Marginal Revolution

What are the Worst MR Posts?

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

What are the worst MR posts, most illogical, poorly reasoned, low value, inconsistent?

From the Archives, written by ChatGPT:

These are provisional candidates for weak reasoning, selected because there is a specific gap between the evidence and the conclusion. This is not an objective ranking of all 40,326 posts in the downloaded archive. Poor reasoning should also be distinguished from low value: an overstated argument can still be unusually useful to think against.

1. Tyler Cowen — Democracy and the Democrats

October 22, 2022 · Main defect: conflating concern about democratic breakdown with unwillingness to accept electoral defeat. Cowen writes that many Democrats believe:

“democracy works satisfactorily only when it delivers sufficiently low gas prices!”

But two positions are logically distinct:

  • “Democracy is illegitimate when voters choose policies I dislike.”
  • “Voters might elect politicians who subsequently weaken democratic institutions.”

These are illustrative formulations, not quotations from the post. The second does not imply the first. Someone can accept an election’s legitimacy while worrying about what its winner will do. The post does not adequately establish which position its targets hold. It then compares a sympathetic account of classical liberalism with an unsympathetic account of Democrats, without applying an equivalent evidentiary test to both. The opening also dismisses certain anticipated objections through an insult. That discourages scrutiny precisely where the argument needs distinctions. Verdict: One of the clearest candidates for an unfairly framed argument. The useful underlying point—that democracy can produce bad outcomes—does not establish the accusation being made. Read the original post

2. Tyler Cowen — What the hell is going on?

May 25, 2016 · Main defect: an elastic psychological explanation supported by loosely connected observations. The central hypothesis is:

“The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males.”

That is worth investigating. The trouble comes when male economic difficulties, changing gender relations, political anger, violence, and support for quite different political movements are bundled together under “brutes.” Several things remain unestablished:

  • Are the men experiencing the cited disadvantages the same men driving the political developments?
  • Does the mechanism explain support for Sanders and Trump in the same way?
  • What observation would distinguish resistance to a “nicer” world from resentment of economic insecurity or perceived contempt?
  • What does “nice” mean independently of the author’s preferences?

The label risks doing the explanatory work: people support objectionable politics because they are brutish; their politics then becomes evidence of their brutishness. Credit where due: Cowen explicitly calls the hypothesis uncertain and acknowledges weak evidence. That makes it an honest speculative post, rather than a falsely presented research finding. Verdict: A provocative conjecture that outruns its supporting evidence. The caveats are better than the causal argument. Read the original post

3. Alex Tabarrok — The Gaslighting of Parasite

June 25, 2020 · Main defect: treating a contestable interpretation as an unambiguous demonstration. Film spoilers follow. The pivotal sentence is:

“This is not my judgement it is what the film tells us.”

That is exactly what the review needs to establish. Several inferences are too strong:

  • A child noticing a smell does not establish that the smell lacks class significance. Material conditions can produce differences that children notice.
  • The poor family’s dishonesty does not rule out a critique of inequality. A film can depict morally compromised people within an unjust or damaging social structure.
  • Images of sewage and infestation do not uniquely imply that the filmmaker regards the family as morally filthy.
  • Other critics reaching a different interpretation does not establish deliberate deception or “gaslighting.”

The strongest version of the review would argue that conventional readings underweight the family’s agency and wrongdoing. Instead, it often claims those observations exclude alternative readings. Verdict: Among the most intellectually stimulating but least securely demonstrated of the reviews considered in this archive analysis. This qualifies the earlier recommendation of the review: it deserved inclusion as provocative criticism. That does not make its claims of interpretive certainty persuasive. Read the original post

4. Tyler Cowen — No, American fascism can’t happen here

March 1, 2018 · Main defect: turning a plausible obstacle into an impossibility claim. The MR excerpt argues:

“American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy.”

Institutional complexity plausibly makes comprehensive control harder. But the conclusion requires additional premises:

  • Why must an authoritarian movement control the entire bureaucracy rather than strategically important parts?
  • Why does administrative fragmentation necessarily constrain coercion rather than sometimes obscure responsibility?
  • How much control would be sufficient, and what evidence establishes that this threshold cannot be reached?

These are questions about the argument’s structure, independent of whether one thinks a particular American administration qualifies as fascist. The June 16, 2025 retrospective points to institutional resistance and executive setbacks. Those are relevant evidence for constraints. They cannot, by themselves, validate the original categorical impossibility claim. Verdict: A potentially valuable institutional argument weakened by excessive certainty. “Important barriers exist” is much better supported than “cannot happen.” This assessment concerns the argument reproduced on MR; the complete linked Politico essay could not be retrieved for this review. Read the original MR post

5. Alex Tabarrok — The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely

October 13, 2015 · Main defect: moving too quickly from equal moral worth to a particular institutional conclusion. The excerpt argues that foreigners do not possess less inherent moral worth. But that premise alone does not settle whether governments may impose any entry restrictions. Equal moral worth can coexist with arguments about special obligations, institutional responsibilities, competing rights, or consequences. Those arguments might ultimately fail—but they require engagement. Likewise, comparing restrictions on exit with restrictions on entry does not establish their moral equivalence. It poses a question rather than answering it. The longer Atlantic essay, published October 10, 2015, adds economic arguments, so it would be unfair to characterize the case as exclusively moral. Nevertheless, the sweeping dismissal of competing moral frameworks is insufficiently defended. Verdict: Forceful advocacy with a missing argumentative bridge. This is a criticism of the claimed deduction, not a demonstration that open borders is wrong. Read the original MR post

Recurring weaknesses

Across these examples, three weaknesses recur:

  • Certainty exceeds the argument: “cannot,” “obviously,” and “the film tells us” substitute for establishing the relevant threshold.
  • Opposing positions receive less charitable treatment: disagreement becomes evidence of bad motives, confused psychology, or inability to face reality.
  • An interesting mechanism becomes a complete explanation: institutional complexity, male displacement, or equal moral standing is asked to resolve more than it actually establishes.

Allegations of inconsistency across posts require more caution. A changed view, a different context, or a different definition is not necessarily a contradiction. The stronger criticism here is uneven standards of proof within individual arguments. For a rigorous critical essay, the strongest starting points are Democracy and the Democrats and The Gaslighting of Parasite. Both have identifiable logical problems that can be examined without relying on hindsight or agreement with the critic’s politics.

The post What are the Worst MR Posts? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Contraptions

Experiments with Monstrousness

Venkatesh Rao
Updated

It looks like over a thousand new readers signed up over the last week, mainly due to the Cognitive Mercantilism post, taking me past 27k. I think I last had a viral hit of that magnitude 7 years ago, with the Internet of Beefs (2020).

Times have changed. These days going viral means people make and share AI-generated summaries, explainer videos and infographics about your post, including in other languages. It’s rather gratifying. I also saw a argument-logic-flow diagram go by. Pretty soon, people will be demanding Lean proofs for my more outrageous ideas.

Welcome aboard new readers.

Since I’m long overdue for a re-introduction to the reading public anyway, to the point that many people seem to think I’m dead (especially on X, where I stopped posting after the Muskening), this seems like a good time to attempt one. A writerly inner-game re-introduction, not the basic biographical sketch, which you can find here.

Halloween is actually a good occasion for a re-introduction. It’s been just around a year since I adopted the motto that best explains who I am these days as a writer, Be Slightly Monstrous. I’m a one-year-old monster in training.

As a doctrinal directive, the motto simply means: adopt AI without reservations, and let it freely transform you.

As a philosophical stance — hopefully a slightly alarming one — it is something like a declaration of resistance to the Nostalgia for the Human that’s been overtaking the zeitgeist.

The most visible sign of my growing monstrousness is that I freely use AI in every aspect of my writing, and as of a month ago, I don’t even segregate or declare it anymore, since it’s my default now. It’s fully hand-crafted writing that’s the exception, requiring labeling. You can find my AI use philosophy on my About page.

But that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve increasingly started to operate by a whole set of Strange New Rules for Being Slightly Monstrous, in every aspect of my work and life. And it’s all got to do with AI one way or another. It helps that half my work is consulting for the leadership of a great frontier AI company (Tenstorrent — go buy their computers), so I get a ringside view of just how powerful this emerging technology is.

The other half — well, I’ll get to that. It’s a little harder to explain. It has to do with protocols.

This post is a rare handwritten one because the topic is personal enough it’s easier to just write it than to convey enough about myself to an AI to generate it. But by default, I always use AI for writing these days, and am enjoying my centaur-writing more with every post. With every post, I learn new tricks and techniques and improve steadily.

Having to drink blood, avoid garlic, and not being able to go out in the sun is a small price to pay for this growing sense of nameless power.

And I am getting good enough at it (logging a genuine AI-assisted viral hit is one sign) that even many of those who declare that they hate generated writing find themselves enjoying the writing, and then discovering after reading, much to their chagrin, that it was written with AI. I don’t even try to disguise the AI voice or characteristic LLM tics. Quite the opposite. I leave the natural terroir of the models I use almost untouched.

Full collaborators deserve to speak in their own voice. I edit AI text the way I edit other human writers — in a maximally laissez-faire way, minimizing how much I reshape their native voice.

The technology really is getting good enough that you can work this way. It feels increasingly silly to fight quixotic battles to go against the grain of the medium for no real benefit beyond pandering to the tastes of human supremacists.

I saw a comment go by that I must have fine-tuned an AI model on my extensive (~2.5m words) corpus of handwritten archives to write with AI the way I do. Nope. It is vanilla ChatGPT (I save my Claude tokens for coding).

I can probably teach people how to write like this, but 90% of it is just the courage to be slightly monstrous. Only 10% is teachable tips and tricks with prompts and harnesses. If you think you have an aptitude for writing, all you really need to do to transform that into an aptitude for writing with AI is to risk the scorn, contempt, and opprobrium of your tastefully aghast writerly friends. And once you get experimenting, the learning and dopamine follow, you make new friends, and life goes on. It’s really not that hard.

More than my failed experiments with AI writing, I think it is the successful experiments that really make some people mad. I have my theories about why, which I’ll write up some day. Maybe when (and if) I teach a writing-with-AI course (where 90% of the content will be me yelling “be more monstrous dammit!”)

Anyway, my monstrous use of AI in writing has confused and infuriated even many of my oldest and most loyal readers, some of whom have sent me mournful, betrayed-sounding notes over the last couple of years. I am sure it will turn off some fraction of the new readers who will likely feel betrayed that they signed up for this newsletter on the strength of an AI-assisted essay.

A couple of decades ago, this would have bothered me. But I’ll be turning 52 in November. A full deck of cards so to speak. And I increasingly find myself living by Clarke’s Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

I am not yet actually elderly, and I’ll never be distinguished, but I am increasingly confident about betting on things I think are possible. Played asymmetrically ( (I tend to shut up about things I consider impossible), Clarke’s Law offers a nice convex strategy for avoiding avoiding conservatism as you age. Even if it means becoming slightly monstrous.

The motto grew out of what is probably my most influential essay of the last few years, The Gramsci Gap (2025), which was an extended riff on the Gramsci-Zizek quote about how the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born, and it’s the time of monsters.

That essay in turn, came out of a line of thought that started for me in January 2023, in an essay called Disturbed Realities, which was the result of me spending most of 2022 working through the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft, J. G. Ballard, and a book I think is one of the most important of the century so far, Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World.

I read a lot, but this particular reading binge was special because it was how I personally emerged from the planetary chrysalis that was Covid. I did a keynote about these ideas at an event in Singapore in early 2023, which was when the ideas really started to gel (the Shoggoth meme featured prominently in my talk). I’m finally starting to work on a short book pulling all these ideas together from various essays and talks. It will be called New Nature.

The Labatut book was as formative for the current chapter of my current writing life as The Office was for the previous chapter.

For those who came in late, the previous chapter of my writing life was a blog called Ribbonfarm, which was most famous for a 6-part series I wrote in 2009-13 about The Office called The Gervais Principle, exploring the dynamics of sociopathy, cluelessness, and loserdom in organizations. I retired that blog in 2023 because Wordpress was becoming unmistakably a part of the “old world dying” in the Gramsci Gap, and I do not like to hitch my ride to dying things. Ribbonfarm is now an archived static site haunted by an AI-powered ghost-digital-twin (aka RAG bot) of mine I call vgr_zirp. You can talk to it about everything I wrote through 2022, including about why it’s called vgr_zirp. I’m building a fuller living-digital-twin bot that will cover all my writing, but that won’t be ready for a while. It’s a more complex design challenge.

The Gervais Principle inspired my old motto, Be Slightly Evil, which was also the name of a short-run newsletter I wrote around that time. Together, those two works defined my writerly persona through much of the 2010s, as well as the positioning and differentiation of my consulting business, which I started in 2011. To this day, those two works generate most of my consulting leads.

These days though, I turn away such leads. My tastes have changed with age. Now I like to work with leaders and organizations interested in becoming slightly monstrous by going all-in on AI (here’s my consulting page if you’re interested). As with individuals, I’m convinced the challenge for organizations and their leaders is 90% the willingness to be sufficiently monstrous. Only 10% tips and tricks.

Looking back on the old chapter, the essay that seeded this current chapter was one that did not go viral, but long-time readers know has been my main personal lighthouse essay from the previous decade: On the Design of Escaped Realities (2015). It’s sort of like the Frodo-finds-the-ring-and-meets-Gollum episode in The Hobbit. Escaped Realities served as the theme of the final edition of a conference I used to run in the 2010s, Refactor Camp, in 2019. The community that had grown around Ribbonfarm over the previous decade met one last time, and then scattered to the winds. Covid happened just a few months later, and my journey into monster-dom began in earnest.

In hindsight, the essence of the escaped reality idea was that being mildly psychotic was a better idea for the coming decade (2015-25) than being mildly neurotic, which had been a good idea for the previous decade (2005-14). It has taken me over a decade from that point to learn to metabolize and manifest that idea, by Becoming Slightly Monstrous.

Along the way, the tagline for my old blog changed from “experiments in refactored perception” (a mildly neurotic tagline) to “constructions in magical thinking” (a mildly psychotic one). The name of this newsletter, Contraptions, is an attempt to True Name this chapter in a mildly psychotic way, with a whiff of plausibly deniable crackpottery around it. The bot I’ve been training on this chapter of writings is called vgr_gramsci by the way. It is much more psychotic than vgr_zirp, but much less neurotic.

As Douglas Adams observed, “if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.” So you have to periodically choose how exactly you’re going to distort your sense of proportions. A dash of psychosis seems to work very well for 2026, the way a dash of neurosis was helpful in getting through 2007-14.

The optimal amount of derangement these days is not zero. Since Trump Derangement Syndrome and Woke Derangement Syndrome are past their sell-by dates now, most people are choosing between AI Derangement Syndrome and Humanism Derangement Syndrome. The calibrated psychosis that helps me be slightly monstrous includes a stiff dose of HDS. I’m constantly looking over my shoulder in case an unaligned humanist is creeping up behind me to knock me out with a hand-crafted cane made from organic wood using flint tools.

But I was practicing being psychotic before it was cool, and before AI made it easy for everyone to be a little bit psychotic, if only as a treat. And slightly monstrous.

Jokes aside, as you can probably tell, this is not really a bit. Be Slightly Monstrous is a serious philosophy for me. One that has taken shape over a decade, and that I’ve bet money and reputation on.

If you need more Proof of Derangement: I collaborated with artist Simon Denny to put on an art exhibit called Monsters Between Worlds at this year’s Venice Biennale, and I’ve helped instigate and found a new magazine called Monstrous Times over the last year, which you should subscribe to. I’ll be writing more fiction there.

Monstrous Times helps explain precisely how to Be Slightly Monstrous.

What I do not mean by my motto is monstrousness in the sense of fantasy. What I do mean is monstrousness in a particular science-fictional sense (a Labatutian-Lovecraftian-Ballardian sense) — a slightly monstrous human is one who has been transformed through co-evolution with emerging technology in a Gramsci Gap, and who has come to viscerally embody the strange new rules of that technology.

This notion emerged out of my other big obsession over the last 5 years, protocols. This has been the other half of my work in recent years, and it has shaped my philosophy and writing a lot (not least because it involved a lot of writing and editing of other people).

Between 2023-26 I was running a program for the Ethereum Foundation called the Summer of Protocols. This has now evolved into a new organization called the Protocol Institute, where I’m the Director of Research (currently unpaid, because the organization has no money yet). The Monstrous Times magazine also came out of the Summer of Protocols, so it’s a sibling project to PI. Specifically, it came out of an idea we explored through SoP that science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people, or “chosen ones.”

It’s an idea we call Chiang’s Law, after Ted Chiang, who first articulated it. Right before he chose AI Derangement Syndrome as his chosen path through the Gramsci Gap. I like the irony. I always like irony. Monsters like irony (are monsters GenX? 🤔).

Anyway, for nearly two years, a bunch of us have been exploring the emerging future through fiction based on this premise (me as editor more than writer, though that will change soon). We’ve dubbed this new genre protocol fiction. One of my own contributions to this emerging genre is this story, The Signal Under Innsmouth (April 2025), a Lovecraftian pastiche (AI-generated of course!). This was a bit of a personal breakthrough for me, both in terms of revealing just how good and actually entertaining AI-generated writing could be, and in making legible the idea of becoming monstrous through technological transformation, and the internalization of strange new rules of being and becoming.

This leads to an interesting thought. What does it mean to not embrace co-evolution with technology; to not accept such transformation in what it means to be human?

It means being attached to a particular, historically contingent frozen snapshot idea of what it means to be human, based on the people alive and grappling with the question of AI circa 2024. A chosen people, presumably representing the pure acme of human development, who are choosing to head down a cul-de-sac of being and becoming. Who increasingly inhabit an enervating fantasy of humanism; “acting dead” to borrow a term from Bruce Sterling.

There’s a deep irony here that I’m still thinking through: That attempting to preserve your humanity as you navigate the Gramsci Gap may be the most deadening thing you can do, while embracing monstrousness may allow you to tap into the deepest kinds of liveness you can access today.

Again, this is not a bit. And it’s not a drill either. It’s a real unfolding praxis for me. If using AI is going to do irreversible horrifying things to my brain, I’m already partway there.

I’ve done two talks on this idea in the last month alone (one as part of the Biennale exhibit, and one as part of the Monstrous Times official launch party), and I nearly have the idea properly worked out enough to write about. So expect to see it pop up here soon. It’s going to be part of the New Nature book I’m going to tackle in November.

Oh, and speaking of liveness, that’s another of my pet themes, and next year, it will be the focus of the book club I run (this year, the book club is exploring another of my favorite concepts, Divergence). You may want to read my two posts so far on this topic, In Search of Liveness, and Engineering Liveness. It’s how AI and protocols are coming together for me, conceptually. I hope some of you join the book club, which also feeds a research group on psychohistory (yes, the Asimovian kind) at the Protocol Institute.

Anyway, that’s it for my introduction for new people (and re-introduction for those discovering that I’m now undead). Hopefully that provides some orientation in the thought spaces I like to explore with my fellow monsters-in-training, and also gives you a sense of where the human fraction of ideas like “cognitive mercantilism” come from.

Happy Halloween!

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Vincent Bernat

Network lab with QEMU

Vincent Bernat
Updated

To experiment with network stuff, I was using UML-based network labs. Many alternatives exist, like GNS3, Netkit, Marionnet or Cloonix. All of them are great viable solutions but I still prefer to stick to my minimal home-made solution with UML virtual machines. Here is why:

  • I didn’t want to use disk images. They take a lot of space and they have to be maintained. They also become cluttered, especially if you try to reuse them across several labs. They are also difficult to share.
  • I want to be able to access my home directory. It contains the important configuration files related to the lab and I can put them in the right place thanks to symbolic links when the lab starts. It also makes exchanging files with the lab quite easy.
  • I don’t want to boot a complete system. This allows me to be cheap on memory and each virtual system should boot in a few seconds.

The use of UML had some drawbacks:

  • It may be buggy. For example, it is currently not possible to use gdbserver inside UML without a patch. Sometimes, the kernel won’t even compile.
  • It is slow.

However, UML features HostFS, a filesystem providing access to any part of the host filesystem. This is the killer feature which allows me to not use any virtual disk image and to get access to my home directory right from the guest.

I discovered recently that QEMU provided 9P, a similar filesystem on top of VirtIO, the paravirtualized IO framework.

Setting up the lab

The setup of the lab is done with a single self-contained shell file. The layout is similar to what I have done with UML. I will only highlight here the most interesting steps.

Booting QEMU with a minimal kernel

My initial goal was to experiment with Nicolas Dichtel’s IPv6 ECMP patch. Therefore, I needed to configure a custom kernel. I have started from make defconfig, removed everything that was not necessary, added what I needed for my lab (mostly network stuff) and added the appropriate options for VirtIO drivers:

CONFIG_NET_9P_VIRTIO=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_NET=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_RING=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_PCI=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_BALLOON=y
CONFIG_VIRTIO_MMIO=y

No modules. Grab the complete configuration if you want to have a look.

From here, you can start your kernel with the following command ($LINUX is the appropriate bzImage):

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -m 256m \
  -display none \
  -nodefconfig -no-user-config -nodefaults \
  \
  -chardev stdio,id=charserial0,signal=off \
  -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0 \
  \
  -chardev socket,id=con0,path=$TMP/vm-$name-console.pipe,server,nowait \
  -mon chardev=con0,mode=readline,default \
  \
  -kernel $LINUX \
  -append "init=/bin/sh console=ttyS0"

Since there is no disk to boot from, the kernel will panic when trying to mount the root filesystem. QEMU is configured to not display video output (-display none). A serial port is defined and uses stdio as a backend.1 The kernel is configured to use this serial port as a console (console=ttyS0). A VirtIO console could have been used instead but it seems it is not possible to make it work early in the boot process.

The QEMU monitor is setup to listen on a Unix socket. It is possible to connect to it with socat UNIX:$TMP/vm-$name-console.pipe -.

Initial ramdisk

Update (2012-10)

I was initially unable to mount the host filesystem as the root filesystem for the guest directly by the kernel. In a comment, Josh Triplett told me to use /dev/root as the mount tag to solve this problem. I keep using an initrd in this post but the lab on GitHub has been updated to not use one.

Here is how to build a small initial ramdisk:

# Setup initrd
setup_initrd() {
    info "Build initrd"
    DESTDIR=$TMP/initrd
    mkdir -p $DESTDIR

    # Setup busybox
    copy_exec $($WHICH busybox) /bin/busybox
    for applet in $(${DESTDIR}/bin/busybox --list); do
        ln -s busybox ${DESTDIR}/bin/${applet}
    done

    # Setup init
    cp $PROGNAME ${DESTDIR}/init

    cd "${DESTDIR}" && find . | \
       cpio --quiet -R 0:0 -o -H newc | \
       gzip > $TMP/initrd.gz
}

The copy_exec function is stolen from the initramfs-tools package in Debian. It will ensure that the appropriate libraries are also copied. Another solution would have been to use a static busybox.

The setup script is copied as /init in the initial ramdisk. It will detect it has been invoked as such. If it were omitted, a shell would be spawned instead. Remove the cp call if you want to experiment manually.

