are bigger relative to the financial system as they were when Lehman collapsed. And it’s only reasonable to worry about the possibility of a new financial crisis.
At the moment these worries are centered on private credit — lending by institutions that, unlike banks, are effectively shielded from public disclosure and regulation. What’s actually on their books?
After two lenders went bust last fall, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, made waves with his comment that “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”
The good news is that providers of private credit aren’t banks, so that even if they turn out to have a lot of junk on their books it probably won’t have as much negative impact as bank losses in 1930 or shadow bank losses in 2008. But these companies aren’t exactly not banks either. And the rise of private credit is part of a broader growth in weakly regulated financial institutions that is making all of us who remember 2008 increasingly nervous.
So, today’s primer will be about private credit and the broader re-risking of the financial system. Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. How financial crises happen
2. The growth of private credit and other “non-bank financial intermediaries”
This inspired me to revisit a research project I ran when Lalit first released it a couple of weeks ago, where I tried it out and then compiled it to a WebAssembly wheel so it could run in Pyodide in a browser (the library itself uses C and Rust).
This new playground loads up the Python library and provides a UI for trying out its different features: formating, parsing into an AST, validating, and tokenizing SQLite SQL queries.
I like publishing transcripts of local Claude Code sessions using my claude-code-transcripts tool but I'm often paranoid that one of my API keys or similar secrets might inadvertently be revealed in the detailed log files.
I built this new Python scanning tool to help reassure me. You can feed it secrets and have it scan for them in a specified directory:
If you leave off the -d it defaults to the current directory.
It doesn't just scan for the literal secrets - it also scans for common encodings of those secrets e.g. backslash or JSON escaping, as described in the README.
If you have a set of secrets you always want to protect you can list commands to echo them in a ~/.scan-for-secrets.conf.sh file. Mine looks like this:
llm keys get openai
llm keys get anthropic
llm keys get gemini
llm keys get mistral
awk -F= '/aws_secret_access_key/{print $2}' ~/.aws/credentials | xargs
I built this tool using README-driven-development: I carefully constructed the README describing exactly how the tool should work, then dumped it into Claude Code and told it to build the actual tool (using red/green TDD, naturally.)
Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After that, the next opening remains the week starting July 27.
If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 and Q4 2026, and over half of those weeks are already sold.
One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed. But it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since.
But man, if you want to notice, do what I did and spend two days back on iOS 18. So many little things feel slower. I don’t know if anything actually is slower, but because the animations are slower, it looks slower, and that means it feels slower. You may not notice if you only use iPhones, but people contemplating a switch from Android definitely notice. Apple should speed up some of these animations again this year. (And/or offer a system-wide setting to make them faster. I do not want to eliminate these animations. I just want them to go very very fast.)
Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are
always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine
asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse
for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial
prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire
conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and
Google.”
Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with
personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who
want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode.”
That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a “sham.”
Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. Sunday morning update. Yesterday, I talked about how awful Trump’s message about glory to God and all of that was, but it’s looking much, much worse today. I’ll quote Trump in a second.
But let me do a Heather Cox Richardson here and talk about history for a second. Think about what Abraham Lincoln, a president who was actually winning his war, said in his second inaugural. You’ve all probably heard the magnificent conclusion, which begins,
with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.
Determination, humility, decency, Now, let me read you Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from this morning:
Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the fuckin strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah.
What happened to us? This is not the country we were supposed to be.
If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.
But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare. and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes.
You can get even more pessimistic. Tim Snyder has been arguing that we’re basically in preparation for a coup, that somehow or other the war will be a pretense and arguing that this insane expansion of military spending in the latest Trump budget is a bribe to the military.
I hope he’s wrong. But in any case, my God, if Trump gets his way, and if he doesn’t chicken out —and I think TACO is greatly overrated, I think all too often Trump actually does follow through on his insane stuff.
It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening. This is real.
It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things. Take care, I guess.
Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in
one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’
Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST
WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
This low level of civility and intelligence shown by a leader of a
country is regrettable; the shameful fervor with which intentions
to commit war crimes are repeated is staggering; and the fact that
the Divine is invoked regardless of ill intentions clearly exposes
deep fanaticism. Apologies for sharing this language.
It’s getting harder to tell which side is the authoritarian theocratic regime run by demented hateful nut jobs. (You Crazy Bastards would be an excellent title for a book on the Trump 2.0 administration.)
If you have no particular intellectual interests or ambitions and are content with the company of your family and friends, then life on Iceland must be very pleasant, because the inhabitants are friendly, tolerant, and sane. They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism. I always found that they welcome criticism. But I had the feeling, also, that for myself it was already too late. We are all too deeply involved Europe to be able, or even to wish to escape. Though I am sure you would enjoy a visit as much as I did, I think that, in the long run, the Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me. The truth is, we are both only really happy living among lunatics.
That is from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland, from 1937, which is one of the better travel books, if indeed that is what it is.
California’s $20 fast food minimum wage raised wages in the sector by roughly 8 percent relative to the rest of the country but employment fell by 2.3 to 3.9 percent (depending on specification, median ~3.2%), translating to about 18,000 lost jobs. Food away from home (FAFH) prices in California’s four CPI-reporting MSAs rose 3.3–3.6 percent relative to 17 control MSAs. Falsification tests on Food at Home and All Items Less Food and Energy show zero differential movement—this is specific to restaurant prices.
What’s interesting is that the papers are independently estimated but the fit is consistent. The price paper uses Andreyeva et al.’s demand elasticity of -0.8 to convert the estimated price increases into an implied quantity declines: about 3.9–4.1 percent in limited-service and 1.7–1.8 percent in full-service. These align well with the employment declines of 3.2 and 2.1 percent estimated in the first paper.
The consistency tells us something about the mechanism. One thing we have learned about the minimum wage in recent years is that the pass-through effect is large and more of the employment decline is driven by pass through than by labor-capital substitution. In other words, prices rose, quantity demanded fell, and that’s what killed the jobs—not robots replacing workers. Not today, anyway.
In terms of welfare, the bulk of employed workers get an 8% wage increase, a small minority get disemployed. The big transfer was from consumers to workers. California has roughly 39 million residents, all of whom face 3.3–3.6% higher FAFH prices. The transfer is likely regressive — lower-income households spend a larger budget share on fast food specifically. So the policy effectively taxes low-income consumers generally to raise wages for a subset of low-income workers, while eliminating jobs for another subset. Your mileage may vary but I don’t see this as a big win for workers. We thought small increases in the minimum wage were absorbed–maybe some were or maybe they were just hard to estimate–but you can’t extrapolate the small increases to big ones–the effect is non-linear. Big increases in the minimum wage start to bite.
As usual, when it comes to fast food there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Addendum: Clemens’s JEP paper continues to be the masterclass in how to think through minimum wage issues.
The Orion spacecraft is now much closer to the Moon than Earth on its 10-day journey into deep space and back, and overall everything is going smashingly well.
Things are going so well that, during the daily mission briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston, there's just not that much of substance to talk about. So the discourse keeps coming back to, of all things, the toilet on board Orion.
As you may recall, there were some toilet problems in the initial hours of the mission. During the initial checkout of spacecraft systems, Orion's toilet was supposed to be “wetted” with water to prime the pump. Not enough water was introduced, so the pump was non-responsive. Once more water was added, it began functioning fine.
My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.
Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat. Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.
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