The flag -initrd allows QEMU to use this initial ramdisk.

Root filesystem

Let’s mount our root filesystem using 9P. This is quite easy. First QEMU needs to be configured to export the host filesystem to the guest:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  ${PREVIOUS_ARGS} \
  -fsdev local,security_model=passthrough,id=fsdev-root,path=${ROOT},readonly \
  -device virtio-9p-pci,id=fs-root,fsdev=fsdev-root,mount_tag=rootshare

${ROOT} can either be / or any directory containing a complete filesystem. Mounting it from the guest is quite easy:

mkdir -p /target/ro
mount -t 9p rootshare /target/ro -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.u

You should find a complete root filesystem inside /target/ro. I have used version=9p2000.u instead of version=9p2000.L because the latter does not allow a program to mount() a host mount point.2

Now, you have a read-only root filesystem (because you do not want to mess with your existing root filesystem and moreover, you did not run this lab as root, did you?). Let’s use a union filesystem. Debian comes with AUFS while Ubuntu and OpenWRT have migrated to overlayfs. I was previously using AUFS but got errors on some specific cases. It is still not clear which one will end up in the kernel. So, let’s try overlayfs.

I didn’t find any patchset ready to be applied on top of my kernel tree. I was working with David Miller’s net-next tree. Here is how I have applied the overlayfs patch on top of it:

$ git remote add torvalds git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
$ git fetch torvalds
$ git remote add overlayfs git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mszeredi/vfs.git
$ git fetch overlayfs
$ git merge-base overlayfs.v15 v3.6
4cbe5a555fa58a79b6ecbb6c531b8bab0650778d
$ git checkout -b net-next+overlayfs
$ git cherry-pick 4cbe5a555fa58a79b6ecbb6c531b8bab0650778d..overlayfs.v15

Don’t forget to enable CONFIG_OVERLAYFS_FS in .config. Here is how I configured the whole root filesystem:

info "Setup overlayfs"
mkdir /target
mkdir /target/ro
mkdir /target/rw
mkdir /target/overlay
# Version 9p2000.u allows one to access /dev, /sys and mount new
# partitions over them. This is not the case for 9p2000.L.
mount -t 9p        rootshare /target/ro      -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.u
mount -t tmpfs     tmpfs     /target/rw      -o rw
mount -t overlayfs overlayfs /target/overlay -o lowerdir=/target/ro,upperdir=/target/rw
mount -n -t proc  proc /target/overlay/proc
mount -n -t sysfs sys  /target/overlay/sys

info "Mount home directory on /root"
mount -t 9p homeshare /target/overlay/root -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,access=0,rw

info "Mount lab directory on /lab"
mkdir /target/overlay/lab
mount -t 9p labshare /target/overlay/lab -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,access=0,rw

info "Chroot"
export STATE=1
cp "$PROGNAME" /target/overlay
exec chroot /target/overlay "$PROGNAME"

You have to export your ${HOME} and the lab directory from host:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  ${PREVIOUS_ARGS} \
  -fsdev local,security_model=passthrough,id=fsdev-root,path=${ROOT},readonly \
  -device virtio-9p-pci,id=fs-root,fsdev=fsdev-root,mount_tag=rootshare \
  -fsdev local,security_model=none,id=fsdev-home,path=${HOME} \
  -device virtio-9p-pci,id=fs-home,fsdev=fsdev-home,mount_tag=homeshare \
  -fsdev local,security_model=none,id=fsdev-lab,path=$(dirname "$PROGNAME") \
  -device virtio-9p-pci,id=fs-lab,fsdev=fsdev-lab,mount_tag=labshare

Network

You know what is missing from our network lab? Network setup. For each LAN that I will need, I spawn a VDE switch:

# Setup a VDE switch
setup_switch() {
    info "Setup switch $1"
    screen -t "sw-$1" \
        start-stop-daemon --make-pidfile --pidfile "$TMP/switch-$1.pid" \
        --start --startas $($WHICH vde_switch) -- \
        --sock "$TMP/switch-$1.sock"
    screen -X select 0
}

To attach an interface to the newly created LAN, I use:

mac=$(echo $name-$net | sha1sum | \
            awk '{print "52:54:" substr($1,0,2) ":" substr($1, 2, 2) ":" substr($1, 4, 2) ":" substr($1, 6, 2)}')
qemu-system-x86_64 \
  ${PREVIOUS_ARGS} \
  -net nic,model=virtio,macaddr=$mac,vlan=$net \
  -net vde,sock=$TMP/switch-$net.sock,vlan=$net

The use of a VDE switch allows me to run the lab as a non-root user. It is possible to give Internet access to each VM, either by using the -net user flag or using slirpvde on a special switch. I prefer the latter solution since it will allow the VMs to speak to each other.

Debugging

This lab was mostly done to debug both the kernel and Quagga. Each of them can be debugged remotely.

Kernel debugging

While the kernel features KGDB, its own debugger, compatible with GDB, it is easier to use the remote GDB server built inside QEMU.

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  ${PREVIOUS_ARGS} \
  -gdb unix:$TMP/vm-$name-gdb.pipe,server,nowait

To connect to the remote GDB server from the host, first locate the vmlinux file at the root of the source tree and run GDB on it. The kernel has to be compiled with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y to get the appropriate debugging symbols. Then, use socat with the Unix socket to attach to the remote debugger:

$ gdb vmlinux
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4.1-debian
Reading symbols from /home/bernat/src/linux/vmlinux...done.
(gdb) target remote | socat UNIX:$TMP/vm-r1-gdb.pipe -
Remote debugging using | socat UNIX:/tmp/tmp.W36qWnrCEj/vm-r1-gdb.pipe -
native_safe_halt () at /home/bernat/src/linux/arch/x86/include/asm/irqflags.h:50
50  }
(gdb)

You can now set breakpoints and resume the execution of the kernel.

It is easier to debug the kernel if optimizations are not enabled. However, it is not possible to disable them globally. You can however disable them for some files. For example, to debug net/ipv6/route.c, add CFLAGS_route.o = -O0 to net/ipv6/Makefile, remove net/ipv6/route.o and type make.

Userland debugging

To debug a program inside QEMU, you can just use gdb as usual. Your $HOME directory is available and it should therefore be straightforward. However, if you want to perform some remote debugging, that’s quite easy. Add a new serial port to QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  ${PREVIOUS_ARGS} \
  -chardev socket,id=charserial1,path=$TMP/vm-$name-serial.pipe,server,nowait \
  -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial1,id=serial1

Start gdbserver in the guest:

$ libtool execute gdbserver /dev/ttyS1 zebra/zebra
Process /root/code/orange/quagga/build/zebra/.libs/lt-zebra created; pid = 800
Remote debugging using /dev/ttyS1

And from the host, you can attach to the remote process:

$ libtool execute gdb zebra/zebra
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4.1-debian
Reading symbols from /home/bernat/code/orange/quagga/build/zebra/.libs/lt-zebra...done.
(gdb) target remote | socat UNIX:/tmp/tmp.W36qWnrCEj/vm-r1-serial.pipe -
Remote debugging using | socat UNIX:/tmp/tmp.W36qWnrCEj/vm-r1-serial.pipe -
Reading symbols from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
0x00007ffff7dddaf0 in ?? () from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
(gdb)

Demo

For a demo, have a look at the following video:

  1. stdio is configured such that signals are not enabled. QEMU will not stop when receiving SIGINT. This is important for the usage we want to have. ↩

  2. Therefore, it is not possible to mount a fresh /proc on top of the existing one. I have searched a bit but did not find why. Any comments on this are welcome. ↩

California
Marginal Revolution

Those new service sector jobs?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

A suburban Chicago man has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for conspiring to stage armed robberies so that the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for crime victims.

From 2022 to 2024, PARTH NAYI organized and participated in hundreds of staged armed robberies at coffee shops, restaurants, liquor stores, and gas stations throughout the country, including in Chicago and the suburbs of Lombard, Elmwood Park, St. Charles, Hickory Hills, River Grove, Lake Villa, and South Holland.  Nayi worked with others to recruit fake victims, pay off store owners to use their locations, coordinate and pay fake robbers, and coach the bogus victims through the plan.  Thousands of individuals who posed as victims each paid Nayi $5,000 to $30,000 to participate in the scam so that they could later apply for Nonimmigrant U-Visas, which are set aside for foreign nationals who are victims of certain crimes and are helpful to law enforcement in the investigation.

During the staged robberies, individuals acting as robbers brandished what appeared to be firearms, approached the purported victims, and demanded money.  Afterwards, the purported victims submitted forms to local law enforcement to obtain certification that they were victims of a qualifying crime and were helpful in the investigation. Upon receiving the certification, the purported victims then submitted fraudulent U-Visa applications to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services predicated upon their alleged status as robbery victims.

Here is the full story, via Ryan.

The post Those new service sector jobs? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Central Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ACPN50 PHFO 011118
TWOCP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 AM HST Sun Nov 01 2026

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Well Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands:
A broad area of low pressure is forecast to develop well to the
southeast of the Hawaiian Islands in a couple of days. Thereafter,
environmental conditions appear generally favorable for gradual
development of this system, and a tropical depression could form by
the middle to end of the week as it moves westward to
west-northwestward over the Central Pacific basin.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...50 percent.

$$
Forecaster Kelly
NNNN


Marginal Revolution

Are LLMs good or bad Bayesians?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Bryan Caplan:

It seems like you and other AIs are bad Bayesians. When presented with counterevidence, you should move toward or against the presenter with roughly equal probability. It depends on whether the argument was better or worse than expected. In fact, you seem to either move toward the speaker or just not change.

ChatGPT:

I think you’ve identified a genuine and important failure mode in AI reasoning: LLMs tend to treat a plausible counterargument as evidence in favor of its conclusion, rather than comparing the counterargument to what they should have expected to hear.

Your Bayesian point is correct, with one qualification: there’s no general theorem that updating toward and away from a speaker should happen with equal probability. But under appropriate calibration assumptions, both directions should occur, and an argument that’s weaker than expected should cause a negative update—even if the argument is perfectly valid as far as it goes.

Here is the full dialogue.  But will they try to fix this?  Should they try to fix this?  Can you undo this with good enough prompting?  The scope and limits of Bayesian are truly at stake here…

The post Are LLMs good or bad Bayesians? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Simon Willison's Weblog

How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts

How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts

Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed iframe.

It's important that HTML in these stays tightly sandboxed to avoid untrusted code interacting with OpenAI APIs and accessing private data.

Parameter found quite a complex attack chain. OpenAI use the MathLive JavaScript library as part of their graph support, and that library includes its own virtual keyboard, which can be triggered in the parent page via postMessage() from the sandboxed iframe.

That message receiving code uses innerHTML, so anything that sends a message can add custom HTML to the parent - and there was no mechanism to prevent other sandboxed frames, including HTML preview frames, from calling that method.

This meant untrusted code in an iframe could insert HTML, and while innerHTML doesn't directly execute script elements it could be used to inject a new iframe without sandbox restrictions.

OpenAI’s CSP rules blocked inline scripts entirely, and only allowed script loading from a handful of domains, but one of those was YouTube - and the YouTube oEmbed endpoint could be used to reflect JavaScript back in a way that executed it.

Once the attack had JavaScript execution on ChatGPT, it was trivial to fetch private user data from APIs and exfiltrate it via an image reference.

The end result: you could create a ChatGPT share URL which, when visited by another signed-in user, could exfiltrate their private data or take actions on their behalf.

OpenAI closed the hole and paid out a $5,000 bug bounty, which I think was a bit cheap for a vulnerability this serious.

Via Hacker News

Tags: iframes, javascript, sandboxing, security, xss, openai, chatgpt, content-security-policy

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-llm 0.1a9

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9

I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin.

It now picks up the default model used by LLM, which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing to explicitly configure a default model:

uvx --with datasette-agent datasette content.db --internal internal.db

Previously you would also need to specify a model with -s plugins.datasette-agent.default_model gpt-6-astra.

Tags: datasette, llm, datasette-agent

Paul Krugman

Azeem Azhar on the Explosion of Hacking and Other AI Issues

Paul Krugman
Updated

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Azeem Azhar

(recorded 10/29/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. I am talking today with Azeem Azhar, writer, researcher, investor with Exponential View, who is one of the people I turn to when I don’t understand what’s happening with AI, which is basically all the time. There was a really striking piece that Azeem wrote the other day about the PHP hack with the title, “The Wuhan Moment.”

Why don’t you explain to me what you mean by that, and let’s try to understand what’s going on here.

Azhar: Yeah. Well, that PHP hack was just one particular instance of a range of things that are now happening because AI models have become good enough. And the reason I called it the Wuhan moment is that there are infectious diseases all the time, but then came along one with slightly different characteristics, and it had a much bigger impact than all the other ones that were circulating.

So, when I say AI models have gotten more capable—we’ve had this experience as we use ChatGPT, it gets smarter and smarter—and AI models became good enough to be used in code, to be directed to find vulnerabilities and weaknesses and bugs in software. And because AI systems are tireless and indefatigable, and you can just spin more of them up and they don’t get exhausted, they’re not like human security researchers or human hackers. They can find all of these vulnerabilities, many vulnerabilities, quickly. They can research them in novel, non-human ways and chain them all together. And that’s a new regime that we find ourselves in. And it feels different to where we were a year or two ago when these weaknesses and vulnerabilities were discovered methodically by the occasional hacker, but generally by security teams. So that’s the moment.

Krugman: So my understanding is that basically the way the world works now is that there’s software everywhere. Everything is being run on software which is complicated and maybe not that carefully put together. Tell me if I’m wrong on this, but I think it’s sort of on stilts where you have newer software laid on top of older software, and God knows where the vulnerabilities are.

Azhar: Well, software and technology is this really big industry that somehow managed for 50 or 60 years to escape any part of safety testing.

Krugman: Right.

Azhar: And so, you know, that’s why you have beta releases and bug fixes, because the culture of software development for the longest period of time has been started from a tinkering mindset. And there’s no real security model required around software. It’s not an AI problem, it’s not a social media or an internet problem.

It was a problem in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. It’s just that we started to move from centralized mainframes to having personal computers and many, many more opportunities for that software to be developed in a decentralized way. And so here we are decades later, and it’s a miracle the internet works, given how many bugs and issues there are. But that has also been its benefit, because what it has by not being a fixed cathedral is agility. One software developer likened it to a crowded, buzzing bazaar. It has the ability to respond, adapt, and stay pretty resilient, which the internet has by and large done, except for a few major cyber attacks over the last 25 years. So what was a feature, and a flaw recognized by software engineers, that there’s no agreed security model for making software—has also been the reason why we’ve had a flourishing of software, and we are able to continue on our way even when bugs are found and there are problems that get discovered.

Krugman: Right. And a lot of it is based on PHP. You should probably tell people what it is. I mean, I actually had never heard of it until last week, but of course...

Azhar: Well, you’ve certainly used it. In reality, 70% of websites are running on PHP. It’s a programming language that happens to be very easy for people to use, and so it was cheap. If in the late ‘90s you wanted to write a piece of software, you used PHP. It’s simplistic; it doesn’t have the learning curve of C++ or something else. And it got extended and extended. Facebook used it a lot, and so it became part of the internet’s architecture. And like many other systems we use, like Python, which is another language, or BIND, which is a piece of software that turns friendly internet addresses like Substack.com to the numbers that the routers need. These are pieces of software that are actually open source as well, you know, they’re written by collaborations of volunteers who have their own governance systems, who share that code in repositories. And again, if you don’t think about it, you’ll be surprised. And it feels like it’s a miracle that it works, but we have evidence and proof that it does.

Krugman: Okay, and how relevant is it that it’s old? That PHP is a ‘90s thing. It’s all jerry-built, which was good enough until now we have these AI models that are tireless, right? And basically an army of gimlet-eyed experts in deception can go and find the holes, right?

Azhar: Right, yeah. I mean, the whole setup was maybe not quite on stilts because it all worked. It also has to be recognized that it’s really hard to write extremely precise, foolproof software in an enterprise—be it a corporate, consumer, customer environment—because standards change. If you want to understand why, think about the experience when you’re flying on an old plane, as you will across the Atlantic, and you pull up the in-flight entertainment, and the software is so slow compared to your modern smartphone because it had to be designed and locked down 18 years ago, or 10 years before the airline bought it, and it’s still in place. So all of these things were really part of the trade-off that we as customers and consumers made to have something that would adapt and be responsive to our lives. None of us really want to use the type of software that runs a nuclear power station, right? Because it’s stuck in the ‘70s or ‘80s. And that means that there are just lots of different ways of getting these pieces of code to crash, and once they crash, maybe to get access to the machine and figure out where to go next. And that’s what great hackers do.

AI models crossed a threshold at the start of this year when Anthropic had a model called Claude Mythos. It’s the best cybersecurity model in the world. It was not made widely available. In fact, only a small number of organizations get access to it. And they’ve been running around trying to patch or fix these bugs and close loopholes. The first part is finding them. But one of the things that happens with AI, is that the capabilities cascade down to cheaper models very, very quickly.

And so at some point this summer, the open-weight models, also known as open-source models, started to get towards the capabilities that Mythos had. And so they, too, crossed that uncanny valley into a point where they can be chained together and directed by either hackers or bad actors to find vulnerabilities before the good guys find them and then try to exploit them. And we’ve seen an uptick, a rapid increase in the number of those vulnerabilities that are being discovered. And this PHP one was one example of it.

And I guess what I was writing in my essay was to say, Look, what we know about these technologies is that they get cheaper, and as they get cheaper, they get used far, far more, right? We all take many more digital photos than we do film photos now from 40 years ago. The same thing would likely happen here. And that means if there are vulnerabilities or exploits, however obscure, it’s quite possible that they would be found and exploited. And I’ll just mention one data point that I’ve seen. There was one particular piece of software that had been tested for vulnerabilities trillions of times by humans running test suites. And yet a recent AI model was able, despite that, to find severe vulnerabilities that could be exploited. So even though we’ve looked very hard, we can never guarantee that these things are 100% robust.

Krugman: And this sounds like it’s a constant arms race. Now you’ll be using AI to try and patch or protect, but it sounds like inherently the advantage is going to be with the bad guys, right? It’s going to always be hard, or am I wrong?

Azhar: Well, I think the bad guys move more quickly than everyone else in general. Remember, the bad guys only have to find one vulnerability at one place. The good guys have to defend every vulnerability all the time. And so I think it would be fair to say that there are lots of private sector organizations and government organizations that are ahead of the curve, but there are also billions of computers connected to the internet and trillions and trillions of lines of code and systems that haven’t been updated for years that could be vulnerabilities. And that’s why the Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at Anthropic said it’s going to be quite a rough 18 months.

And I think what I alluded to in my essay was that there is that period where, you know, just as it was with the spread of what we then called, believe it or not, 2019-nCoV before we called it SARS-CoV-2, things can spread faster than we can figure out what we can do about it. And I think that that’s the risk that emerges in that shorter period of time.

Krugman: And what we did do to deal with the spread of the coronavirus, with extreme political consequences, was lockdowns. And you suggested that we were going to be seeing a lot of partial disconnect from the open web. So, how does a walled garden actually operate, and can we even do that now?

Azhar: Well, arguably, Paul, I think we may already; many of us spend a lot of time in walled gardens. If you live in Instagram or you live in Facebook, it’s not the open web that you and I remember. It’s not the open web I fell in love with in 1992, where you go from one place to the next. And you know, even so many things require password authentication to access. But I do think that what you’d expect to see is that the number of AI agents will rapidly exceed the number of humans. I think the amount of .browsing that is done by bots on the internet now is higher than humans. It’s always been high because search engines have to crawl, and people who are buying things on eBay will use price-sniping bots to keep an eye on the listings. But that will tilt enormously towards the machines over the coming few years. The internet and the companies on the internet will evolve to meet that demand.

The way that I liken it is that if you think about Fifth Avenue in 1895, there were more people strolling in the middle of Fifth Avenue than there were automobiles. But by 1920, people didn’t stroll down the middle of the street. You don’t go for an afternoon walk on the freeway. You might go for an afternoon drive and use the freeway to get you there. And so I think that the internet would need to start to filter out what these AI systems need. They move really quickly. They’re trigger-happy. They work in milliseconds. We work in seconds. They have completely different technical requirements. And that will mean that that would occupy a different patch of cyberspace to the patch that we want to be in.

And in particular, if we want to be really, really secure and robust about threats, we might choose to say, “I want to stay in an enclave that is safe.” And I think a good example of that is what Apple does with the Apple Store. In some countries you can use third-party stores—but mostly you have to get apps from the Apple Store, because Apple wants to say, “We’ve checked that this is safe.” Whereas in Android, you can go anywhere. And that’s why there are many more viruses and safety problems on Android. So I do see this potential journey where the internet needs to serve the kind of economic requirements of companies using agents, which means how fast it is, whether there’s transactions and pay-as-you-go and validation and so on. But that may not be the way that we will want to operate on the internet at all. It will feel it’s not for us in the same way as the 101 highway in California is not for humans to have a stroll down.

Krugman: So it’s going to be a world in which, instead of being able to let a bot go and make purchases, you will have to prove that, or you know, offer some evidence that you are you, or only certain things will be available; just a much pokier environment, is that it?

Azhar: I think you’ll end up having to validate your bot, and you’ll have to give your bot your approval, and the bot will have a set of rules. It’s allowed to spend $50 without sending you the approval link or whatever the system happens to be. And the truth is, I don’t think we know at all right now what that would look like. I mean, people are experimenting, and my sense would be that publishers in particular, and then retailers as well, will start to publish listings for consumption by machine agents in the way that they need to see the material, which is much more structured, much less emotive, just with more data that they can navigate around. And they’ll do that because you or I are quite likely to be using an agent on our iPhone or an agent from Meta to interact with wherever we know we’re buying or browsing. I mean, I really don’t think we’re there yet, but I think people in the industry generally think that that’s the direction that we would go.

And I have a little bit of experience myself because I have a bot that keeps track and looks out for concerts I might want to go to, because I don’t like going to venue websites because they’re all different from one another. So the bot knows my music tastes, it’s got my music catalogue, and it checks every week or so to see if there’s a ticket I might want to buy and tells me about it. So, I’m no longer visiting those venue websites, but I am going to be paying for the ticket.

Krugman: I remember how freaked out I was when I was a very early Amazon book buyer, meaning physical book buyer, and when Amazon started recommending music to me. I never actually did buy any music from them, but the recommendations were pretty good even then. And that was kinda shocking to realize that at some level, from the books I bought, they figured out what music I probably liked. And it’s just a very spooky world for someone my age.

Azhar: I think it is spooky; it’s spooky for all of us when you get those suggestions. I mean, you can probably do it in ChatGPT. If you took a photo of my bookcase and stuck it in ChatGPT and said to it, you know, “Recommend some books that this guy might like,” I think it’ll do quite a good job. I remind myself that it’s math, that’s what it is. It’s kind of traversing an enormous matrix and it’s finding some likelihoods.

Krugman: No one listening to this will know what I’m talking about, but it just shocks me that basically matrix multiplication with a few nonlinearities can do all of this. It’s just absolutely bizarre that it works.

Azhar: It’s so weird. It is so weird.

Krugman: Okay. But this is a little less apocalyptic than what I took from reading your piece. But I guess it still may be very, very scary. You think that we will eventually have worked out a reasonably seamless way of making it work?

Azhar: Look, what is an apocalypse? If we look at what happened with COVID, could COVID have been much, much worse? Yes. Was COVID really bad? Yes. Was it apocalyptic and awful for lots and lots of people individually and also for entire cohorts? Yes. I mean, imagine the kids who did their college in lockdown on their own away from home for the first time. I mean, that is just awful. So I think that those are bad outcomes. I think the thing that we’re dealing with here is that it feels like over 18 to 20 months people will have figured this out, and those guys are not going to get much sleep, but in the meantime really uncomfortable things could happen. You know, you could get a bank that just fails to get ahead of the ball, and your money in a bank is only an entry in a database. It’s not in Jimmy Stewart’s hands, right? And the cash is literally just a line in an Oracle financials database. And that would be pretty apocalyptic for people.

And I think that we can’t rule out what statisticians call tail risks, but we can’t see those tail risks, right? They’re Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns.” And what we do know is that the internet with all the billions of machines connected to it is now much more porous and much more vulnerable than it was two or three months ago. And so does that mean that something quite bad could happen? Lots of things like power grids are sometimes connected or accessible to the internet. Well, it’s more likely now than it was a year ago because of this. And that’s where we have to be very, very proactive.

I’ve spoken to policymakers and a few months ago, I went off and I said, look, you need to come together and have a public-private agreement partnership where the state is actively encouraging small, medium, and large companies that are not tech companies to ask the right questions, to make sure these things are being proactively fixed because there will be a moment when you cross this uncanny valley, and the vulnerabilities will magnify hugely. So, I mean, it has to be taken really, really seriously.

If I don’t sound like I’m running around panicking, it’s because I model important things on Sully Sullenberger, the pilot of that plane that landed on the Hudson. You know, he had 115 souls on that plane and he didn’t panic. And there’s a great media interview with Katie Couric where she keeps asking him how he was feeling and was he panicking? And he is cool as a cucumber because at moments like this, when things matter, we want to use our evidence, we want to use data, we want to use our judgment, we want to think calmly. So I think it’s serious. People should act quickly.

Krugman: Okay, but how many people in major leadership positions in the world remind you of Sully Sullenberger?

Azhar: Well, I mean, you know, democracy is the best system we’ve got. Unfortunately, you know, that’s what it is.

Krugman: I know. Or as Churchill said, “The worst system except for all the others.” But anyway, yeah.

Okay. Before I read about the hack apocalypse or the possibility thereof, the big question we’ve all been asking is about an AI bubble. For many of us, our kind of formative experience on this was the IT bubble of the ‘90s, which more and more I’m starting to think is actually not a very good model for where we are right now. But you’ve been, you know, not a wild-eyed enthusiast, but you’ve been basically saying, “Calm down. There’s a lot of evidence that this is at least not that bad of a bubble.” Do you want to talk about why you’re coming down on the calmer side here?

Azhar: Yeah, not that bad of a bubble yet, might be the better way to phrase it. One thing that I have noticed in the debate over the last couple of years is that it splits between descriptive discussions—the facts of the world and normative discussion—and feeling: the oughts of the world. And people sometimes find it really hard to separate those. And I think the debate gets extremely heated, very passionate, but probably not particularly helpful. And I would say that everything that I say really is at this point descriptive. I’m not saying it ought to end one way because the world would be better or another, right? So I think that’s quite important.

Bubbles and this overexpansion of investments during any technology are really, really common, as you know from your own work. The real pain emerges when customers don’t buy enough to pay for the financing of whatever it is required to build the factories, the infrastructure. And that mismatch is what creates bubbles. It’s what created the railroad bubbles in the US. It’s what in some sense was happening with dot-com and with telecoms. Not every investment wave in a new technology ends in a disastrous bubble. Most of them do, and mostly it happens because the financing gets too exotic, it gets too circular, it gets too big. But not every one does. Automobiles in the US, for example, didn’t end up in a bubble. They ended up in lots of companies failing and there being consolidation, but generational companies came out of it, as well.

And so when I look at what’s going on with AI, the question that I’m asking—and we look at the data—is, what is the weight, the ballast? How is the complexity of the debt and the financing that is building up set against the way customers, mostly companies, are spending? And does one outweigh the other? And I think that a lot of that can be measured. A lot of that can be driven by fact rather than opinion. Some of it is unknown, and that’s why I’m calm. I have a view which is that, to put it simply, when I was starting out at work, my first mortgage was for 85,000 pounds, so like $110,000, this is 30 years ago, and that was really tough for me to pay. My mortgage today is substantially larger than that, and it’s quite easy for me to pay. And if I took today’s mortgage and gave it to me at age 24, I would have been crushed under the weight of it.

So the scale of the debt, the finance obligations, have to be put in proportion to how customers are spending and how they may spend. And that’s why I’m a little bit calmer, more sanguine right now, although I do think that the bubble metric is higher today than it was a year ago, you know, for the reasons I’m sure we’ll explore.

Krugman: Yeah. There was first a debate about how productive is this technology. It’s obviously awesome. It’s still hard to believe that basically matrix arithmetic can sound so much like a person, but there’s still some argument. There’s still some people saying that, okay, this stuff is amazing, but we can’t see it in the aggregate productivity numbers. Have you been taking that on at all?

Azhar: It’s very difficult to see it in aggregate numbers. You’re a far greater economist than I am so I’m not sure when you would expect to see it in aggregate numbers. And I’ve heard one economist in China—I was in Asia a few weeks ago—saying they’re starting to see some numbers in some sectors. I still think it’s very fair to say that they’re not showing up in aggregate numbers. They are showing up in small numbers of companies outside of the tech industry. Depending on which survey you believe, it’s between 5 and 10% of large companies seeing maybe a 6% benefit, increased sales, lower costs.

Krugman: Yeah.

Azhar: And that could increase. What we don’t know is whether the other 90% will turn into that 10% in one year, two years, five years, 10 years, or ever at all. And they may not. And we don’t know what percentage of that 10% will get more and more benefit and therefore spend more and more. But I think it would be—with something like this, it’s a little bit like a doctor trying to understand a complex disease. You don’t just take the patient’s pulse. You take lots of tests and blood tests and you try to paint a picture.

So certainly, there’s not much in the aggregate statistics, certainly not in the US. There’s some sector evidence, there’s some evidence from surveys from companies. I talk to executives quite a lot. What execs tell me is that this is harder than they thought. More of them are getting success. Everyone intends to continue to spend next year to try more. When does that show up in a number that an economist like you can say, “Here’s a number.” I mean, I think that’s a really important question. If it takes too long, then it’s probably the case that revenues are not going to grow fast enough to pay for the mortgage.

Krugman: Okay, so to get back to revenues in a second. Where I would be looking at the IT boom of the ‘90s, you know, by 2005 we were talking about total factor productivity. In aggregate, we were something like 10% above where the previous trend would have expected you to be, which is a lot, although it kind of stalled out after that. But we are, I would think in terms of the timing, something like in 1999.

Azhar: Mm-hmm.

Krugman: The productivity benefits were a lot more obvious in the first four or five years into the internet bubble. So I don’t know what to make of that.

Azhar: Yeah, my recollection is that it was even earlier with IT. I thought that the real rapid speed increase was in that ‘94 to ‘98 period. It happened to coincide, I think, with Bill Clinton as president. So he was able to do all sorts of things with the budget and so on. So it was pretty quick and sustained. And the question is, where are we with this ChatGPT thing? I think that the clock should start probably a year after ChatGPT, which is when Microsoft and Google released enterprise, corporate versions of what they were doing. So that’s been three years. And the question is, how fast would we expect it to go, and is IT a fair comparison? And with IT, people had to buy computers, for example, which is a much higher cost than paying for a ChatGPT subscription.

So I think that there’s a reasonable case to say that this is not yet provably faster than IT and could well be slower, right? I think that would be a reasonable position to hold today. And I have some ideas as to why that might be. Like what is the cause of the inertia within companies, and does that mean [the return on investment is] not as quick as we might’ve hoped or thought?

Krugman: But then the second question is, suppose this does great things for aggregate productivity growth. It really is great for the economy. The question has to be how much of that is captured by the companies, right? In the end, the internet was great, but you can look at those old Qwest ads from the ‘90s about this wonderful new world of the broadband internet, and everything in the ads has come true, but Qwest is no more, right? And so, how much should we be worried that Anthropic and OpenAI and maybe some of the others are busy doing all these great outlays and producing great stuff, but that everybody will end up buying Chinese products that are 90% as effective and 90% cheaper?

Azhar: Well, I think that we have to separate out the companies like OpenAI and Anthropic with the companies who are actually paying for the capital expenditures in the data centers, which are the infrastructure companies. And those companies will make money whether Anthropic is selling to you or whether you’re using a Chinese model, because the model still has to run on a computer.

Krugman: Okay.

Azhar: And that computer is a GPU probably owned by Microsoft or Amazon. So they will still make money at the infrastructure layer. And so we try to separate out how much money flows to the infrastructure layer versus how much goes to the model lab companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Even if people do move to those cheaper models, I suspect that there’s enough capital flow, and enough business, at least for the next couple of years.

However, what we constantly hear from the industry is that there is a huge undercapacity of computing. Just before we recorded this, Microsoft and Google had their earnings announcements and they said the same thing again: we just don’t have enough compute capacity to serve all of our customers. So I separate out OpenAI and Anthropic. And I think when I look at Anthropic, the company published a document that’s called an S-1, which is the marketing document before it goes public. And we forensically went through it and deconstructed it. And I was quite surprised by things that I saw. For example, margins are a really important part of whether a business can survive or not. And Anthropic’s gross margin from over the compute costs that it pays is about 85%. That number was about minus 200% two years ago when lots of people were saying this company was going to die within a year or two. (And these people have not corrected themselves, by the way.)

And so I think that’s a surprise that the margins are as strong as that, that they are making profits in that way. Of course, your point remains, though. Like, there could be deflation or price competition from cheaper models, but in the end, the infrastructure bill mostly lies with infrastructure companies, and they will still make money serving open-weight models.

Krugman: So the open-weight—I am embarrassingly weak on exactly what we’re talking about here, but that’s okay, I think. Although the open-weight models are, at least as I understand, they basically just do a lot less computation than the full sauce, but nonetheless the demand for compute is still skyrocketing.

Azhar: So the reason open-weight models are cheaper for us is that they’re effectively put out for anyone to download like open-source software. So you’re not paying a profit margin to OpenAI or to Anthropic. You’re paying just the margin that the infrastructure company is going to put on that model for serving it. You’ve disintermediated one layer of margin. As to whether they’re actually cheaper in tasks, this is a hotly contested issue where they might be cheaper by the token, but you need more tokens to get a task done, so they end up being more expensive.

And my view again is a little bit sanguine about this. I’m pretty certain that there’ll be a lot of workloads moved onto open-weight models. But I also think that Anthropic and OpenAI resemble software companies of the past: there were cheaper open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office, like LibreOffice, but nobody used it. Most companies just went to the branded business, and so did that. And I think that there is a simple mental model that says that even if they lose lots of market share, they can still persist as businesses because there will be the typical reasons that people buy software to buy their products. I think the big question is how much market share would they lose and what happens to their pricing power? And the truth is, I don’t think anyone can look out over more than a few months to have any certainty. That’s why I go back to all the data that I look at and see all the data that can contradict the arguments that I’m making, to just make sure that I’m calibrating myself.

Krugman: But that’s the thought, that ChatGPT and Claude will end up being the Microsoft Words of the future. Basically inferior products that everybody uses because nobody gets in trouble for buying it.

Azhar: Well, yeah, it might be that, but I do think that they are still better products. In my team, we use a lot of open-weight models for the work that gets done because it’s often good enough, fast enough, cheap enough. Weirdly, I particularly use an open-weight model for one of my agents because the model is not as sort of machine-intelligent as the state-of-the-art models. So it does what I ask it more often. If I swapped it out for an expensive state-of-the-art ChatGPT model, it would often do more than I asked, right? And I would say, “No, but that’s not what I wanted. I just wanted the simple thing done. I wanted you to get me eggs. I didn’t want you to bake me a whole cake.” And so there are all these things, Paul, that we just don’t understand right now. We have to feel our way, and on the back of it is like $5 trillion sitting on top of it.

Krugman: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, there are some places apparently trying to use AI for air traffic control, and it’s like you might get the response: “I’m sorry, you were right, there was a plane already sitting on the runway. Would you like some advice on how to deal with mass casualty events?”

Azhar: Right. Well, fortunately, we haven’t got there at the mass level, but of course there have been kind of horrible stories of people who’ve been sort of taken down by AI psychosis, and to the end of their lives, which of course is a horrible outcome. But I think there is a risk in this debate about a bubble or a boom, and it tends to present a binary. And I think there are other outcomes. There is an outcome where there’s not a bubble that bursts, but a period of very, very low returns for the companies who’ve made these investments. So it’s not great for their investors. But you don’t see that kind of cataclysmic arrest as we saw in the housing market in the US when housing starts completely stopped after the global financial crisis.

One of the reasons I think it’s important to think about other scenarios than financial catastrophe is that if American and European companies do start to get results and do pay enough as customers of these businesses so that they can afford to pay this metaphorical mortgage they’ve taken out, where does the load of that lie? The load of that is quite likely to lie on the workforce. And we could blind ourselves—by getting so excited about Bloomberg’s terminals turning red as share prices fall—to starting to take proactive steps on the possibility that the technology actually does work, does deliver greater productivity, that companies as a result do cut costs, and some of that falls on the workforce. And I think that’s too important to leave to tabloid shouting over financial calamity.

Krugman: Yeah, I am mainly worried about how capital intensive this stuff is. There is definitely a competition for capital and these data centers essentially employ no people. You take eight billion dollars that might have been creating a bunch of jobs, and you end up with a hundred maintenance workers. But let me just ask you, since one of the things I’ve been hearing, and I have no ability to assess, is that presumably there will be a lot of money-losing investments. You know, there will be investments that companies are sorry they made or the company ceases to exist, which can be okay. We had that in the IT boom of the ‘90s because the infrastructure wasn’t there. But then it was. So we had a lot of fiber that stayed dark for years, but then eventually all became useful again. But the story that some people are telling me, and I have no idea whether it’s true, is that these investments will depreciate really fast. That they will depreciate financially because the chips get outmoded, but even perhaps more so because they literally, physically deteriorate. Is that a concern?

Azhar: This is another example where we have data to help us.

Krugman: Okay.

Azhar: So these chips do, of course, go obsolete just like any other chip, and they tend to be carried by infrastructure companies on depreciation for between five and six years. The evidence comes through public, regulatory statements that people have made, so we can kind of assume that they’re true. And what they say is that even eight- or nine-year-old chips are still being rented at premium prices because demand is so high. Will a 2026 GPU, one of these computer chips for AI be in use in 2046 the way an 1888 rail line is in use today? No, it will not be. I’m sure of that. But at the moment they pay themselves back within two or three years.

Krugman: Okay.

Azhar: Now what happens if one of these smaller infrastructure companies fails? We talked about the smaller ones who are not the big household names, and of course they’re on shakier financial footings. So if one of them fails, some of their investors, their shareholders, will obviously lose money. The people who’ve lent them money may lose money, but the chips will not be lost. They will immediately be taken over. In fact, a lot of the contracts have what’s known as an interrupted-in-service clause. So even if the legal entity that owns them fails, the customer still gets serviced and served. And as long as we’re in an undersupply of compute, which we appear to be, those things will get picked up. And I think we could expect that out of these hundreds of rinky-dink small infrastructure companies, there will be a lot of consolidation over the next few years because markets don’t support that many individual players.

Krugman: Right. So the dismal analogy that people have made is with fracking, where one of the big problems with fracking was that it turned out that fracked wells declined much faster than was in the accounting. But you’re saying that that does not look to you like it is really an issue with the chips. I mean, that’s a little bit reassuring.

Azhar: Well, it’s not an issue now, and it’s what the data says. But the thing about semiconductors and infrastructure like this is that we have undersupply right now, but the moment you have oversupply, prices can collapse. And what happens with chip companies generally, and has done over 50 years, is that they go into periods where demand grows, and so there’s undersupply, prices rise, and so they go and build factories, and by the time the factory is built, demand has cooled off, and now they’ve got overcapacity and they have to cut their prices and they lose all their money. So semiconductor investors are really aware of that cycle, and at the moment the question that the model people have to build in their heads—and there are lots of variables—is for how long will demand for computing of AI and these chips exceed the supply that’s provided and the supply that is available? And if that switches because there’s a new algorithm that’s much more efficient that everybody uses, and demand doesn’t pick up, then you could get into an oversupply situation which would have many of the effects that we saw in shale.

But I think there is a difference with shale, because what would happen with shale would be that you’ve got the external price of oil or gas that is setting a recovery price, but even if the price is high you also have the depletion curve of the well where every subsequent barrel—or whatever you’re getting out—is more expensive. So you have that kind of economic tapering off. And I’m not familiar enough with knowing how quickly a fracked well would pay off. But certainly right now, the GPUs that are being bought are being paid off within a couple of years or two and a half years.

Now, there is a bigger issue, right? AI is not some kind of airy-fairy thing that just lives out in the cloud. The cloud is physical. It is steel and sweat and energy and massive buildings. And as you say, buildings that don’t employ anyone. We can talk about what we could do about that. And so there is a scramble to get all the things other than the chips that you need for data centers, like land, like cooling, and most importantly, power. My team and I think that there is an emerging power gap. That is, the amount of power the chips will need set against what power the US grid and the European grids can provide. That’s not that important this year, it’s probably manageable next year, but it starts to become quite significant the year after that. And that raises all sorts of questions because no one’s going to buy $100 billion of chips in 2028 just to not plug them in for six months. So I think that there are these additional risks that make this question quite hard to come down with a definitive answer.

Krugman: Yeah, that’s where I’ve been coming in is to say, even more than the data centers and the connections to the grid or the other power sources, there’s a lot of political veto points. And there’s often local government and angry citizens where that becomes a real issue.

Azhar: Well, let’s talk about the angry citizens. So I think this is a really important thing that’s going on in the US. It is an act of democratic engagement and political engagement. Quite often people who observe the US go, “Nobody votes, nobody cares, everyone’s tuned into TV.” And this is not what we’re seeing now. I think data centers are less popular than ICE, which is one of your less popular government departments. This is an important part, I think, of how during a radical technology change, [there needs to be a] social contract, an agreement that gets hammered out.

As you rightly say, for every $100 million of investment in a data center, they employ 25 times fewer people than an advanced factory. So they’re not local employers. And a deal that got brokered in the UK in order to give permission was essentially for every megawatt of power—and a big data center might draw 100 or 200 or 500 megawatts—the data center operator has to pay $100,000 into the local community, and the total sum was, I’m just looking at my notes, about 500 million pounds, about $758 million. Now, I think that idea of constructing a local license to operate, it’s eminently affordable for both the infrastructure companies and the AI companies that they serve because the margins are so good. They can absolutely afford to pay this. Brokering at a local level, if necessary, these types of agreements I think goes some way. And it’s not just about the money. We have to come back to the point that you made: data centers employ a lot of people during the construction, then they don’t employ many people thereafter. So what can local communities then do in terms of development funds and access? I know the UK better than the US. But funds like that can stimulate the kind of local entrepreneurship and business building that is sort of generative and sustainable for a community.

Krugman: Yeah, one of the things that puzzles me a little bit about the public backlash is why the data center builders aren’t saying, “We will come to Pleasantville County and we will hold open town meetings and we will contract to pay a large sum of money into the county treasury.” I’m not aware of any examples of that, yet it seems such an obvious thing to do at this point.

Azhar: There are a few examples. I think there’s certainly a set of precedents out in Loudoun County which is the hotspot in Virginia. And I know that Microsoft’s campus in Washington state made commitments about what would happen to water bills and electricity prices and put in money for local redevelopment in different ways. So I think the money is there. And that means that half the battle has been addressed already, because it’s not as if you’re asking someone who’s going to make a lot of money to contribute some of that to a local community. And I think that the question is, what do you actually do with that? Do you do as we did in the UK with North Sea Oil, hand it back as tax cuts and God knows what happens 50 years later? Or are you able to use it to inject some commercial economic dynamism that can survive once the construction workers leave?

Krugman: Okay, last question: what scares you? What is the real fear that you have? Obviously, we know that the hacking is something that is looking pretty alarming, but further down, leaving aside maybe extinction of the human race, what do you really worry about here?

Azhar: The first is the extension of the hacking to a state-organized, multi-layer gray war, from polluting the information environment to widespread, increasingly significant hacks on what we call national infrastructure. I’m thinking of electricity grids, financial systems, water systems, where it’s not sort of individual criminal groups, but they are being mediated and managed by a state. I think that’s really, really serious, because we don’t see bombs going off. We don’t think we’re in a period of conflict. Especially in Europe, where there’s much more sabotage going on as well, I think we are getting there, and people need to understand that that risk is real and it exists. So I think that’s one of the really big things that I’m concerned with.

But the second thing, as we talked about, is jobs. And I think that what happens to the workforce, I think will be a very gentle turning up of the temperature. It won’t be a hundred thousand jobs going at once. It will be a reduction in wages, fewer new openings. And then before you know it, the workforce looks different to what it did. And we have to be alert to that.

And finally, I’m super, super worried about what’s going to happen to our brains with brain rot and just relying on, you know, “it’s not this, it’s that,” ChatGPT-isms, and losing critical faculties. I bought all of my team fountain pens. We all write in fountain pen. My desk is covered in pages of handwritten notes. I encourage them to work without a computer a few hours a day. I read really old books, a book from 1794, things that are predating ChatGPT. I use the tools, the AI tools, all the time, but at the same time, I’m really deliberate about how I try to protect my mind and try to pass my thinking and process ideas to my kids who, being the age they are—well, actually two of them barely use AI, but they’re not going to be that receptive. But I think that we have to really think about what is it about human thinking that we need to continue to cultivate and allow it to flourish alongside these technologies that, whether there’s a bubble that bursts and delays it for a few years, whether it’s grinding, whether it’s smooth, it will be with us. And we need to talk about that and actually do things about that sooner rather than later.

Krugman: Okay, I think that’s a good place to end. Boy, scary stuff. Fascinating, but I did not see this one coming.

Azhar: Paul, that’s the nature of AI. None of us see any of it coming. I mean, that’s a sad part.

Krugman: Maybe it turns out that all the people we were saying “learn to code,” should have been saying “learn cursive script.”

Azhar: Might not have been a bad idea. Cheers.

Noahpinion

Farewell, my Captain

Noah Smith
Updated

“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.” — Q

There’s something about the mindset of really hardcore Star Trek fans that’s very difficult to describe to people who don’t share that fandom. I can’t speak for all of us, of course, but for many of us, there is a sense in which the world portrayed in Star Trek is not quite fictional. No one regards it as an exact description of the future, of course, but there is a sense in which it represents one possible future that we must achieve — a “Star Trek timeline” that either we’re on or that we need to return to. The United Federation of Planets isn’t some fantastical interstellar alliance, but an organization that we must create, and whose ideals we must instantiate as the governing ethos of humankind.

Our quasi-religious commitment to this utopian future came from watching the Star Trek TV shows, but the different series inspired us in different ways. The original “Kirk and Spock” series, which aired in the 1960s, was more of a technological vision — the idea that one day we would zip around the cosmos getting into adventures, as easily as we’d zip around the world in a boat today. But Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s, gave us a different kind of vision. It was a moral future for the human race — a depiction of a better way that we could face the unknown and master our own personal challenges.

There has never been another television show like Star Trek: The Next Generation, and there might never be one again. It is the greatest TV show ever made, not by dint of a difference in degree, but because of a difference in kind. It is a drama of pure optimism. Every other show tries to thrill us by showing us how bad or how ridiculous or how exciting someone else’s world could be; Star Trek: TNG thrills us by showing us how beautiful our own world could become.

For such a show to be put on the air required an incredible confluence of coincidences. For one thing, it was syndicated in its first run, meaning that it was free from constant interference by network executives. The showrunner,1 Michael Piller, also did something highly unusual when he opened the show up to outside script submissions; this allowed in a whole lot of highly innovative episode ideas.

But the real secret sauce of Star Trek: TNG was the creative vision of Star Trek’s original creator, Gene Roddenberry. A lot of people — and even a lot of science fiction writers — assume that even as technology makes us more powerful, human nature will remain basically the same, with all its old petty short-sighted hatreds and jealousies and selfishness and so on. Roddenberry believed otherwise. He famously declared that the people of the future would actually be better people, free from the flaws of his day. And so he mandated that Star Trek: TNG have no internal conflict in its plotlines.

Some of the writers chafed at that constraint. Interpersonal conflict is the bread and butter of drama — and always an easy plot device to fall back on when you need something to go wrong. But because Roddenberry decreed it, the writers of TNG were forced to envision how the ideal human being would deal with various personal and external obstacles. And so every episode gave us a thoughtful, probing exploration of what the ideal human beings — or at least, people much more morally and emotionally advanced than us — would look like.

No character embodied that ideal more than Captain Jean-Luc Picard. It’s not his personal life that’s ideal — he famously puts career over family, leading to a life full of self-doubt and regret — but his approach to the world. Picard is the ultimate Reasonable Man. He will always try to understand the alien before he opens fire. He is a legendary battle commander but would always rather negotiate than fight. He’s not necessarily the kind of man you’d want for a father, but he felt like one anyway. He values all life, and all uniqueness, intrinsically; he is zipping around the galaxy in a starship in order to discover the Universe, and occasionally to save it, but most of all to understand and respect it.

Understanding and respect, in fact, are Picard’s greatest weapons. He is a brilliant man, with many brilliant people under him, and occasionally he uses his intelligence to defeat an external threat. But he’s no swashbuckling space cowboy — more often than not, he succeeds in understanding the threat, and figures out how to help it achieve its goals without sacrificing his own. Picard realizes that the highest application of intelligence is not to thwart your enemies, but to design a world in which you and they can live in mutually beneficial coexistence. 1990s America was a uniquely hopeful and liberal time in the world, and Star Trek’s greatest captain embodied the spirit of that too-brief moment.

The character of Captain Picard was brought to life by the peerless acting skills of Patrick Stewart, who died two days ago at the age of 86. Stewart’s acting career went far beyond Star Trek — he’s widely considered one of the greatest Shakespearean stage actors of his generation, if not of all time, and he played in dozens of films. But the tributes that are flying thick and fast around the world today almost all focus on his role as Captain Picard.

I’m of two minds about this. As a very slightly famous person, I can tell you that public and private personas are very different things — if you meet me in real life, I won’t quite be the character you’ve imagined from my writings. That goes triple for actors, whose job is literally to pretend to be someone else. Patrick Stewart was not Captain Picard, but a man with a life and a personality all his own. He was, by all reports, a good man, well-loved by those who knew him and worked with him, but his strengths and his flaws were very different from those of the man he played on television. To mourn his passing as the passing of Captain Picard is to engage in a parasocial relationship.

And yet, I do. I can’t help it. I never knew Patrick Stewart, but I did know Captain Picard, and the death of the real man who brought that fictional man to life makes me remember what I loved so much about the latter, and there is value in that.

Nor am I alone. Today the internet is flooded with tributes to Picard, praising Stewart’s portrayal as an embodiment of an ideal liberal politics, an exemplary moral figure, and even as a model of masculinity:

The remembrance of Captain Picard comes at a pivotal moment for our species. The advent of artificial intelligence — machines that can out-think us — will naturally cause a shift in what it means to be human. As with the Industrial Revolution and the advent of agriculture, we will have to figure out a new way to live — new lifestyles, new forms of government, new systems of economic production and distribution, new reasons to value ourselves and each other.

There are many reasons that the particular future portrayed in Star Trek — one in which human beings, as they exist today, take the lead in physically exploring the galaxy — will never happen. AI is one more reason. This is in spite of the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably the single best prediction of modern AI ever to appear on the screen. The “engineers” on the Enterprise are clearly vibe-coding and prompting the ship’s computer,2 which is so powerful that it sometimes accidentally creates human-level intelligence as part of a holographic entertainment program.

But in real life, the physical requirements of deep space exploration are such that it will never make sense for human beings to be at the forefront, except potentially as digital uploads. And even if we did go, AI’s superhuman intelligence, data assimilation capacity, and speed would remove most or all of the need for human judgement in the loop. If the Romulans attack us, it will be Claude or GPT who handles them.

But outer space is not our true final frontier. The true space that we, as humans, are exploring is our own set of possibilities. In fact, Q, a whimsical omnipotent trickster-god-being that serves as Picard’s foil throughout the series, says this to Picard in the final episode of the show — see the quote at the top of this post. It is our quest to chart the unknowable possibilities of our own existence.

The ultimate destiny of humankind is a consistent theme of Star Trek: TNG, and the show strongly implies that we’ll eventually ascend to some sort of godlike posthumanity. There are multiple instances of humans or human-like beings turning into some sort of higher cosmic being, and Q himself implies that he’s testing humanity for admission into the realm of the space gods. This is probably where we’re headed in reality — our new AI scientists will help us figure out how to expand our consciousness and merge it with the digital realm, until we become something greater than we can currently imagine.

But before that happens — and perhaps even after it happens — it’s possible to envision a better version of Humanity Classic. It’s possible to imagine that through the right combination of technology, governance, and culture, we can put the lie to the old saw that “human nature never changes”, and become more like the characters in Gene Roddenberry’s universe.

In fact, though the overall picture is murky and the road has been stochastic, there is some evidence that we’ve already been moving in a more humane, rational direction — that Captain Picard is less alien to the human race of 2026 than he would have been to the human race of 1626. We once embraced slavery as a way of life; today we regard it as anathema. We once tortured cats to death in public for entertainment; today that would land you in prison. We are far less murderous than we once were.

It is not clear exactly what led to these improvements. Perhaps with scarcity alleviated — with our bellies full, and tractors instead of slaves — we are naturally gentler and more magnanimous. Perhaps more information has given us more empathy toward people far away. Perhaps the social adaptations needed to handle modern economies — markets, property rights, police, democracy — have tamed and civilized us.

Whatever it was, it offers the hope that we can do more of it — that whatever cosmic ascension we might eventually undertake, human beings as they exist in 2026 are not the best we can do in the current form factor.

I won’t lie. The last quarter century has been brutal to the hopes of those raised on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The promise of a liberal society has not been eliminated, but it has been tarnished by over a decade of social media hatred and rising authoritarianism. Neither greater prosperity nor more information nor giving voice to the voiceless has made our societies more like the United Federation of Planets. Sci-fi marvels are coming to life around us, but every day the people who lead our species seem less like the crew of the Enterprise.

But as the 1990s were not the end of history, neither are the 2020s. Moral progress is not a smooth upward line; there have been reversals before (and there certainly are plenty in the Star Trek timeline). It’s about time to pick ourselves back up and start the journey again. We should all go back and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its silly haircuts and its dated special effects, and remember who we thought we could become.

Farewell to the great Patrick Stewart. And farewell also, Captain Picard. In the greatest trek of all — our search for the possibilities of our better selves — you will always be our Captain.

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1

From the third season onward.

2

This was a lucky accident, since vibe-coding and prompting are easier to portray on screen than writing lines of code.

Paul Krugman

RIP Bill Nordhaus

Paul Krugman
Updated

William Nordhaus

Oh, my. Bill Nordhaus has died. He was a great economist, an inspiring teacher, a wonderful academic citizen — and my first mentor. As an undergrad I took a seminar taught by Bill and Tjalling Koopmans on the economics of exhaustible resources. Bill liked my term paper well enough to hire me as a research assistant on his classic 1973 paper “The Allocation of Energy Resources.” Here’s the front page of that paper; see the note at the bottom;

Bill taught me how to be an economist, how to puzzle out a complex real issue and try to frame a model to make sense of that issue. He also showed me that economics can and should be a mission as well as a job. I’ll write more about his contribution and what it was like to work with him soon, probably after the midterms, when I have time to do it right.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Saturday 31 October 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and at noon home to dinner, where Creed came and dined with me, and after dinner he and I upstairs, and I showed him my velvet cloake and other things of clothes, that I have lately bought, which he likes very well, and I took his opinion as to some things of clothes, which I purpose to wear, being resolved to go a little handsomer than I have hitherto.

Thence to the office; where busy till night, and then to prepare my monthly account, about which I staid till 10 or 11 o’clock at night, and to my great sorrow find myself 43l. worse than I was the last month, which was then 760l., and now it is but 717l.. But it hath chiefly arisen from my layings-out in clothes for myself and wife; viz., for her about 12l., and for myself 55l., or thereabouts; having made myself a velvet cloake, two new cloth suits, black, plain both; a new shagg gowne, trimmed with gold buttons and twist, with a new hat, and, silk tops for my legs, and many other things, being resolved henceforward to go like myself. And also two perriwiggs, one whereof costs me 3l., and the other 40s. — I have worn neither yet, but will begin next week, God willing. So that I hope I shall not need now to lay out more money a great while, I having laid out in clothes for myself and wife, and for her closett and other things without, these two months, this and the last, besides household expenses of victuals, &c., above 110l.. But I hope I shall with more comfort labour to get more, and with better successe than when, for want of clothes, I was forced to sneake like a beggar. Having done this I went home, and after supper to bed, my mind being eased in knowing my condition, though troubled to think that I have been forced to spend so much.

Thus I end this month worth 717l., or thereabouts, with a good deal of good goods more than I had, and a great deal of new and good clothes.

My greatest trouble and my wife’s is our family, mighty out of order by this fellow Will’s corrupting the mayds by his idle talke and carriage, which we are going to remove by hastening him out of the house, which his uncle Blackburne is upon doing, and I am to give him 20l. per annum toward his maintenance.

The Queene continues lightheaded, but in hopes to recover.

The plague is much in Amsterdam, and we in fears of it here, which God defend.1

The Turke goes on mightily in the Emperor’s dominions, and the Princes cannot agree among themselves how to go against him.

Myself in pretty good health now, after being ill this month for a week together, but cannot yet come to … [shit – L&M] well, being so costive, but for this month almost I have not had a good natural stool, but to this hour am forced to take physic every night, which brings me neither but one stool, and that in the morning as soon as I am up, all the rest of the day very costive.

My father has been very ill in the country, but I hope better again now.

I am lately come to a conclusion with Tom Trice to pay him 100l., which is a great deale of money, but I hope it will save a great deal more.

But thus everything lessens, which I have and am like to have, and therefore I must look about me to get something more than just my salary, or else I may resolve to live well and die a beggar.

Footnotes

Read the annotations

Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

Once again, NASA is asking for ideas to rescue Hubble from certain death

Stephen Clark
Updated

The Hubble Space Telescope still shines in the eyes of astronomers after 36 years in orbit, but it is not as nimble as it once was. Left alone, the observatory will plunge back into the atmosphere in the early-to-mid-2030s, closing the book on one of the most famous scientific instruments of the century.

NASA last raised the orbit of Hubble in 2002, when the Space Shuttle Columbia visited the observatory for a servicing mission. The final shuttle servicing flight in 2009 did not reboost the telescope's orbit, and with the retirement of the shuttle fleet two years later, Hubble has steadily lost altitude with no way to stave off eventual destruction.

The space agency released a Request For Information (RFI) on Thursday asking commercial companies for ideas on how to reboost, service, or a controlled disposal of Hubble. Responses are due November 30. Specifically, NASA is looking for information about companies' current and near-term capabilities for capturing Hubble and boosting it to an altitude of at least 373 miles (600 km), enhancing the telescope's performance, or guiding Hubble to a controlled reentry.

Read full article

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The Honest Broker

My 10 Rules for Public Speaking

Ted Gioia
Updated

I learned this craft unwillingly, at least at first—and it was all because of music.

It started at age 13, when I pestered my parents to buy me a record player. There was a sweet little model at nearby Clark’s Drugstore. My highest life goal at the time was to place the turntable near my bed and listen to my favorite songs over and over again.

At first, my parents said no. But I didn’t give up. My mother soon grasped how much I wanted this hi-fi and, shrewdly seizing her leverage, finally agreed that it could be mine—but on one condition. I had to enter a local public speaking contest for high school students.

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This was an unsettling proposition. I had no experience in public speaking, and I was just a 9th grader, and one of the youngest in my class—how could I compete with 17 and 18 year olds on an equal footing? I considered saying no, but I desperately wanted that record player.

So I worked hard on my speech, and when the dreaded day arrived, I stood up in front of a roomful of grownups, and gave my little talk. To my surprise, I took home the prize—and, a few days later, my first turntable. I kept it all the way through college.

My first record player—but I needed to give a speech to get it

Over the next few years, I entered—and won—a few more speech competitions. And then I was confronted with real life public speaking demands. I won a college scholarship from a business group, but to collect the money I had to talk to a huge auditorium full of people at their annual convention. I walked up on stage and gave a joke-filled speech that was almost a comedy monologue. It had an amazing effect—once again, with an audience where everyone was more than twice my age. I was such a hit that, over the next 24 hours, I got numerous requests for a copy of my speech.

But the reality was that there was no copy. At this stage, I was already speaking without a prepared text—which seemed like the jazzy way to do things. I also found it easier to riff off the energy in the room rather than memorize a talk. That’s still how I operate.

From that moment onward, my life seemed to force me into public speaking at every turn. I got another scholarship to study overseas from the Rotary Foundation, but one of the conditions was that I would give talks at lunches and dinners for Rotarians. I did dozens of these in the US and England, and soon learned what was expected of an after dinner speaker.

The Rotary Foundation paid for my overseas education, but I had to talk at dozens of Rotary lunches and dinners

The demands got even greater after I finished Stanford Business School, when I was thrust into giving presentations to high-powered CEOs who would interrupt and cut you to pieces at the slightest sign of weakness. Again and again, I was the youngest person in the room, but had to take charge of the situation.

By the time I left those business projects behind to lecture on jazz at Stanford, I was fearless in front of an audience. I was just in my mid-20s, but had already survived hundreds of experiences dealing with every kind of audience, including some very hostile ones. Lecturing to college students was easy as pie compared to situations I’d been through. Even better, my focus on spontaneity meant I could speak on a wide range of topics with very little advance warning or preparation.

In time, I was enlisted to train others in public speaking. But that was trickier.  What exactly did I do in front of an audience? And could I teach it?

“The three best kinds of speakers to study are comedians, preachers, and TV wrestlers. Politicians are surprisingly bad at this kind of stuff.”

Eventually I jotted down some rules. Many of them violated accepted public speaking techniques, but that didn’t bother me. You often have more impact by going against the grain. And these rules had proven their value to me over and over again, even in difficult situations where much was at stake.

For your possible benefit, I’ve listed ten of them below. But I must warn you that I have a tendency to do strange things in front of an audience. So you will inevitably find that a few of these rules run counter to conventional wisdom.

Ted’s 10 Rules for Public Speaking

(1) The Podium is Death.

I may start my talk at the podium, but I get away from it at the first opportunity. I see others who hold on to the lectern for dear life, almost as if they’re rodeo cowboys on a bucking bronco. But unless you are a father confessor, you shouldn’t keep a big wooden slab between you and your listener.

Speaking is more than just words. Your movements and physical location reinforce the message you’re delivering, or undermine it if you don’t do it right. When you do stand still—as you will from time to time—it creates high drama, and focuses everyone’s attention on what you are saying. And when you move, the energy moves with you. Which leads to my second tip . . .

(2) Invade the Audience’s Space.

At a key juncture in your talk, actually move into the audience. This is easiest to do if you are off the stage and on the same level as your listeners. There will usually be a middle aisle in the room, and when you start walking up it you will feel the energy rising all around you.

Humans are mammals and always pay closest attention when others invade their space. At that juncture you will have everyone intensely focused on your presence and totally aware of everything you say—so you only do this at the most significant moment or moments in your talk.

(3) Embrace Spontaneity—Even (or Especially) When It Seems Risky.

I perhaps take this to an extreme—the last time I used a script was in high school. I do have an outline, but I try to avoid looking at it while I am in front of an audience. So it’s really just an outline in my head. And I will depart from it at a moment’s notice, if it feels right.

Before important talks, I will rehearse a few times—but every rehearsal ends up sounding very different. That’s a good sign, and what I want. So the outline is really more for me to grasp the various ways a talk might evolve when I’m actually in front of the audience.

Not everyone is comfortable doing things like this, but even if you want to take fewer chances, your talk must still feel spontaneous and in-the-moment. The audience wants that. They are energized by something that is happening right now and in this place. They will tune out the moment it sounds like you’re working through your pre-set talking points. Even if you require careful scripting and rehearsal, you still should strive for a feeling of spontaneity when you’re actually facing your listeners.

(4) Remember That the Audience Always Wants You to Succeed:

I’ve never met anyone who went to an event hoping to be bored and disappointed. The audience really, really wants you to succeed, and if you give them even the slightest chance at having a good time, they will cheer you on. 

Just understanding this takes away much of the fear of public speaking. Even better, this desire for success is contagious—and in both directions: When you radiate enjoyment, the audience feels it too. When the audience is having a good time, you do as well.

That’s a virtuous circle, and you want you get into it as soon as possible. You should try to find a way of signalling within your first minute in front of an audience that everyone will have a good time today. Often you will even see relief in their faces at the moment when they realize that your talk won’t be a punishment or chastisement. They will be grateful—and you will be too.

(5) Don’t Be Afraid of Humor, or Even Silly Jokes.

At a very early stage, back when I was still a teen, I realized that I had won several speaking contests, but I was still afraid to tell a joke to a large audience, especially of adults. I fretted that they wouldn’t laugh, and I would feel stupid or awkward. To overcome this, I forced myself to tell jokes every time I spoke to a sizable group. Not only did I overcome my fear, but I learned how powerful humor is. It wins the audience’s love and support. The joke can even be second-rate, but they will still appreciate that you cared enough about their entertainment to tell it.

I once took an accounting course from Charles Horngren, who would periodically interrupt his dense lectures on cash flow statements and accelerated depreciation to tell a joke. The jokes weren’t always funny, but we welcomed and applauded them, if only because they showed how much he cared about our mood and engagement.

I’ve met people who believe they are above all this. It’s not just the fear of telling a joke to a huge audience, it’s also a fear that their dignity might somehow be compromised. Don’t believe that for one second. Joking is no joke—even for serious speakers it is one of the most powerful tools in the whole elocutionary arsenal.

(6) You really don’t need slides, and if you insist on using them you must deal with the consequences.

I once had to give a presentation as part of a class assignment at business school, and I was the only student who did it without slides. At that point, I was very hostile to the notion of turning my talks into slide shows. Okay, I later made my peace with slides—you really have no choice in many instances. But if you’re bringing a slide deck to the gathering, the audience will never be sure whether they ought to pay attention to you or to the slide.

It’s even worse when you hand out hard copies of the slides to the audience members before your talk. If you do that, you will probably lose everybody’s attention. You’ll find yourself talking to a distracted group paging back and forth in the deck, and ignoring most of what you have to say.

So never give out the hard copies until after you’re done speaking. And when you do talk with slides, try to signal to the audience when they should look at the screen, and when they should pay attention to you. Sometimes you need to point directly at the screen with a thrust out index finger, while at other junctures you should dramatically strut away from the screen in a way that brings attention back to you. In these settings, you’re a conductor, but it’s the focal point of the listener that you’re conducting.

My gestures are sometimes extravagant, but I view speaking as a kind of conducting

Finally, if you decide to throw out all the slides, and just speak from the heart (coherently, of course), you have my complete support. I note that if you buy a book of the 100 greatest speeches of all time, you will discover that none of them were accompanied by a slide presentation. Four score and seven years ago, as you see from this chart. . . .

(7) Tap into Your Own Craziness.

Every one of us is an odd duck—you, me, and everybody else in the pond. We work hard to hide our peculiarities and nonconforming behavior patterns, especially in front of strangers. I’m now going to tell you to do the opposite.

You can learn from jazz musicians in that way—they have fewer inhibitions than most, and will do things on stage the rest of us would never consider. Watch Thelonious Monk get up from the piano to dance. Or Miles Davis turn his back on the audience. Or Sun Ra wearing his Afrofuturist garb as if he just got off a spaceship. Or Dexter Gordon doing that bizarre thing holding his sax sideways like it’s a saint’s relic.

The stranger they are, the more we love them. Public speaking is like that too. If you have quirks and eccentricities, let them rip. The audience will remember you for years to come. And, believe it or not, they will remember what you said too.

(8) Don’t Be Shy About Giving Your Roadmap to the Audience.

When you go on a trip, you want frequent updates on your progress—that’s why the map apps give you so much information. Audiences at a talk are no different, so feel free to give them explicit feedback along the way.

If you have something you want them to take very seriously, just tell it to them straight: “I want you to pay close attention to what I’m going to say next.” If you think they are taking things too seriously, you can say: “Why is everybody looking so glum? Sit back, relax, and let’s have a good time today.” If you are entering the final stretch of your talk, you can actually say: “We just have a few more minutes together today, so let’s make sure we make the most of it.” Before your last point, you can actually say: “This is the last point I’m going to make today.” Etc. etc.

These may sound like throwaway lines, but they’re actually key parts of your talk. Listeners appreciate the guidance, which is useful in itself. But they will also be more engaged and attentive, which is another positive. But most important of all, they feel like they are working in tandem with you, and this makes them far more committed to the entire experience and its outcomes.

(9) Pay attention to other speakers, and steal all their best techniques.

Whenever I see a skilled public speaker, I pay attention to every word, gesture, and nuance. And if something works, I start using it myself. I had a friend who employed a bizarre gesture whenever he made an important point in front of an audience—he would raise his right hand up above his head, and when he got to the most important words in his talk, he would point emphatically with his right index finger down at the ground in front of him. I have no idea what this gesture was supposed to indicate, but it had an amazing impact on the audience. It was like the gates of hell were about to open up in front of the podium. I started using it myself, and it’s riveting, especially if your downward hand thrusts are in rhythm with your words. Yeah, it sounds goofy, but it works.

I heard another speaker who would wait until after he had made a very important point, then he would pause, and after a few seconds would say quietly: “Do you see what I’m saying?” or sometimes just mouth one syllable: “See?” It was almost a whisper when he said it. I couldn’t believe how much power he extracted from that one word: “See?”

And I have numerous other devices of this sort—specific phrases that engage a listeners, timing effects, odd gestures, facial expressions. By the way, the three best kinds of speakers to study are comedians, preachers, and TV wrestlers. Politicians are surprisingly bad at this kind of stuff.

(10) Be a Rock Star and Savor the Moment.

The audience will feed off your enjoyment. And don’t tell me that it’s impossible to have fun in such a stressful situation. Every last one of us wants to be heard and acknowledged, and you will never find any situation that delivers those goods in more abundance than public speaking. It’s almost as exciting as playing music on stage—in fact, the adrenaline rush feels almost the same in both instances.

So just as you are about to begin your talk, tell yourself: I’m a Rock Star and I Totally Rock! And it’s not a lie—for the next few minutes, that will be exactly what you will experience.

Weather West

As unusual low-latitude storm approaches SoCal and threatens serious Four Corners flood risk once again, record-warm and record-high ocean conditions persist along CA coast amid still-strengthening El Niño

Daniel Swain
Updated

The ocean along the California coast is now record warm, and literally reaching new heights It has been a wild week along the California coast, and not in a good way. Ocean temperatures have now reached record highs along the entire California coast (and on both sides of the Baja California peninsula, for that matter) […]

The post As unusual low-latitude storm approaches SoCal and threatens serious Four Corners flood risk once again, record-warm and record-high ocean conditions persist along CA coast amid still-strengthening El Niño first appeared on Weather West.

California
Slashdot
The MIT Tech
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 10/31/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Ohio’s Kroger gets $3 million ‘MAHA’ grant. Critics call it taxpayer-funded marketing.
The efficiency of information gain by natural selection
A New Kind of Chemistry
The phantom lighthouse: new research explains one of Australia’s strangest illusions
AI Generated Content and the Identification of Features in Time Series Data
Scientific Reports on hold in PubMed while NLM reevaluates journal
Pork Futures: How should we save our swine?
Congo Ebola outbreak kills more than 5,000

Other:

Please Let the Internet Die
Forget Banning Stock Trades. A Democratic Majority Must Tackle All Corruption.
Former Patient Files Class-Action Lawsuit Against Senator Marshall
Searching for Jobs, Gen Z Feels Like It’s Staring Into ‘the Void’
DoorDash’s $17B Acquisition of Instacart Points to a World Without Employees
George Pelecanos Shows Off His D.C. Roots Yet Again
Ask A D.C. Native: I’m an artist. Should I leave D.C. to make it big?
RFK Jr. may hate vaccines, but he loves mystery shots
Nearly half of people who applied for shelter at this D.C. homeless family crisis center were denied
Mark Ein closes in on control of Rock Creek Tennis Center, home of DC Open
Democrats Have a Bogeyman in Musk. They’re Hardly Using Him.
Agentic AI is myth set in motion
After decades of boycotts, Palestinian citizens of Israel turned out to vote. It could shape what comes next
‘Amateur morons’: Flávio Bolsonaro’s short-lived ‘president-elect’ claim met with mockery
Federal judge signals she may halt construction on Trump’s arch
The Supreme Court’s Gutting of the Voting Rights Act is Mobilizing Black Voters. Look at Alabama.
We polled Kansas. Democrats wanted to talk. Republicans, not so much.
Stephen Miller Messed with Texas
No one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught me that he was wrong.
How Republican lie that Abdul El-Sayed ‘publicly supported’ Muslim Brotherhood started with Laura Loomer
Cabinet Officials on the Campaign Trail? Ethics Experts Say Some Are Breaking the Law.
Let’s Talk About Alaska
Mike Rogers’s Wife Runs a Consultancy That Sells Government Access
A very abbreviated list of a few corruption scandals from the first half of Trump’s second term
Instagram shut down a No Kings account. Now Democrats want answers from Mark Zuckerberg.
U.S. to Send Dozens Back to Afghanistan, Despite Risk of Persecution
Trump Rages as Leaks Show Aides Feeding Him Midterm Hopium
D.C. and Virginia sue to block Trump’s proposed triumphal arch
2028 Won’t Be the 2020 Ideas Primary Again

Marginal Revolution

William Nordhaus, RIP

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Here is notice from Yale, and from Paul Krugman, he was one of the true greats.  For the pointer I thank several MR readers.

The post William Nordhaus, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Aviationist
Marginal Revolution

And so it begins…

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Researchers, I just uploaded a prominent QJE paper on climate change economics to @RefineDotInk and I loaded my critique of the paper. I asked the AI to offer an impartial verdict. I will make this report public. A new journal could collect these into “Special Issues”.

That is from Matthew E. Kahn.

The post And so it begins… appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Map Room

Review: Mapping the Mountains

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
I spent my youth and twenties hiking the Canadian Rockies as much as I could, always with topo maps in hand. So a book like Mapping the Mountains by Andrew Davies (Uitgeverij Moving Mountains, 2026) holds considerable… More
Letters from an American

October 30, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Not much from me tonight, but I do want to call out the political signs reading “Stop Fraud: Vote Republican” I saw today as I left Maine. They seemed especially audacious in light of today’s news from Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times that last summer the Department of Homeland Security paid more than $495 million for a 1,600-bed prison the state of Minnesota declined to purchase a year ago for the asking price of $75 million—or even “a fraction of that price.”

They also seem to contradict the report yesterday from Wendy Siegelman of NewsTRACS that Trump Media & Technology Group received $350,000 for running ads on Trump’s social media site for this summer’s Freedom 250 events. Freedom 250 was the group Trump backed in place of the congressionally-approved nonpartisan America 250 organization designed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Trump owns 41% of Trump Media & Technology Group.

Perhaps Republicans are hoping to attract low-engagement voters who don’t pay much attention to politics. According to G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, those voters preferred Trump to Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris by 13 points in 2024. Now, though, they are not a good bet for the Republicans, Morris notes. He explains that they have swung away from Trump by 15 points and now prefer Democratic congressional candidates by 2 points.

Those voters might not be highly engaged in politics in general, but they cannot miss the country’s rising prices, especially the cost of gasoline and diesel—and the food delivered by vehicles that use them—resulting from Trump’s war on Iran. Bloomberg reported today that almost half of Americans’ spending now goes toward food and housing, the highest percentage in 15 years.

Rising costs contrast painfully with reports from today that those higher prices are sending oil company profits skyrocketing. Steve Kopack of NBC News reported today that oil giant BP’s profits are at an 18-year-high and Chevron’s earnings are up more than 180% from a year earlier.

On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump asked oil executives to donate a billion dollars to his campaign, calling it a “deal” considering how much money they would make from the regulatory cuts and new permits Trump promised. That investment seems to have paid off. At a rally on October 24, Trump commented to attendees, “I wonder if I should say this,” then went on to say that “our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.” He continued: “My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher. But what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before.” He finished: “I don’t give a damn: I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune.”

But most Americans are not part of that “we,” and they are angry not only at the soaring profits of oil companies while they pay higher prices, but also at the cuts to Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, medical and scientific research, and so on at the same time that the administration is pouring lives and taxpayer money into Trump’s war of choice on Iran.

On Wednesday, Ben Finley and Konstantin Toropin of the Associated Press reported that the Pentagon has provided a new estimate of the cost of the war to the Pentagon: $47.1 billion. That number does not include the damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East, which Anika Arora Seth, John West, Shelby Holliday, and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today could cost as much as $15 billion. Graphics from that story, by Carl Churchill and Katherine Chui, illustrate the extent of the damage.

On Wednesday, Summer Said, Shelby Holliday, Benoit Faucon, and Anat Peled of the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials have warned Gulf Arab countries to prepare for a renewal of U.S. strikes on Iran as early as November 4.

Trump has been on the road for the midterms, convinced that his rallies will help Republican candidates struggling against surging Democratic opponents. But the rallies have drawn far fewer people than Trump likes, and his wandering monologues about how great the economy is, how he aced a cognitive test, how wonderful his ballroom will be, and how much he admires the anatomy of a certain male Republican candidate, along with his deep unpopularity, have made even allies distance themselves from him.

When Trump cancelled rallies scheduled for this weekend in Kansas and Iowa in favor of webcasts, one top Republican official told Kevin Liptak, Kaitlan Collins, Adam Cancryn, and Alayna Treene of CNN: “Thank God. He hasn’t moved the needle anywhere.” Officials hoped he would stay more focused in what they called “telerallies.”

But, the CNN journalists report, Trump fumed at media coverage of the cancellations and ordered the rallies to be reinstated. So he will be in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday, trying to sell voters on his message.

That may not be an easy sell. An image circulating on Bluesky shows a Maine “Stop Fraud: Vote Republican” sign. Next to it, a handmade blue sign with a big white arrow pointing to it reads: “HILARIOUS.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/30/us/minnesota-prison-homeland-security.html

https://newstracs.com/trump-media-will-earn-350k-for-ads-by-freedom-250-linked-to-national-park-service/2026/10/29/

Strength In Numbers
Low-engagement voters are swinging hard toward Democrats
Democrats are getting a lot of support from people who don’t usually vote…
Read more
a day ago · 175 likes · 5 comments · G. Elliott Morris

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-30/housing-food-costs-make-up-half-of-americans-spending-most-in-15-years

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/exxonmobil-chevron-profits-trump-high-oil-prices-rcna606524

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-warns-gulf-of-possible-short-intense-renewal-of-iran-war-after-midterms-cd1a55e1

https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-costs-trump-congress-81d781a54149709d1ca6754d2aab78bc

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-war-us-bases-damage-88db3224

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/30/politics/trump-rally-cancellation-midterms

Bluesky:

activatemaine.bsky.social/post/3mynrcgxgbs2t

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Letters from an American

Free and Fair Elections

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

To read this letter, click here:

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The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

Austin Lumbard is just making shit up

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

So if you have the good fortune of living in the delightfully cool and comfortable town of Tustin, odds are fairly high you’ve received this mailer over the past few days. It’s via the AI slop factory of Austin Lumbard, Tustin’s Trump-voting Republican mayor …

And, well, it’s weird, because DEMOCRATS FOR LUMBARD features (wait for it) literally nary a single Democrat for Lumbard. Hell, look at the brochure. Right there. Above this paragraph. Do you see a name listed, besides (cough) Austin Lumbard (a registered Republican and MAGA sympathizer, to be clear)? Do you spot a Democrat for Lumbard alongside DEMOCRATS FOR LUMBARD? Like, a single Democrat?

And do you know any Democrats who’d allign with this sort of thinking …

Truth be told, the whole thing is a hoax, and also horribly unbecoming of a small-town mayor who (beyond anything else) needs to be honest and direct with his constituents. Yesterday, on his Facebook page, Tustin City Council member Lee Fink rightly teed off …

I just, truly, hate this shit. It’s slimy and petty and unbecoming, and yet another reason to back Dr. Letitia Clark, the Democrat and former Tustin mayor, who offered up this fantastic Q&A a month back. Clark has quickly emerged as one of my favorite local political figures. She clearly loves her city, and wants to represent all its inhabitants—politics be damned.

Alas, she’ll need to survive the dishonesty of a foe who should know better.

Such is 2026.

PS: I worked on the brochure. No charge …

The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

A question for all the Orange County Republicans: Y’all cool with this?

Jeff Pearlman
Updated
Jacob Bogage: Journalist.

There is a journalist named Jacob Bogage. He is the White House correspondent for Reuters and a widely respected reporter.

For most people in the business of media and/or politics, there are the attributes that matter. Strong writer. Excellent interviewer. Reports his ass off. That’s what we see in Jacob Bogage, because his reputation is that of an all-star. Seriously, the dude has big-time credentials, and lives up to the billing.

Two days ago, however, Bogage committed a horrible crime. An unspeakable crime. A crime that, in 2026, makes him a traitor and an American villain. Namely, he asked Donald Trump why he wasn’t planning on traveling to Kansas.

Gasp!

Here is what the (grr) sitting United States president said in response …

Now, imagine for a moment you’re Jacob Bogage’s wife. His parents. His grandparents. His aunt and uncle. His friends. Imagine you’re them, watching the president of the United States fat shame your loved one. Imagine seeing it happen to someone who (like all of us) probably has his own insecurities. Imaging watching it again and again and again and again, mouth agape, fists clenched, heart broken.

Imagine it.

And, truly, I want to ask every Republican Orange County office seeker a simple question: Y’all really voted for this?

I’m being serious. Will O’Neill, cowardly head of the OC GOP—you cool with this bruh? Will, do you know anyone overweight? Anyone who has struggled with dropping some pounds?

What about you, Lisa Davis? You’re the president of the Capo Unified School Board. You rocked a MAGA cap. How does this make you feel? You’ve spoken out against bullying plenty of times. Obviously, “Grab ‘em by the pussy” wasn’t enough for you. Obviously mocking the disabled reporter wasn’t enough for you. Obviously dismissing POWs for being captured (“My heroes weren’t captured”) wasn’t enough for you. So how about this? How about the fat shaming?

I’m asking all y’all. Ken Calvert? Laurie Davies? Diane Dixon? Jennifer Adnams? Howard Hart? Gracey Van Der Mark? Wendy Bucknum?

Do any of you guys have anything to say about the meanness?

Any of you?

•••

Answer: Of course you don’t. You’re cowards and you’re soft.

But here’s what I’d like to say, on behalf of Jacob Bogage, to Donald Trump: First, fuck you. Fuck your cruelty, fuck your meanness, fuck your callousness. You are an absolute piece of shit, and I hope you die on the toilet while eating your third Whopper. I hope someone captures a photo of that moment, and I hope the photo goes viral, and I hope your epitaph reads, ASSHOLE WHO NOT A SINGLE PERSON LIKED DIED SHITTING HIMSELF WHILE GRIPPING A WHOPPER.

You are a worthless man, and you will be remembered for that worthlessness.

Also, not for nothing—look in the mirror and have some self-awareness. You, too, are no waif. You spray paint your skin orange. Your hands appear to be falling off. You paid a porn star hush money because you fucked her while your wife was home with your infant child. Your diaper sags. You smell of rot and spoiled ham.

You are the president of the United States.

And, amazingly, you are nothing.

National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABNT20 KNHC 011118
TWOAT

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
700 AM EST Sun Nov 1 2026

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.

$$
Forecaster Kelly


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABPZ20 KNHC 011118
TWOEP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
400 AM PST Sun Nov 1 2026

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Well Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands:
A broad area of low pressure is forecast to develop well to the
southeast of the Hawaiian Islands in a couple of days. Thereafter,
environmental conditions appear generally favorable for gradual
development of this system, and a tropical depression could form by
the middle to end of the week as it moves westward to
west-northwestward over the Central Pacific basin.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...50 percent.

$$
Forecaster Kelly


Market Design

Sports, ethnicity, and the urban geography of basketball

Al Roth
Updated

 I'm just back from an unexpectedly grueling trip, and hope to resume semi-daily blogging.  This story caught my eye: basketball has been an inner city game in the U.S., in part because basketball courts can be set up very inexpensively in urban parks, and not so expensively in gyms.  So inner city kids are disproportionately represented among the most talented players.  But who those kids are has changed over time.

The WSJ has the story: 

When Jews Ruled the Basketball Court.  Six players on the New York Knicks’ inaugural roster were Jewish.  By Michael Freund 

 "It was Nov. 1, 1946, and Ossie Schectman of the New York Knicks took a bounce pass and scored on a two-handed underhand layup. Schectman, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had just scored the first basket in NBA history.

...

"Six members of the Knicks’ original roster, including Schectman, were Jewish. That was no coincidence. For much of the early 20th century, basketball was widely regarded as a Jewish game.

"The reason can be traced to the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Philadelphia. Millions of Jews arrived from Eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s, often settling in neighborhoods with little open space and scant money to spend on recreation. Baseball required a field and equipment. Basketball needed little more than a ball, a hoop and a schoolyard. "

Marginal Revolution

Saturday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Organizing Intelligence.

2. World Bank African urbanization report.  Building out African cities in a decent way could end up being the task of our coming era.

3. Summary of The Commanding Heights.

4. “Meanwhile in Armenia…”

5. “Female psychopathology has worsened despite increased resources and opportunities, suggesting it does not entirely reflect absolute deprivation, but rather, is a competitive adaptation activated by heightened social competition.”

6. One account of what is going on in Poland.  I am not endorsing that (or any other) interpretation, but if nothing else it shows you how interpretation of these events can make your head spin.  Grok has a simpler answer, again not endorsing.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
Hacker News
City Observatory

Risky business: How IBR’s contracting will produce billions in added costs

Joe Cortright
Updated

Bad as the bad news is on the high cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, it’s only going to get worse as the two state DOT’s move forward toward actual construction.  Everything about this project’s bidding and contracting–the procurement process–virtually guarantees costs will only go up from here.  

Only one bidder:  First and worst, there’s only one qualified bidder, a three-firm consortium led by Kiewit.  This is a classic monopoly problem.  Knowing you’re the only bidder lets you charge whatever you want. A lack of competition has been shown to be a major driver of excessive highway construction costs.

A bidder with a bad track record.  Not only that, but this bidder has a terrible track record with bridge construction in Portland.  Kiewit is the main contractor on the I-205 Abernethy Bridge, which is years late, and has ended up costing three and a half times more than ODOT estimated when it was approved.  ODOT is actively involved in an unresolved  contract dispute with Kiewit over this bridge.

Not even bidding on price.  And it gets worse:  The IBR is not even asking Kiewit to bid on price:  Instead, they’re using a new “progressive-design-build” approach, in which the DOTs choose the contractor based on qualifications (not price), and let them design the project–and we’ll only find out the price after a year or more of design work.

Painting themselves into a corner.  And finally, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have put themselves in a terrible bargaining position, signaling their desperation to get the project started as soon as possible.  Kiewit knows it has them over a barrel.

And here’s the kicker:  Kiewet just got fired from another progressive-design-build contract for a giant bridge–replacing Baltimore’s damaged Key Bridge–because Maryland’s Department of Transportation thought Kiewit’s maximum price–which was going to be paid almost entirely by insurance companies and the federal government–was $9 billion, almost double what the state thought was reasonable.

 

So far, without spending a dime on construction or moving a shovelful of dirt, the cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project (IBR) has tripled from $4.8 billion in 2020 to an estimated $15 billion now.  Construction hasn’t started yet, but it’s already its the single most expensive highway project in the United States on a per-mile basis.

But by far, the biggest risk lies ahead: once construction starts, risks escalate, magnified by the supersized project, the fact that there’s only one company bidding for the project, that company has a lousy track record, and the two state DOTs have shown little ability to negotiate or manage giant construction projects. IBR is also  using a contracting arrangement called “progressive design build” in which in will select a contractor, and then only later negotiate the actual price of the bridge.  Experience with Kiewit in Oregon and nationally, and with “progressive design build” should be setting off budget alarms.

There’s only one bidder to build the IBR:  Kiewit

In July, ODOT and WSDOT got federal approval of a “Record of Decision” for the IBR.  In August, they released a “Request for Qualifications” to identify construction firms that could actually build the bridge.  On October 6, 2026, the Washington State Department of Transportation published a list of the firms who responded to the request for qualifications to build in the Interstate Bridge Replacement.  Here is the full list:

The proposer is a joint venture called “Columbia River Constructors” consisting of three firms, led by Kiewit Infrastructure West Co (Kiewit) –one of the nation’s largest construction firms.  It has two smaller partners, Guy F. Atkinson Construction, LLC; and Traylor Bros. Inc.  No other firms or joint ventures even submitted qualifications to undertake the project.

Getting multiple bidders for any project–whether it’s a kitchen remodel or a multi-billion dollar bridge–is the most basic step to ensure that the buyer is getting a fair deal.  At this point, the Kiewit-led team knows that it is Oregon and Washington’s only option.  This gives them enormous bargaining power.  And careful studies of highway spending patterns confirm this basic truth:  the fewer bidders you get for a project, the higher its price.  The nation’s leading expert on highway procurement costs, Yale’s Zach Liscow, reports that having one fewer  bidder on a typical road project was associated with about 8 percent higher costs.

Liscow testified to the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Transportation Oversight Committee meeting in June:

“The role of competition as a cost driver is evident. Bidders know the identity and capacity of their competition at the time of bid-letting. DOTs do very little bidder outreach and there are fewer construction firms in most states than there were ten years ago.”

Trade publication Construction Briefing summarized Liscow’s research:

In a detailed report comprising a survey of DOT staff from all 50 states, a study of actual project costs, an investigation into procurement practices in each state, and an analysis into the work of individual engineers at one major DOT, Liscow and his team built up a compelling picture exposing the hidden costs to taxpayers associated with dwindling levels of competition in the industry and poorly staffed state transport departments.  [Liscow] one fewer bidder on a project was associated with 8.3% higher costs per mile of road

Strike one:  Only one bidder is a recipe for high costs and cost escalation.

 

Kiewit has a record of cost overruns

So what does Oregon’s experience with Kiewit tell us about ODOT’s ability to work with the company to get projects done on time and under budget.  Here, there’s even more bad news. Kiewit is currently in a contract dispute with the Oregon Department of Transportation over the I-205 Abernethy Bridge, a project which has tripled in price from ODOT’s original “Cost to Complete” report, and increased by more than $385 million since ODOT awarded the initial contract to Kiewit.  The project is both behind schedule and over budget.  And the scale of the Abernethy Bridge project is about a tenth the scale of the IBR project.

Kiewit has also gotten low marks in ODOT’s contractor rating system.  ODOT annually reviews contractors for performance.  According to ODOT reports obtained by the Portland Daily Journal of Commerce under Oregon public records laws, Kiewit has received consistently negative evaluations for safety, structural workmanship and environmental violations.   The Daily Journal of Commerce wrote:

Construction giant Kiewit scored negative marks on four consecutive annual ODOT evaluations dating to the beginning of work in 2022-23.  Its most recent score for work in 2025-26 was its worst yet: a -36.  . . . The evaluation uses a baseline of zero.  ODOT noted major structural workmanship issues and environmental violations.

Kiewit is no stranger to costly bridge projects.  Kiewit was selected a little over a year ago to be the design-builder of the proposed Hood River Bridge.  That project has experienced enormous cost increases, doubling in price in 2024, to more than $1.2 billion due to inflation, and the significant under estimates of the cost of drilled shafts to support the new bridge.

It’s pretty standard to ask for references, and even more common not to give more business to a contractor whom you’ve consistently determined to have sub-par performance, and who blew through both the budget and the schedule for a recent construction project (and with whom you are still involved in dispute resolution, and potential litigation).  But even though ODOT is mired in disputes with Kiewit on the largest contract the agency has ever executed, it’s poised to commit to a vastly larger and riskier project.

Strike two:  Kiewit has shown it’s a bad contractor, and  it will blow through agreed-upon budgets.

Kiewit isn’t even offering a bid based on price

At this point, you might be asking, “How much is Kiewit and its partners proposing as the bid price for the Interstate Bridge Project?”  Actually, they haven’t said–and ODOT and WSDOT aren’t asking–and won’t ask for some time yet.  The IBR is using something called a “Progressive Design Build”  (PDB) contracting process. The key element of progressive design build is that you choose a contractor first, and then only later, settle on a price for the project.  As you can imagine, this creates a great deal of uncertainty about how much a project will actually cost.

This PDB approach differs dramatically from traditional public contracting.  Most people  think of public contracting as having the state (or its engineers) design a highway or bridge, prepare the plans, and then ask for dollar bids from potential builders; and generally awarding the project to the bidder who offers the lowest price.  In more recent years, some states have shifted to what are called “design-buiid” contracts, where, the state asks bidders to both draw up the plans for the project, and propose a price.  The idea behind design-build is that if the contractor has some flexibility to vary or fine-tune design, they can look for ways to reduce costs.  In theory, the design-builder is incentivized to find ways to lower public costs as a way to win a contract, and the state harnesses the expertise of the private builders.  In exchange, design-build is supposed to shift financial responsibility for design decisions to the bidding firm (if their innovative changes don’t work or don’t save money, the contractor, not the state, bears the cost).  While contractors understandably like the flexibility, they don’t like having to commit to added costs.  In recent years, several states have been trying a third approach, which is called  “progressive design build.”  Neither Oregon nor Washington has much experience with Progressive Design Build.  PDB has never been used on a major highway project in Oregon.

The progressive design build process works like this:  Firms submit statements of qualifications, basically documenting their expertise to build a particular kind of project.  The state reviews the qualifications, and selects the bidder they think is “best qualified” to tackle the project, but importantly, this selection is made, and the contract is signed–without a price.  The contract is divided into two Phases.  In Phase 1, slated to begin in mid-2027, , the selected firm is given time to design (and even start work) on a project.  In Phase 2—scheduled for Fall 2028—, begins only after the state and the contractor have agreed on a “guaranteed maxximum price” (GMP).  The state has the option to either  accept the GMP and move forward, or take what is called an “exit ramp”–where it takes possession of project plans, and has the option to seek new bids.  The theory behind PDB is that the state DOTs and the selected bidder work as “partners” to figure out the best way to build the bridge, and that there will be substantial negotiation between the parties over the design, and price, as the design proceeds.  But ultimately, it’s up to the firm to propose its “guaranteed maximum price.”

Given the consistent record of cost escalation for the IBR project–and its supine acceptance by the state transportation departments, their supervising commissions, and elected officials—it seems likely that we can expect big cost increases from Kiewit when the “Guaranteed Maximum Price” lands on the table, probably late in 2028.

Strike three:  We won’t know Kiewit’s bid price for at least another year, and Progressive Design Build invites a big increase.

ODOT & WSDOT are lousy negotiators and managers of big contracts

The success of progressive design build hinges directly on strong supervision of the contractor by the two state highway departments.  In theory, state employees work closely with the selected contractor to solve problems and refine the design, looking for ways to do things cheaper and better.  In reality, the arrangement suffers from what Yale Law Professor and transportation finance expert Zach Liscow calls a “principal-agent” problem:  the incentives for the contractor are very different from those of the two states.  The bigger and more expensive the project is, the more money Kiewit and its partners stand to make.

Neither Oregon nor Washington has a stellar track record in making the terms of their contracts stick.  Oregon’s first large-scale experience with “design-build,” the Highway 20 Pioneer Mountain Eddyville Project, ended in disaster.  Granite Construction, which had agreed to a fixed $129.9 million design-build contract, was allowed to exit, basically without penalty even after its design failed.  ODOT ended up demolishing partially built bridges from the Granite design, and finishing the project at its own expense, at a total cost of $360 million.  Likewise, the Washington Department of Transportation is mired in contract disputes with Flatiron/Lane the construction firms it selected for a $700 million design-build contract to construct I-405 express lanes between Renton and Bellevue.  The project is two years behind schedule; litigation has been ongoing for three years and a trial is scheduled in the Fall of 2027.

The single bidder problem is compounded by the two states’ evident desperation to move forward immediately with the project.  Already, the state DOTs are painting themselves into a corner with a very bad negotiating position.  They’ve signaled that they need to reach agreement on a Guaranteed Maximum Price in order to begin construction in 2028, and they worried about a risk in delaying construction.

The IBR presentation identified in extremely vague terms the risks from a narrow bidder pool.  They worried that the massive size of the contract (which the state DOTs chose), would limit the bid pool.  In fact, we now know that they limited the bid pool to one.  The other risk is the negotiation of a “guaranteed maximum price.”  None of their “mitigation strategies” changed the essential fact that there’s only one bidder, and that one bidder has enormous market power.

Kiewit and its partners already know they are only ones WSDOT and ODOT are negotiating with.  They also know that ODOT and WSDOT are desperate to start construction as soon as possible.  That gives them every incentive to insist on a very high “guaranteed maximum price,” knowing that the agencies fear that if they don’t start the project soon, it will never go forward.

With three strikes already, Kiewit ought to be out of the game, but it’s not, because ODOT and WSDOT are lousy negotiators.

 

Kiewit just got fired from a big bridge project for greed

When you combine Kiewit’s track record, the riskiness of the “progressive design build” contracting, and the two state’s management incompetence and desperation, it’s clear that IBR construction is shaping up to be a major disaster, even before it starts.  We can see that this is likely based on another big bridge project:  the replacement of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge.   Maryland chose Kiewit using exactly the progressive design build arrangement proposed for the IBR.  Kiewit was hired, started work, and began demolishing the remnants of the old bridge and preparing the site for the new structure, only to be fired from the job when Maryland officials determined that Kiewit’s proposed budget was far too expensive.  News reports indicate that Maryland had expected to pay about as $4-5 billion, but that Kiewit wanted $9 billion. The Baltimore Banner (May 4, 2026) reported:

The state said in November [2025] that it expected the bridge to cost between $4.3 and $5.2 billion, and in April [2026] officials began formally hammering down the price with Kiewit, the giant firm selected in August 2024 to design — and likely build — the span. Kiewit and state officials have declined to specify how much the company proposed in negotiations. Last week, a source familiar with discussions between Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s administration and Kiewit said the company had estimated the bridge would ultimately cost upwards of $9 billion.

So Maryland exercised its “off-ramp” rights under progressive design-build.  It canceled Kiewit’s contract, and is now splitting the project up into smaller pieces and seeking new bids, and hoping they will end up spending less than the $9 billion Kiewit was demanding.  The Key Bridge experience shows that Kiewit is willing to play a high-stakes game in the negotiation process.  They’ll certainly do the same with the IBR.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge is just a dress rehearsal for what will happen with the IBR.  Oregon and Washington leaders should be prepared for some very costly news.

Construction is where real cost overruns will likely occur

It’s important to recognize that the real likelihood of cost overruns still lies in the future, once construction begins.  So far, the project has tripled in price from $4.8 billion to $15 billion, based entirely on changes in planning estimates, not actual experience in construction.  The history of highway megaprojects is that the worst overruns occur after construction starts, when builders encounter real-world problems.  This was true for Boston’s Big Dig, Seattle’s Alaskan Way deep bore tunnel, ODOT’s Pioneer Mountain-Eddyville project and others.  Notably, ODOT’s largest current construction contract is with Kiewit to rebuild the I-205 Abernethy Bridge; since the contract awarded let for $500 million in 2022, the cost of the project has now escalated to $885 million.

And the IBR is likely to be a vastly more complex and risky project to build.  Here’s just one example of a significant cost risk.  Bridge construction involves the installation of drilled shafts in the Columbia River bed, drilling through hundreds of feet of alluvial material into deep bedrock to support columns that will lift the bridge more than 116 feet above the river.  The riverbed is composed of complex materials, including gravel and boulders.  The IBR’s own risk analysis has described the largely unknown geology of the site as a “contractor’s pot of gold” because encountering more difficult drilling conditions could lead to expensive change orders.

 

Similar geotechnical problems caused cost increases for the Abernethy Bridge, led to a near doubling of the estimated price of the Hood River Bridge, and  plagued Salem’s proposed Center Street Bridge.  These geotechnical problems are just one of many risks the IBR faces that will be realized only after construction starts.

 

IBR’s consultants tolerate and enable contractor cost overruns

 

The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project is run mostly by the consulting firm WSP which has billed more than$100 million for its consulting work, and which developed the plans to extend the project for the next twenty years–in the process building a budgt of more than $1 billion for additional staff and consulting costs.

And WSP has a very good reputation as a partner among construction firms.  Good in the sense that they are understanding when construction contracts experience major cost overruns.  Earlier this year, Engineering News-Record reported construction companies singing praises of WSP’s tolerance of cost overruns:

Evan Lawrence, Superior construction project manager, notes that in addition to WSP’s excellent communication with the project team, its work on the Brooks Bridge indicates “problem-solving ability that is second to none because [the firm] is such a big resource.”
He adds: “A lot of engineers understand what it looks like on paper, but they don’t know what it looks like in the field. WSP just truly understands how we have to build. It’s a more agreeable approach where [both parties know] we’re going to have cost overruns, we’re going to have issues on the job, but let’s work through them. There’s never any pointing fingers.”
[Emphasis added, bracketed material in original article

Not only are the agencies inept at making contracts stick, but the principal consultant they’ve hired to act as their representative in these negotiations has an industry reputation for tolerating and accommodating cost overruns.  Together, the combination of Kiewit as lead contractor and WSP as project manager on behalf of the state is the principal-agent problem, squared.  Both make more money when the project’s size and budget increase. Neither entity has faced any serious financial consequences for massive cost overruns on Portland-area projects.  WSP developed successive cost estimates that were understated by literally billions of dollars for the IBR–and remains on the job.  Kiewit was about $385 million over budget on the Abernethy Bridge–and is being offered a vastly larger and more lucrative project.  The worst is yet to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marginal Revolution

My Barcelona talk

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Wednesday, November 4, 18:30 Barcelona time, details here.  I am honored to have won the Elinor Ostrom Prize from the Institut Ostrom Catalunya.  Maybe see you there!

The post My Barcelona talk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Related Stories

 
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 10/30/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Senate candidate El-Sayed wants to ‘grill’ RFK Jr., calls him the ‘most incompetent HHS secretary ever’
No. I was not paid to critique the Anxious Generation. I came to the conclusion that the science featured in it was flawed all on my own
Holding Science to a Gold Standard Will Hold It Back. A metascientist pushes back against the unified and idealized vision of science embodied in NSF’s new Office of Metascience.
Florida Sues Climate Modeler First Street Over Home Risk Scores
30,000-year-old bone found in French cave reveals vast genetic connections between people of Eastern and Western Europe during the Stone Age
Domestic travel poses growing risk for measles—and a new challenge for states. International travel used to be the main risk of measles cases in the US—not anymore.
First ever human case of livestock-related Shamonda virus identified in France

Other:

Trump Erupted After Learning of Alina Habba’s $50 Million Deal. Angry about the scale of a contract signed by one of his former lawyers with the family of a wealthy pardon seeker, the president told allies he wanted some of the money to go to his future presidential library.
Video Shows ICE Agents Slashing Portland Couple’s Car Tire Then Driving Off
ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is engaged in far-reaching spying against left-wing activists that rivals the FBI and CIA crackdowns on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
Trump Just Told Us How He Intends to Steal the Midterms
Trump tried to rebrand “AI” as “SI.” Right-wing outlets aren’t listening.
Pay to Say: Influencers Caught in NewsGuard Sting
Google admits AI search makes less money, but it’s fixing that with more ads
A Defense Contractor Gave Their Personal AI Agent Access to a Secure Pentagon System
Hack Apocalypse Now
Jared Kushner Got Secretary of State Fired After Dictator Paid Him Off
Democrats Have an Islamophobia Problem Too. Centrist Democrats spent last year criticizing the party’s most visible Muslim candidate—and have done so again in 2026.
AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public
Kash Patel Invests in U.S. Tech as FBI Investigates Chinese-Connected Cybercrime
Bombshell report exposes Trump antisemitism czar’s threat to choke Jewish intern
Patrick Stewart, ‘Star Trek’ Captain and ‘X-Men’ Superhero, Dies at 86
Conservative influencers face identity theft charges over Minnesota primary
Patrick Stewart, a perceptive patriarch in ‘Star Trek’ and ‘X-Men,’ dies at 86
In historic first, voters in five states will decide transgender youth rights. Five states have initiatives on the ballot to outlaw trans athletes in girls’ sports and gender transition treatment for children. Washington state could require genital exams for girls in school athletics.
ICE agents tackle and injure U.S. citizen student with disabilities, local officials say
Confused NYPD Abandons East Village E-Bike Raid. They showed up to harass delivery workers … but then changed their minds.
Brazil probes foreign financing, including group linked to Vance
Top 25 donors provided 1 in 6 individual contribution dollars
Oldest Recording of Louisiana’s Vanishing Creole Language Is Published. The rediscovery of a forgotten recording from 1935 sheds light on a language rooted in the state’s history of slavery and French colonialism.
Google Eats Its Own Tail (and Profits) With AI Summaries as Stock Price Plunges
America’s Truckers on the Brink With 221 Bankruptcies This Year
Disinformation videos, likely from Russia, are exploiting real people to malign Senate candidates
Good Enough For Journalism
Waiting On a New D.C. Trash Can? You’re Not Alone.
All My Apes Gone
I talked to Tom, the viral ‘Jonestown’ Trump rally guy. He planned to make good trouble. But he didn’t expect to be handed a Fox News mic.

Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Construction Physics

Reading List 10/31/26

Brian Potter
Updated

The Golden Temple, Amritsar, by Edwin Lord Weeks, via WikiArt.

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at space fiber optic cable manufacturing, nuclear district heating, Spain’s high-speed rail crash, China’s spaceplane, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

Housing

An independent committee’s report on the huge Hong Kong apartment complex fire last year found that it was probably started by a lit cigarette, and accelerated by flammable foam boards and scaffolding nets. [BNN Bloomberg]

Bloomberg Philanthropies wants to spread strategies that have helped get housing built in the cities of Atlanta, Austin, and (checks notes) San Diego to other metros in the US. [The New Localism]

Manufacturing

Space-based data centers seem to be taking up most of the oxygen for what sort of things become possible if Starship or other technologies makes launch costs much cheaper, but it’s interesting to consider what else might be unlocked from vastly cheaper access to space. Here’s one: incredibly high-quality fiber optic cable. [IEEE Spectrum]

Last week we looked at a report that noted the US produces a very small amount of aluminum, despite our huge demand for it. Apparently one big reason is that we import a large amount of aluminum from Canada, which can produce it thanks to an abundance of cheap hydropower. “...the enormous power requirements for making aluminum have meant that Canada, where abundant hydropower has kept electricity prices from rising as sharply as in the U.S., has supplied about 70% of U.S. aluminum imports in recent years.” [WSJ]

Defense startup Anduril wants to make a laptop in the US. [Anduril]

The Wall Street Journal on the crisis in US explosives manufacturing. “Following the widespread closures of government-owned plants in the 1990s, the entire production of the powerful explosives HMX and RDX came from a single supplier, Holston Army Ammunition Plant. The 84-year-old plant makes about 3% of what it did during peak production in 1944, according to Hacker’s research, and it has been beset by explosions and pollution violations. There is a one- to two-year wait for products coming out of Holston, said industry experts.” [WSJ]

The ultra-competitive Chinese car industry is apparently struggling in the domestic market, thanks to a drop in demand — domestic sales are down 22% compared to last year. This is part of what’s driving the huge export push from Chinese manufacturers. [WSJ]

Energy

US utility company First Energy estimates that every 1 GW of data center demand requires about $250 million worth of transmission upgrades. [Utility Dive]

Per Exxon, roughly 10% of global refining capacity is currently offline, mostly refineries in Russia and the Middle East. [Exxon]

Read more

Daring Fireball

Patrick Stewart Dies at 86

John Gruber
Updated

Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter:

Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi icon, has died. He was 86.

Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia,” longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak announced.

There’s an old adage that everyone’s favorite SNL cast is the one from their teenage years. It’s probably true for Star Trek too. My favorite is The Next Generation and it’s not even close. Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard was just so fucking cool. Smart, wise, firm, curious, empathetic, and just fucking cool. Those same adjectives seemingly all apply to Stewart himself.

See Kottke for a bunch more links.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

TPM Live: Election Preview With A Special Guest

Joe Ragazzo
Updated

We’ll be live on YouTube at 1 p.m. ET today to recap the week’s headlines and talk about the election. Today, special guest Josh Marshall will be on the show. That is right — the founder of TPM himself will join me, Nicole Lafond and Hunter Walker. Hope to see you at 1 p.m.

Daring Fireball

Sponsorship Openings for Daring Fireball (Including The Talk Show)

John Gruber
Updated

Sponsorships have continued selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the last week of December, and the Q1 2027 schedule is already filling up. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. Update: OK, next week has been sold, but Christmas week remains open. That’s a good week at DF. I keep posting and readers are often more bored than usual. Also a good week to promote games.

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, just email me — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q1 and Q2 2027, and over half of those weeks are already sold. The rate for the two remaining weeks in 2026 is $11,000, and the rate for open weeks in 2027 is $12,500.

The sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show also has openings, including for the next few episodes in November and December. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

★ MacBook Pro Pricing and Configurations for M6, M5 Pro, and M5 Max

John Gruber
Updated

Apple’s dynamic configuration UI in their online store doesn’t hide or disguise the pricing or configuration options, but it doesn’t present all of the options at a glance. I find it useful to organize all of the configuration options into tables on a single page, and I figured it might be useful to share this now, before I finish writing my full thoughts on the redesigned hardware and displays for the PROLED XDR models.

Notes:

  • The old-style (mini-LED, no touchscreens, heavier) M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros were announced and began shipping in March 2026, alongside the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR, the MacBook Neo, and M5 MacBook Airs.

  • The new but old-style plain 14-inch M6 MacBook Pro was announced in October 2026 and is set to begin shipping in early November.

  • The all-new PROLED XDR (touchscreens, lighter weight) M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros were announced in October 2026 and are set to begin shipping in early November.

  • As in previous generations, there are no 16-inch models for the plain M6 or the chip-binned fewer-core M5 Pro configurations. The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts with the full 18-core CPU / 20-core GPU M5 Pro chip.

  • 16-inch models, when available, cost $300 more than the same-specced 14-inch configuration.

  • Nano-texture displays are an option for all MacBook Pro models, and always cost $150.

  • The new PROLED XDR models cost $400 more than the equivalent old-style ones. This $400 difference is true for both 14- and 16-inch models.

  • The new 16 TB SSD upgrade is exclusively available for M5 Max models with the new PROLED XDR displays. It costs a smooth $7,000 more than the base 2 TB storage.

M6

12-core CPU / 12-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $2000
    16-inch:          N/A

    PROLED XDR:       N/A
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    16 GB      +0
            24 GB    +200
            32 GB    +400

    SSD:    1 TB       +0
            2 TB     +500
            4 TB    +1500

M5 Pro

15-core CPU / 16-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $2500
    16-inch:          N/A

    PROLED XDR:      +400
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    24 GB      +0
            48 GB    +600

    SSD:    1 TB       +0
            2 TB     +500
            4 TB    +1500


18-core CPU / 20-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $2700
    16-inch:        $3000

    PROLED XDR:      +400
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    24 GB      +0
            48 GB    +600
            64 GB   +1000

    SSD:    1 TB       +0
            2 TB     +500
            4 TB    +1500

M5 Max

18-core CPU / 32-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $4100
    16-inch:        $4400

    PROLED XDR:      +400
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    36 GB      +0

    SSD:    2 TB       +0
            4 TB    +1000
            8 TB    +3000
           16 TB    +7000  (PROLED XDR only)


18-core CPU / 40-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $4700
    16-inch:        $5000

    RAM:    48 GB      +0
            64 GB    +400
           128 GB   +2000

    SSD:    2 TB       +0
            4 TB    +1000
            8 TB    +3000
           16 TB    +7000  (PROLED XDR only)

To me, the most curious detail in these tables is that if you select the chip-binned M5 Max with only 32 GPU cores, the one and only RAM configuration is 36 GB. The “full” M5 Max with 40 GPU cores starts with 48 GB of RAM in the base configuration.

For size, weight, battery life, and display brightness differences, consult Apple’s ever-excellent Compare tool, preconfigured with that link to show the 14-inch models with M6, M5 Max (mini-LED), and M5 Max with PROLED XDR. (PDF archive of that Compare page, archived today for posterity.)

Daring Fireball

The Only Good Easter Eggs Are Whole-Assed Easter Eggs

John Gruber
Updated

Marcin Wichary on the original iPod easter egg on Apple Music’s website 404 page:

I am usually not a fan of easter eggs — most of them are poorly made — but this might be the best iPod recreation I’ve seen, and it’s an interesting thing to study:

  • I think it generally covers all the modes etc.
  • (with small exceptions) the typography looks accurate,
  • it has the little “haptic” beeps,
  • it has proper acceleration and the scrollbar,
  • it has a little music library with various playlists,
  • I have only noticed a few small bugs.

It looks real, sounds real, feels real. Don’t bother with your easter egg idea if you’re going to half-ass it.

Update: The original iPod itself had a great easter egg: a hidden version of the classic game Breakout. Apple’s new easter egg web-page iPod includes the hardware iPod easter egg. Just go to Settings → About and hold down the center button for 5 seconds. An easter egg in the easter egg. That’s how you do it.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

GM to Pay $220 Million After Betraying Their Own Drivers’ Privacy

John Gruber
Updated

Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters:

General Motors will pay $220 million to settle ​allegations that it illegally sold drivers’ private behavior and location data to brokers, who then sold the information to insurers that used it to set and sometimes increase rates.

The settlement, announced on Thursday, resolves claims by the attorneys general of 35 US states and the District ​of Columbia over the automaker’s Smart Driver program, which enrolled millions of drivers ​between 2016 and its discontinuation in 2024. Other regulators have also reviewed GM’s handling of driver data.

GM was accused of pitching Smart Driver to help ​people improve their personal driving safety, only to violate drivers’ privacy by reneging on its ​promise not to sell their data without permission. Many people who signed up were also enrolled in GM’s OnStar safety, navigation and diagnostic service.

Reuters’s milquetoast headline was “GM to Pay $220 Million to Settle Allegations It Violated Drivers’ Privacy”. They’re not mere allegations. They did it. They just betrayed their customers’ privacy to make a few quick bucks.

I’ve driven a few GM rentals in recent years, and I’d almost certainly never buy one of their cars just because they’re poorly-designed pieces of crap. But even if they made a decent car I wouldn’t buy it. They’re still seemingly digging in on the CarPlay thing, and they ratted out their own customers to insurance companies.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Alina Habba Has To Give The Boss His Cut

Josh Marshall
Updated

Lot goin’ on. So let me just briefly flag this.

Remember the grifter war between Trumpers Ric Grenell and Alina Mildon (née Habba) over whether money back-channelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo made its way to the Kennedy Center, then named after Donald Trump? Soon after the initial story hit, another story revealed that Mildon had got a cool $50 million to work for (read: secure a pardon for) a Venezuelan billionaire. (He got the pardon.) All of these actions emerge out of the general divvying up of the spoils of Venezuela which Mildon, her new husband/nepo-oligarch Turhan Mildon and Grenell were involved in. (There’s no proving it, but I basically guarantee you that Grenell knew about the $50 million and got it leaked to the Times as retaliation.)

Now, I frequently joke about how in Term Two MAGA, it’s fine to be corrupt. But you’ve got to kick some of the sweetness up to the boss, just like Jimmy Conway had to kick some money up to Paulie after the Lufthansa heist in “Goodfellas.” I frequently struggle to understand, keep up with, just how true these things are. Yesterday, the Times returned to this story and well … here’s what they say happened.

From the Times (emphasis added)…

President Trump erupted last week after he learned that one of his former lawyers, Alina Habba Mildon, secured a contract worth more than $50 million to work for a billionaire Venezuelan family.

Angered at the size of Mrs. Mildon’s deal, Mr. Trump has told aides and allies that she should donate a portion of that money to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.

It’s important to note that with other presidents, a donation to their presidential library might be symbolic to the president but really just to a library in their honor. But Trump has structured the future Trump library to be a personal piggybank for him and his family. So he really is Paulie here getting his cut, or at least demanding it.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Let’s Talk About Alaska

Josh Marshall
Updated

I was at the gym this afternoon when a press conference came on with the U.S. Attorney in Alaska floridly introducing a criminal investigation into this “Dan Sullivan” issue. One of my colleagues just noted that to do this, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman “unrecused” himself from this case. “Unrecusal” is not a thing. He recused himself because he’s trying to get a judgeship from Alaska’s Republican senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski. I note this simply for the comedic nature of this spectacle. This investigation is itself a corrupt abuse of power on three or four different grounds at once.

Let me share some thoughts on this.

I’ve heard a number of people say they’re “troubled” or “disturbed” or unhappy that this happened. All I can say is that I would really recommend that you toughen up because you simply won’t make it through the next few years, even under the best circumstances. There is no crime here and no possibility of a crime here. This is trolling. At worst, it’s a dirty trick. If it is a dirty trick, it is a special kind since it has been out in the open and has been a staple of Alaska political news for the better part of a year. Election officials in Alaska already took note of the possibility of confusion and added the word “incumbent” after Sen. Dan S. Sullivan’s name on the ballot, as well as “registered Republican” to make certain that no one can be confused as to who is who. State authorities are the only ones permitted to judge this question and arrive at a solution to it, if it requires one. They already have.

It is entirely within the rights of Alaska voters to look at what happened here and punish the Peltola campaign if they choose to. The Times claims that people associated with Peltola’s campaign recruited Daniel J. Sullivan — who my colleague Kate Riga calls “rando Dan Sullivan.” Peltola denies any involvement. It goes without saying that this claim and article surfacing now is not good news for the Peltola campaign. I’m skeptical that it will make a difference. But the race is so close that it certainly could. I have no way to judge that.

The Trump administration is abusing its prosecutorial power to do everything it can to deceive people into thinking that some crime has been committed. They have already gotten the incumbent Republican governor to threaten not to certify the election if Peltola wins. These are all out-in-the-open threats to disenfranchise Alaskan voters if they don’t comply and elect their chosen candidate. What they’re doing here violates every rule in the book. But let me back up to make a broader point. It is simply undignified to be lectured on election practices by people who are carrying out a months-long criminal conspiracy to violate the Constitution and wrest from the states their sole constitutional authority to administer elections under federal law. This is all out in the open. We see it happening every day. We here at TPM along with many other publications cover every detail of it. Again, it is undignified even to entertain this nonsense.

Republicans have pulled this same name stunt countless times. No one has ever claimed that it’s a crime because it’s not. For years Republicans have been channeling money to amplify third party candidates to drain vote from Democrats. Now Democrats are doing it too. Nice? Seemly? Who knows. Legal? Absolutely. And none of this is any different. Again voters are free to judge this. But every claim about this needing to be investigated, throwing anything about this election into doubt, should be treated with laughter and contempt.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

The Sign-In Issue is Fixed

Joe Ragazzo
Updated

We experienced an issue in which many users were logged out and then unable to log back in. This is now fixed. A vendor we work with made a modification that negatively affected our capacity. Once we identified and understood the issue, we were able to resolve it. Apologies for the frustration and thanks for your patience.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Poll-mageddon—Kansas Edition!

Josh Marshall
Updated

WaPo published a fascinating piece this morning tied to their latest poll of Kansas. The headline, figurative if not literal, is that they came up with a result that shows incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall not behind Adam Hamilton, but way behind. But they don’t buy their own result. What’s fascinating and laudable is that polls like this, this late in the cycle, often never get released or they get adjusted to bring them more into line with pollsters’ expectations or the consensus of other polls. But here the Post made the decision to release the poll as is and pull back the veil on all the internal details and decisions they made to get the poll as close to what they think is accurate as they could.

Differential response has been the bane of pollsters for more than a decade. We know that no one answers the phone (or the text message) when pollsters get in touch anymore. The problem is that Republicans and Democrats “never” respond at slightly different rates. And even more specifically, the slice of usually disaffected voters that Donald Trump has repeatedly activated when he’s on the presidential ballot are the most poll-resistant of all. So a huge amount of what has happened in the polling industry over the last decade is pollsters trying to find ways to tweak numbers in some coherent way to adjust for getting too few of those poll-shy Trump voters. (And to be clear, this isn’t the old idea that they’re embarrassed to say they support Trump. They just don’t want to talk to pollsters.) Further complicating the issue is that that activation — and the polling misses tied to it — doesn’t seem to happen in midterm elections, based on 2018 and 2022.

As you can see in this chart, the problem the Post faced with differential response has been manageable in most races this year. Polls in Michigan and Maine differed by around 4% points. But in Kansas Democrats were wildly more likely to respond to the polls. So the Post did the standard weighting to bring the numbers into line with the state population — weighting for partisanship, geography, various demographic markers, etc. But after they did all that they still came up with a result they didn’t find credible, or at least that they had significant doubts about. Those results were Hamilton 52%, Marshall 43% and a third party candidate at 4%.

Adding to this was respondents’ recall of how they voted in 2024. This is actually another source of potential error but in the other direction. After the sample was weighted, respondents in aggregate remembered voting for Donald Trump by 7%. In fact he won the state by 16%. This part in the write-up was obscure to me because I couldn’t tell just which way and at which stage they were trying to adjust for voters’ selective memories. So for instance you have this: “Post-Schar School polls typically weight by 2024 vote choice. But even after doing so, registered independents in the poll reported voting for Harris over Trump by 25 percentage points, compared with a nearly even split in a 2024 AP VoteCast survey released after the election.”

The problem with vote recall is that you don’t know what it means. If your sample says they voted for Donald Trump by 10% and the actual vote was 20%, maybe you have a sample of the electorate that is less Trumpy than the electorate at large. But given how unpopular Trump has become, maybe they’re not telling the truth about who they voted for. (This doesn’t have to be willful lying; people have selective memories.) In practice it’s probably a combination of both. But which it is or the precise mix can tilt the poll into error in different directions.

We get some additional insight on this incredibly difficult question from our friend Lakshya Jain, now at The Argument. They did a livecast last night where they discussed their latest and final poll (11 point Democrat spread on the generic ballot). The key is that they have an ongoing panel. So they can talk to the same identified people — literally the same individuals — and compare who they said they voted for right after the 2024 election and who they say they voted for in that election now. And a substantial number of them have gone from saying they voted for Trump to now saying Harris. I can’t remember the exact percentage. But point being, this isn’t some hypothetical thing. Most pollsters are weighting to partisan recall. But not everyone is an accurate narrator.

As long as we’re deep in this forest of polling error hypotheticals, I wanted to mention one other. G. Elliott Morris is another big player in the polling and public opinion analysis field. He’s generally been among those in this cycle saying we don’t really have any reason to think polling error will go one way or another this cycle. And that we’re wrong to dismiss the possibility that polls could actually be underestimating Democratic strength. But he’s also been scanning the numbers asking the following question: if there is yet another systematic underestimation of Republicans, where is most likely to come from?

He came up with one possibility which he discussed in a post this week. In the weighting above, pollsters weight for all sorts of things: gender, education, vote recall, urban/rural — and a bunch of other things. But Morris notes that they don’t usually cross reference these things. And what he came up with is that his poll was oversampling Trump voters who live in blue urban areas as opposed to rural red areas. And it turns out that matters. Because urban Trumpers are defecting at higher rates than rural ones. So you can weight to make sure you have the right number of Trump voters and the right number of rural voters. But if you don’t combine the two things you’re missing some of the most loyal Trumpers. The impact wasn’t huge. Morris found after crunching a lot of numbers that it generated between .5 and 1 percentage point difference in the generic ballot.

That’s meaningful but not game changing. But there’s a further hitch. These are also the type of voters who’ve tended not to vote when Trump isn’t on the ballot. There’s also decent evidence that these voters are demotivated. So that’s another reason why they might not show up. Non-response can signal the same kind of low motivation or disenchantment that leads especially occasional voters not to vote. Or maybe this will happen and it will be offset by one of the several possible ways that polls could be underestimating Democratic strength. Morris points specifically to the dissembling voter recall issue I noted above as one of those possibilities.

In any case, none of this discussion is really an attempt to figure out just what to make of that single poll. It’s just a fascinating window into this moment in the world of polling in which a mix of technological and sociological transformations have made the whole enterprise totally different and quite difficult to do. In terms of the Kansas race, there are two other polls of the race released in the last 24: CNN (Hamilton +4) and Emerson (Hamilton +2). Those can give us perhaps a more realistic view of the race, though I can’t help but wonder whether similar discussions were going on with those pollsters and they resolved the questions differently than the Post.

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Marginal Revolution

The pass-through of retail crime

Tyler Cowen
Updated

This paper shows retailers increase prices in response to organized retail crime. We match store-level crime data to scanner data from the universe of transactions for cannabis retailers in Washington state. Using quasi-experimental variation from robberies and burglaries, we find a 1.7–1.8 percent price increase at victimized stores and nearby competitors. This rise is not driven by short-to-medium-term demand changes but is consistent with crime-related cost shocks. Effects are larger for independent stores and less concentrated markets. We estimate crime imposes a 1 percent “hidden” unit tax on affected stores, implying $30.7 million in additional social costs, primarily borne by consumers.

That is from a newly published paper, AEJ: Economic Policy, by Carl Hase and Johannes Kasinger.

The post The pass-through of retail crime appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Schneier on Security

Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid Off California Coast

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Neat video:

The sighting, announced September 2, marks the first time anyone has spotted a live bigfin squid, which belongs to the Magnapinna genus, in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Schneier on Security

Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This story is interesting:

One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—­or spyware, if you’re being less charitable­—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go.

It’s interesting because it exposes all the insecurities in this piece of IoT software. But I think the real story is that a random person was able to do this reverse-engineering with the help of AI. Expect a lot more stories like this in the future.

Marginal Revolution

The unintended consequences of academic leniency

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Education is widely recognized as the primary driver of human capital accumulation. However, policies designed to promote educational attainment often overlook students’ endogenous responses. This paper provides empirical evidence of the causal impact of relaxed academic standards on student effort and achievement. We find that academic leniency results in mechanical GPA increases, but significant reductions in effort among lower ability students based on lower attendance and lower numerical grades. These heterogeneous effects compound and exacerbate gaps in engagement and achievement throughout high school, ultimately worsening deficits in human capital accumulation as measured by ACT scores.

That is from a newly published paper, in AEJ: Economic Policy, by A. Brooks Bowden, Viviana Rodriguez, and Zach Weingarten.

The post The unintended consequences of academic leniency appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Simon Willison's Weblog

dbreunig/nesformer

dbreunig/nesformer

Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros (very slowly) running inside Qwen!

In a comment on Hacker News Drew reveals the Opus 5.5 prompts he used to build this system:

Read this article and any relevant source code: https://divagr.com/blog/qwenputer. Then explore if you could emulate the chip and ram in a Nintendo Entertainment System (as people do today with FPGAs in MISTRs) using this technique. If so, what size model would you have to build and if you could use smaller faster ones, could you get it to be at the standard clockspeed.

Followed by:

I think we should build it! Just for fun. It's okay if it's not fast. We want to be able to have the weights, and a cli to run them that we can point at a ROM.

Apparently Opus found and then used this collection of conformance tests for the NES CPU released 15 years ago by Christopher Pow.

Via Hacker News

Tags: games, ai, generative-ai, llms, drew-breunig, qwen, conformance-suites

Core Memory

MADE to FIGHT: A Very Human Robot Saga

Ashlee Vance
Updated

We’ve made something awesome.

For the past 18 months, we’ve been filming the rise of robot fights in San Francisco and beyond. What began as something of a curiosity morphed into a wild drama, and we’ve turned the whole thing into an eight-part docuseries. It’s entertaining, funny, heart-warming and quite insane.

The story follows a group of people who start out together, hoping to turn robot fights into the next big form of entertainment. But they soon break apart and go to war with each other, creating rival fight teams REK and UFB. As the story goes on, the robots get bigger and bigger and so too do the fights and the stakes and the drama.

Subscribe now

The series captures this weird moment in time – AI meets robotics meets SF culture – in the most unexpected of ways. It’s a robot story, but it’s really a story about humans trying to make their way in this bizarre world.

Core Memory subscribers will get all the episodes early as they roll out. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve made.

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

Analysts find looming launch crisis is "more severe" than anticipated

Eric Berger
Updated

A new report from the analytics firm Quilty Space confirms that, outside of China, the world faces a significant shortage of rockets over the next five years.

The firm estimates that between now and 2030, there will be a shortfall of about 150 launches compared to demand from satellite operators and civil space agencies. If demand from the US military is added in—and SpaceX does not extend the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program to accommodate increased national security needs—the shortage could be doubled.

"What we wanted to get at is to understand how severe this launch crisis is and when will it be resolved," said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. "What we learned is that the launch crisis is more severe than we thought and that it will not go away this decade for sure, and it might not abate until sometime late in the 2030s."

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The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Friday 30 October 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Lay long in bed with my wife, and then up and a while at my office, and so to the Change, and so [home] again, and there I found my wife in a great passion with her mayds. I upstairs to set some things in order in our chamber and wardrobe, and so to dinner upon a good dish of stewed beef, then up again about my business. Then by coach with my wife to the New Exchange, and there bought and paid for several things, and then back, calling at my periwigg-makers, and there showed my wife the periwigg made for me, and she likes it very well, and so to my brother’s, and to buy a pair of boddice for her, and so home, and to my office late, and then home to my wife, purposing to go on to a new lesson in arithmetique with her. So to supper and to bed. The Queen mends apace, but her head still light.

My mind very heavy thinking of my great layings out lately, and what they must still be for clothes, but I hope it is in order to getting of something the more by it, for I perceive how I have hitherto suffered for lack of going as becomes my place.

After a little discourse with my wife upon arithmetique, to bed.

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Paul Krugman

Trumpflation and Travel

Paul Krugman
Updated

Travel day, so just one chart — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the last big data release before the midterms. Trump likes to stick his name on things, but this time he would be entirely justified: He personally built this, first with his tariffs and then with his war.

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX closes out October with 700th Falcon 9 launch to date

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
The Starlink 15-18 mission lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Oct. 30, 2026, local time. Image: SpaceX.

Update: Oct. 31, 12:25 a.m. EDT (0425 UTC): SpaceX landed its first stage booster on the droneship.

SpaceX capped off the month of October with the launch of a Starlink mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Friday night. The flight was the 700th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to date.

The Starlink 15-18 mission on the eve of Halloween will add another 27 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 9:04 p.m. PDT (12:04 a.m. EDT / 0404 UTC). The rocket flew on a southeasterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1093. This was its 18th flight following the launches of Transporter-16, two missions for the Space Development Agency, and 14 batches of Starlink satellites.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1093 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 231st landing on this vessel and the 675th Falcon booster landing to date.

Winding down Falcon, ramping up Starship

The launch on the eve of Halloween was SpaceX’s 11th and final orbital flight in October. While that number of launches in a calendar month far exceeds that achieved by other launch providers, it comes as SpaceX is starting to wind down the Falcon program as it turns its focus to Starship.

NASA and others have publicly acknowledged that SpaceX looking to end offering the Falcon 9 for commercial and government missions in the next few years. The company’s decreasing launch rate reflects this change.

The Starlink 15-16 launch on Oct. 27 was the first time since July 2025 that SpaceX’s launch rate dropped below 150 orbital launches in a 365-day period. For comparison, at its peak, SpaceX reached a peak of 171 orbital launches in 365 days in December 2025.

In August, SpaceX ceased flying Starlink missions from Florida using its Falcon 9 rockets. A smattering of launches have flown from the Sunshine State since, including NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13, CRS-35, and Bandwagon-5, which flew in October.

This is the breakdown of all of SpaceX’s orbital launches over the course of 2026 across Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Kennedy Space Center, Starbase, and Vandenberg Space Force Base:

  • January – 13 total (6 CCSFS, 1 KSC, 6 VSFB)
  • February – 12 total (6 CCSFS, 6 VSFB)
  • March – 15 total (8 CCSFS, 7 VSFB)
  • April – 12 total (4 CCSFS, 1 KSC, 7 VSFB)
  • May – 11 total (5 CCSFS, 6 VSFB)
  • June – 13 total (5 CCSFS, 9 VSFB)
  • July – 13 total (5 CCSFS, 8 VSFB)
  • August – 13 total (5 CCSFS, 1 KSC, 7 VSFB)
  • September – 8 total (1 CCSFS, 1 Starbase, 6 VSFB)
  • October – 10 currently (3 CCSFS, 1 KSC, 6 VSFB)

SpaceX is expected to start launching orbital Starship missions on a regular basis beginning in 2027. During the third quarter earnings call earlier this month, SpaceX founder Elon Musk pointed to the anticipated ramp up in Starship launch cadence.

“We expect Starship to fly weekly at some point in the first half next year and then second half next year, twice weekly or maybe even more frequently by the end of next year,” Musk said. “The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve rapid and complete reusability.”

Musk went onto state in that call that SpaceX’s plan to attempt a catch of their Starship upper stage during the next flight of the more than 400-foot-tall rocket. That mission, Starship Flight 15, is anticipated to launch in mid-November from Starbase, Texas.

California
Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Software Design: Tidy First?

Trust Is the Binding Constraint

Kent Beck
Updated

Teams accumulate code faster than they accumulate trust. That gap — code without trust — is where projects fail.

I have been circling this idea for two years in this newsletter. Trust accumulates slowly and evaporates in an instant. Most trust-building work is invisible. AI has poured accelerant on the visible parts. Code arrives faster than ever, while the practices that manufacture trust — collaboration, testing, review, shared understanding — quietly get sacrificed to solo speed.

So I am teaching a live class about it.

The Human Practices Behind Trustworthy Software runs on ByteByteGo Live, November 9th & 10th. It’s part of a new partnership with ByteByte to help me speak to a larger audience sustainably.

Each day is a 2-hour lecture followed by an hour of open Q&A. Two days, roughly the shape of the argument I have been making here, made concrete:

  • The trust problem. Trust in the product vs. trust in the process. Why trust breaks faster than it heals, and why its economics matter — trustworthy software lets customers spend less time guarding against risk and more time using the thing.

  • The XP practices that manufacture trust. Testing, pairing, continuous integration, planning, customer on the team, continuous deployment, refactoring, observability. Not as a checklist — as a system.

  • The principles underneath. Humanity, mutual benefit, improvement, flow, redundancy. The XP values — communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, respect — as a trust-manufacturing system, not a poster on the wall.

  • Trust-optimized AI-assisted development. This is the part I most want to get across. The tweak paradox: trustworthiness of code falls with the square of the size of changes. AI wants big batches, trust wants small verified steps. Single-player vs. multi-player: everybody is going to push you into solo AI development, and it is a huge mistake. Slowing down in the right places is how you go faster.

It’s for engineers and engineering leaders. It’s live, so you can argue with me in real time — the hour of Q&A each day is my favorite part of the format.

I have also made sure of a few practical things. Every session is recorded, so if the time zone is unkind you can catch up. Many folks expense it through their learning & development budget, and ByteByteGo provides an invoice and an email template for your manager.

A million caveats, because that’s how I operate. This is a paid class, and it’s not cheap. If your team already trusts each other completely and your AI workflow is humming, you don’t need it. (I have never met that team, but statistics says you’re out there.) And the ideas are all related to things I have written here — the class is the concentrated, worked-through version, with exercises you do on your team, not mine.

If it sounds useful, you can sign up here:

Argue with me live

(That link gets you the details & the current pricing on the available courses, let them know I sent you)

One more thing. This class is the answer to a question I have been asked weekly for a year: “Okay, I believe you about trust — now what do I do on Monday?” This is the Monday version. I hope to see you there, and I hope you argue with me.

Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

Rocket Report: Winter is coming for Themis; Cowboy Space adds iron to the fire

Stephen Clark
Updated

Welcome to Edition 9.17 of the Rocket Report! It's been a while since an American company announced plans for a medium-lift new launch vehicle, but that's what happened this week when a startup named Cowboy Space revealed specs for its Big Iron rocket, named for the classic country-western song by Marty Robbins. I'm a huge fan of the name. Maybe Cowboy Space is striking while the iron is hot as the space industry frets over demand for launch outpacing supply. However, Cowboy Space lags far behind so many other launch providers nearing the launch pad with their medium-class rockets, and the company didn't have much hardware to show at this week's big reveal. In other words, don't mistake style for substance. But we're rocket fans at Ars, and we wish them luck.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin's new rocket plane reaches home port. The first of Virgin Galactic's new Delta-class rocket planes left its Arizona factory Wednesday for a trip to Spaceport America in neighboring New Mexico, where it will undergo preparations for a test campaign culminating in suborbital flights to the edge of space, Ars reports. Virgin Galactic expects the craft's first commercial spaceflight to take place "early" in the second quarter of 2027, but like every other projected date in aerospace, this should be taken with a grain of salt. Virgin Galactic halted commercial flights of its previous vehicle, VSS Unity, in 2024.

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SpaceNews

ESI supplying solar array components to missile defense programs

ESI Motion
Updated

Oct. 30, 2026 – ESI Motion Inc. is proud to announce that it is supplying the Solar Array Drive Electronics (SADE) to Lockheed Martin for its work on the Space […]

The post ESI supplying solar array components to missile defense programs appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Cross Section

Phoning it in (midterm Q&A)

Paul Waldman
Updated
Get more from Paul Waldman in the Substack app
Available for iOS and Android
xkcd.com

Earth Sized Planets

It probably has an icy mantle over the real silicate geology, but I'm hoping something weird happened to burn off most of the water like with Io.
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVb: Iron Ends

Bret Devereaux
Updated

This is the back half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today.

In the front half of this part, we looked at how Hearts of Iron IV understands industry and production, the game’s economic model. On the one hand, the military production model is interestingly nuanced and complex and the decision to simplify the civilian half of the model, in light of the game’s focus, makes a fair bit of sense. On the other hand, the game stumbles quite badly in that it – mostly for reasons of balance (a desire to make Nazi Germany more likely to win than it was historically – constructs an economic world where discredited Nazi theories of economics which were quite decisively humiliated during the war itself are instead represented as right and true. HoI4‘s economic system (unintentionally) employs the tremendous persuasive power of simulation to create the appearance that the Nazis and fascists did make the trains run on time.

Industry is going to remain relevant in this part, where we’re going to talk about HoI4‘s conception of strategy and in particular strategic ends. Paradox games are deservedly famous for not featuring many explicit ‘win states’ and allowing the player to define victory. At the same time, different game systems still push players to think about ‘winning’ in different terms. To take an extreme example, few players are going to define a ‘victory condition’ to be something the game doesn’t even track or simulate.

Here again, HoI4 is a victim of its streamlining: it is mostly interesting in having World War II and profoundly uninterested in the implications of World War II. It exists, in many ways, in a world without strategic ends and the strategic ends it does track – military size and map painting, primarily – are, like so many of its other design choices, fundamentally the ‘victory markers’ that mattered most to the Axis powers and least to the Allies, especially the western allies. Hearts of Iron IV thus, in its careless streamlining adopts in its strategic ends – as with so many of its other systems – an unintentionally fascistic vision of history, one in which what really matters is purely military strength and the ability to dominate.

Finally, this being the conclusion, we’re going to ask what the implications for all of these choices across all four parts are. Hearts of Iron IV has a lot to recommend it – the operational simulator is very impressive – but also quite a few flaws. Most of all, viewing these flaws together, one cannot be surprised that this is a game with a serious Nazi problem. Of course any World War II game is going to attract that sort to some degree, but we can hardly be surprised if a game whose systems repeatedly, if unintentionally, adopt a fascist ideological position is going to have a particularly intense Nazi problem.

Hearts of Iron IV shows World War II as modern neo-Nazis like to pretend it was and so it is unsurprising that they are drawn to the game – albeit, we must note, alongside a great many players who are not ideological Nazis.

But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it, as I rely on word of mouth to replenish my manpower pool after poorly considered post topics. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic work and my public writing, including this project on Patreon! I can’t promise to use your support to buy a division worth of tanks, but I also will not promise not to do that. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

We stopped in our United Kingdom run last time right at the formation of the Commonwealth of Nations. This is the resulting mega-Britain that forms, with Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India all absorbed into a single state with the United Kingdom.
In practice the game is basically over at this point. Massively expanding my core territory (although India is counted as non-core), gives me access to a lot more manpower and – as you can see – a huge number of effective factories, pushing me past even the United States in economic production. In terms of the war against the Axis, the outcome is, at this point, effectively decided – the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when.’

What Is It Good For?

We should begin by discussing strategic ends. Countries in the real world do not wage wars (usually) simply because they like bashing their tanks and airplanes together the way a small child plays with toys (or a large child plays with Hearts of Iron), countries typically have aims they hope to achieve in war. In particular, leaders typically have a desired end state, an image in their mind of what the world is supposed to look like if they achieve all of their objectives in war. Now, war is a tricky thing that tends to get out of hand, so countries often struggle to achieve these sorts of clear end-states, often ending up with something rather different than what they had planned, even when they win.

But these end-states sit at the heart of strategy because all strategic planning is meaningless if you have no conception of what you are even trying to do and so one would expect any strategy game to pay fairly close attention to strategic ends. So it is worth discussing the strategic aims of the major powers in World War II – what were they trying to achieve – and the degree to which Hearts of Iron IV is able to model those outcomes and the factors which led to them.

But first we should acknowledge that Hearts of Iron IV actually has explicit scoring. When a game ends, a ‘playthrough overview’ screen pops up, presenting a ranked list of countries, with an overall score which is a product of the size of their armies, their navies and air forces. In practice, the calculation is very odd as this is effectively another dead mechanic – the air score generally overwhelms every other component of the calculation and relative scoring often makes little sense. In the screenshot below, Imperial Japan – on the verge of surrender, with the home islands having been invaded – ranks above the United States, actively in the process of invading the home islands.

While factory counts are listed on this screen, from the tooltip information, they don’t seem to have any impact on actual score. As far as I can tell, the end-game score system has been like this essentially since the game launched and it is such an infrequently used feature that it has never really been updated. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning here.

The other explicit system are the achievements and Hearts of Iron IV, like many Paradox games, has a lot of achievements (293 at current count) the player can earn. That said, achievements can only be obtained playing on ‘ironman’ mode (a single save file, so the player cannot go back and undo bad choices) and it is pretty clear from the achievement stats that very few players ever play ‘vanilla’ Hearts of Iron IV on ironman. The most common achievements are joining a faction (19% of players), researching Construction V (17%) and having 1000 convoys (17%) all of which are practically guaranteed to happen in most playthroughs, suggesting the total percentage of players to ever meaningfully engage with ironman and the achievement system is sub-20%.

The existing roster of achievements splits into basically two categories: a number of achievements for utilizing basic game mechanics and then the bulk of achievements which are about achieving specific things (in most cases, alternate-history things) as specific countries. Notably, very few of these achievements resemble the actual historical strategic end-states that the major powers were trying to achieve. Instead, most of the country specific achievements are, frankly, memes: a funny title to go with an unlikely outcome that is interesting either because of how absurd it is (‘Thai Fighters: as Siam have 10 aces’) or because achieving it is a demonstration of skill in the system because of how difficult or unlikely it is (‘I Didn’t Hear No Bell: As democratic Czechoslovakia, lose the Sudetenland, then grant autonomy to Slovakia, then defeat Germany’). There is a subset of players that pursue these, but very few of them are related to the historic strategic ends of the major players in WWII.

Finally, of course, there is map-painting. After all, like all of Paradox’s grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron IV is played on a gigantic world map, so it makes sense for players, looking to demonstrate or compare their success at the game, look to see who has painted as much of the map their country’s color. It is the most immediately perceptible outcome of effective gameplay and so one many players focus on. But, as we’ll see, while seizing or holding territory was obviously an important aim of many countries during WWII, it wasn’t the ultimate aim – no one was simply running armies around to engage in ‘map painting,’ they had goals that went beyond lines on a map.

So what were they? And can HoI4‘s systems model them?

By October, 1943, I have pushed south from my initial penetration into Germany, mostly aiming to move along rail lines in good offensive territory. Carving out the heart of Germany means their armies begin to run short on equipment, making it easier to push through the harder territory.
The delaying factor here is that even with logistics companies (which reduce supply weight), my armored fist (now an army made of an even mix of 13 mechanized divisions and 13 armored divisions) needs a lot of supplies to operate, which means that after each ‘push,’ I need to make sure the logistics are untangled before I can set up for the next one, at least if I want to proceed with minimal losses.

Aims of the Axis

Broadly speaking, the Axis powers went to war with variations on the same basic strategic principle: they wanted to seize territory in order to access sufficient resources to enable a kind of ‘national greatness’ but also – as we’ve discussed – economic self-sufficiency (‘autarky’). The goal was thus not just map-painting for map-painting’s sake, but specific programs of conquest designed to secure specific resources in order to create a specific kind of state – a fully internally self-sufficient empire, based on racial hierarchies in all three cases.

The Nazi version of this approach is often encapsulated into the Nazi slogan Lebensraum (‘living space’), but it is important to be clear here that Lebensraum was about resources as much as territory. Had Hitler been offered the entirety of Antarctica or the Sahara Desert, this would not have qualified as Lebensraum. Instead, Hitler’s aim was about securing not just physical space but resources – critically, farmland – for an expanding (racially defined) German Volk. To some modern ears, the idea that the emphasis here was often on farmland of all things may seem strange, but recall that the Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War had inflicted significant suffering and demonstrated Germany’s lack of agricultural self-sufficiency. Moreover, the Nazi ideal – remember, this is a reactionary ideology – placed a fair bit of stock in the ideal of the (‘racially pure’) German farming family as the bedrock of the Volk.

Consequently, Nazi designs were directed towards seizing huge swaths of Eastern European territory – mostly for farmland (but also other resources) – and mass murdering or enslaving the existing inhabitants in order to replace them with German settler-colonists. The basic ideological foundations of these plans reach back into the pre-WWI period, but find clear expression in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), so they are very early components of Nazi ideology. Perhaps the clearest (and most horrifying) vision of this end is in Generalplan Ost (‘General Plan East’), crafted in 1940 and 1941 in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union but building on earlier thinking. This plan – of which the Hunger Plan already mentioned was a component – proposed murdering tens of millions of Eastern Europeans in order to facilitate a mass program of German colonial settlement.

Italian fascists had their own vision of ‘living space’ – Spazio vitale in Italian. It envisaged both a campaign of settler colonization over the ‘small space’ (piccolo spazio) at the core of this new empire and then resource extraction from the ‘large space’ (grande spazio) of imperial dependencies. Once again, resources – viable agricultural land, raw materials and so on – were of core importance in defining the extent of this ‘living space.’ As with the German conception of Lebensraum, fascist Italy sought to conquer a region large enough to sustain an imperial state without trade, by creating a system of ethnic subjugation and resource extraction.

Japan’s conception of its war aims were only modestly different, albeit complicated by the fact that whereas Germany and Italy had singular leaders with singular ideologies, Japan’s belligerence was driven by competing factions within its government. Thus, for instance, the ignition of major war with China in 1937 was not the product of the central Japanese government but the actions of elements of the Kwantung Army. That said, the Japanese government backed these sorts of actions so I am going to take a view here, as it were, that ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’ Thus, even if Japanese actions ‘bubbled up’ from junior officers or resulted from competition between the IJN and the IJA, the fact that Imperial Japan backed and justified those actions make them state polity. Viewed in that light, combined with the (sometimes retroactive) justifications, Imperial Japanese state policy is quite clear and, again, only modestly different from the other Axis powers.

Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – the euphemistic label Japan applied to its empire – was primarily focused on resource extraction rather than colonial settlement. The Japanese home islands were densely populated and – by the standards of the time – highly developed, but relatively resource poor. Rather than trade for these resources or resettle the Japanese population en masse outside of Japan itself, the Japanese aim was to construct an empire (composed substantially out of puppet occupation governments) where the conquered populace would serve as an expendable labor force for the extraction of raw materials for Japan’s industry and a captive market for the finished goods Japan produced. The main difference here is that whereas the Nazis imagined an empire almost entirely of colonial settlement with very little resource-extraction-overlordship and the Italian fascists imagined an empire split between the two, Imperial Japan’s aims were almost entirely for resource-extraction-overlordship, with very little colonial settlement.

In all three cases, these aims were fundamentally economic more than territorial. The end goal was not ‘buffer states’ or a return to some past territory (even Italian aims included territory never ruled even by the Romans, such as Ethiopia), but rather an empire whose brutal extraction could sustain a certain standard of living for the ruling racial class through the subjugation or murder of other racial classes.

Which then leads us to…

In order to clear up my logistics situation and to complete the effective destruction of the Wehrmacht, I spend the fall of 1943 cutting southward out of my massive salient, eventually connecting to the Maginot line by taking Baden. This creates an enormous pocket with roughly 200 Axis divisions trapped in it. The pocket is out of supply basically instantly, with the result that attrition will weaken these forces as the perimeter closes and they’ll all end up total losses.
Of course with so much of the Axis forces trapped in that pocket, there’s functionally no hope of making a real fight for Berlin and it falls to my advancing British forces in March of 1944.
The Soviet Union has still not – and will not – join the war.

The Aims of the Allies

The western allies (Britain, the countries of its Commonwealth, France and the United States, inter alia), entered the war primarily as status quo powers, with stated war aims – the disarming of the Axis and the dismantling of their empires – which largely aimed to return the world to something like the pre-war status quo. That said the way the war turned out mattered greatly to these powers in ways worth discussing.

Britain and France both entered the war as the victors of WWI, leading global great powers and with large colonial empires. After the war’s end, both countries would strive, fight and eventually fail to retain those empires and to defend their great power status. In a very real sense, then, Britain and France, while winning the war, fundamentally lost a grip on their long-term strategic aims. For France, it isn’t hard to see why – they were occupied during the way and the process of dismantling their empire, only partially reversed by the war’s end, began while France, as an occupied country, could do little to stop it.

For the British Empire, despite winning the war and never being occupied, the war fundamentally, fatally weakened an empire that was already (as we noted last time) beginning to slip away in any case. Some of these causes were ideological and political: as in World War I, the Commonwealth states having done their bit felt a renewed sense of pride and increasingly independent feelings. This, as an aside, is one of the only things here HoI4 actually models: war participation by colonial states pushes them towards independence, so a United Kingdom that finds itself unable to win the war except by leaning heavily on its empire finds that empire slipping away even faster for the effort.

What is missing here are the economic causes: the United Kingdom, by the end of WWII was economically exhausted. Winning the war had required suppressing consumer demand and turning the economy over to military production which is a fundamentally unproductive kind of production in that no one can eat bombs. The United Kingdom had begun rationing food supplies and other basic necessities (clothing, soap, fuel, etc) in 1939 and kept rationing some essentials as late as 1954 as the economy struggled to recover. British economic weakness – currency weakness and reliance on fuel imports, among other things – created the leverage that the United States (in part) used to force the British to back down during the Suez Crisis (1956), the event which effectively marked the end of Britain and France’s status as great powers.

Meanwhile, understandably, a country still under rationing, recovering from the economic devastation of the war and absolutely exhausted by it, was equally unwilling to summon the will to spend even more money and even more lived in a likely doomed effort to maintain its overseas empire by force.

Of course the United States stands as a stark contrast: military spending during the war functioned as a massive economic stimulus, while at the same time the United States suppressed consumer demand via rationing (for a shorter time and far less harshly) during the war, leading to a lot of households ending the war with money in their pockets because there had been money to be made during the war but nothing to spend it on. The result, famously, when the war ended was the economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s, which provided the economic muscle for the United States to act as one of the world’s two Cold War-era superpowers.

There is, of course, an irony that the country that ended up at war’s end with the highest standard of living wasn’t the one that had conquered any territory for resources, but the United States, which owed its renewed prosperity to domestic, internal economic factors as well as a gleeful enthusiasm for one of the things the Axis powers hated: trade.

The Soviet Union’s war aims are a bit harder to parse, in part because some of the claimed aims (the USSR promised to create independent new countries in Eastern Europe) were disingenuous (the Soviet Union instead produced puppet-states, disciplined with military force) and because the Soviet Union spent some time, effectively, on both sides of the conflict. Initially, the USSR used the war, in 1939 and 1940, as an opportunity for territorial expansion into Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland, with both an ideological objective (expanding the Soviet model of Communism) and a geo-strategic one (establishing ‘buffer states’ protecting the Soviet core). After the war, those same aims appeared with the Soviet creation of a network of satellite states built on the Soviet model (with the threat of the Red Army to maintain it) in what would become the Warsaw Pact, while at the same time combined with a desire (shared by the western allies) to limit Germany’s ability to upset the global order again.

This set of Soviet objectives are also one of the few Hearts of Iron IV can really model, as it is possible to create ideologically pliable satellite states in the peace conference system, although because the game ends in 1948 (and in practice runs out most of its content by 1945) these states mostly exist as trophies rather than actually doing anything. That said, it doesn’t really model them well; notionally this effort was also supposed to make believers in the Soviet system out of Eastern Europe but as we’ve discussed before the game’s political model is far too simplistic to really capture or simulate that kind of shift in political opinion or consciousness and by the time it would matter the game has lost interest in any event.

What you may note, however, is that for a lot of the countries involved – the USSR is a partial exception but only a partial one – the overall strategic end-states (both desired and achieved) end up as fundamentally economic in nature, revolving around the standard of living that the post-war order could provide and the consequent tolerance of the population for further spending on expensive foreign political programs (the British Empire, the Marshall Plan, the Warsaw Pact, NATO, etc.).

Can Hearts of Iron IV simulate these aims? Broadly speaking, no. I’ve noted the few exceptions, but generally no. It can simulate the map painting component, but the underlying economic realities that the map-painting (or lack thereof) are supposed to produce, it is almost entirely incapable of even simulating, much less representing to the player, much less presenting as an end-state. The actual strategic aims of the major powers in WWII largely fall completely outside of Hearts of Iron IV‘s vision of history, a striking failing for a grand strategy game which cannot model the grand strategies of any of the great powers of the 1940s.

By late March, most of Germany is under occupation and allied troops are entering Poland. Italy is the only really functional Axis combatant (you cannot see it here but in a few months the USA is going to start naval-invading the Japanese home islands) and Italy cannot even hold off France, much less everyone else.
At this point, the game is mostly an exercise in pointing and clicking – Axis armies are weak enough in most places (while my forces remain fully supplied, equipped and reinforced) that I can advance almost at will, even just pushing forward with my defensively-oriented infantry divisions.

Empty Shelves

The main problem here is that nearly all of these war aims historically fed back into economic questions: the availability of resources, of agricultural land (‘living space’), of a trade-based, prosperity-inclined global order, the existence or absence of rationing and consumer goods and overall standard of living. For Germany and Italy, these were combined by what we might bloodlessly term demographic goals – the mass murder and enslavement of tens of millions of people in order to enable a program of mass agricultural resettlement of their lands.

But Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic system doesn’t simulate any of this feedback, making it impossible for the game to even model these strategic priorities – I want to repeat that, the game cannot model the strategic priorities of countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom or the United States – much less present them to players as potential strategic end-states.

A major part of the problem is the underdeveloped civilian industrial system. As noted last week, Hearts of Iron IV ‘taxes’ each country a certain percentage of its factories to produce civilian consumer goods, a percentage which decreases as a country increases its economic mobilization law, which reflects war-time rationing leading to less domestic consumption. Notably, however, these consumer goods factories both consume no resources (besides the coal that everything does) and produce nothing.

So on the one hand, there is no point to engaging in military expansion to secure the resources for any kind of domestic industry except armaments production, because no kind of industry except armaments production actually uses raw resources as the game models them. Armies do conquest and conquest feeds armies but neither of these ever feed back into anything else. In terms of raw factory counts, raw resources – except for coal – are entirely superfluous to industrial expansion. So long as building slots exist, any country can happily keep plopping down civilian factories and infrastructure and never really face any kind of resource shortage.

Meanwhile, HoI4 does not simulate standard of living or the civilian supply of goods at all. The contrast with Europa Universalis V or Victoria II or III – where goods production feeds back both into state revenues but also into the goods available for consumption by pops and thus into stability and politics – is marked. In HoI4‘s economic system, consumer goods usage is simply modeled as waste: it does not result in economic growth, it does not influence politics and there is no standard of living mechanic for it to influence.

Of course historically, rationing – which is how you actually reduce the ‘consumer goods’ percentage of industry – mattered a lot. It was politically contentious in the democracies both during the war and (for Britain) in the years following. In most countries, the demands of the war meant that most luxuries vanished from stores fairly early on, while in many countries – particularly the Axis powers and the Soviet Union – the war’s demands meant that necessities were rationed tighter and tighter, until things like calorie allotments for civilians were truly parlous. It matters, as a historical matter, that the outcome of a war that was supposed to guarantee prosperity and plenty to specific racial groups instead delivered them want and starvation.

Meanwhile the game is likewise incapable of modeling the post-war situation either. Apart from Germany’s unique MEFO bills, the game doesn’t simulate the ways in which countries fought the war by effectively borrowing from the future – either by direct debt financing or by suppressing consumer demand to focus entirely on military production. There is no way, for instance, for the United Kingdom to rack up lend lease debt or end up in a situation at the end of the war where the historical massive Anglo-American loan was required simply to keep the British economy running as it transitioned away from military production (which in turn would also require Marshall Plan assistance).

Instead, as discussed last time, Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic simulation features spiraling, out-of-control growth because it treats consumer goods as a kind of waste that is reduced by war economies, leading to economies becoming more productive rather than less as a result of mobilization (the opposite of the thing that happened). As a result, it has no way of simulating France and Britain being effectively bankrupted by the war, nor of simulating the United States’ unique position as the one major world economy that hadn’t been blasted into rubble. Instead, everyone finishes the war with vastly larger economies than when they started.

The only major exception to this rule is Germany’s MEFO bills. Historically, MEFO bills were an economic gimmick created by Hjalmar Schacht to allow Germany to run an enormous deficit without that deficit showing up on the government’s balance sheet thus enabling massive fiscal stimulus (via rearmament) without a visible exploding debt, though of course the whole thing about the MEFO bills is that they would have to come due eventually (these were 6-month bills, but you could ‘kite’ them for a time by issuing more), but Germany went to war, initiating rationing and a government controlled economy (and then collapsed) first.

The game models this interaction, with MEFO bills giving a quick injection of economic production and suppressing the consumer goods percentage, but with a nasty hangover down the line. However the game provides an a-historical ‘out’ – the start of the war enables the MEFO Bills national spirit to be transformed into ‘Economy of Conquest’ which then can be modified via ‘Autarky Achieved’ directly into Wirtschaftswunder (the term for the post-war economic recovery in Austria and West Germany) once Germany has seized enough raw industrial resources, which resolves the issue.

The major problem with this interaction, from a ‘vision of history’ perspective, is that it presents as if the Nazis could have permanently dodged the economic costs of their war if only they had won, which is almost certainly untrue. Historically, the Nazis looted aggressively across their new European empire and never got out ahead of the massive obligations the state was incurring doing all of the war – instead, even as the Nazis pushed deep into Russia, civilian supplies and rationing had to be aggressively cut back. It was not, in fact, possible for the Third Reich to conquer its way out of bad economic decisions and the fact that Hearts of Iron IV creates an entire focus and event chain to pretend that it was is another way that it ends up – for game balance reasons (Germany has to be able to win!) – endorsing a false and fascist view of history and economics.

Had the Soviet Union collapsed early in 1943, Nazi Germany would still had been burdened with internal debts it could not pay, store shelves it could not stock and people it could not feed, which is a big part of why it was planning to starve more than forty million of those people to death simply to make the math begin to work. I honestly find it a bit offensive that the game uses the historical term Wirtschaftswunder for the end-state here, because it implies that butchery and conquest – if it had worked – could have been a shortcut to the kind of prosperity that West Germany achieved in the 1950s, but the historical Wirtschaftswunder was based on sound currency (something the Nazis did not do), trade and economic integration (something the Nazis hated) and financial assistance from the United States (something the Nazis would never get). It feels like a piece of historical economic stolen valor, to be frank, to give the name of a historical thing accomplished with the opposite methods and ideology of the Nazis as the result of implementing Nazi economics fully.

However, beyond this industrial policy, the game cannot really model fascist economics either. Because of the already-discussed policy of indifference to Nazi war crimes, the game has no way of modeling Nazi efforts to create Lebensraum in the East or the possible effects this would have had. Nazi industrial policy is presented as a workable plan to use conquest as a short-cut to the kind of economy modern Germany has – highly industrialized, based heavily on trade – rather than an insane plan to attempt to murder their way to prosperity through a program of agricultural expansion that I think it is fair to say was doomed to failure no matter what happened. Homesteading was not going to be the winning economic model of the 1950s.

The result is a game that is incapable of modeling the actual war aims and strategic ends of the major combatants in World War II, despite being a grand strategy game about World War II.

Germany capitulates in May, but Italy gets a remarkable reprieve in June…
As Nationalist Spain jumps into the war on the Axis side. Their initial gains into France are checked as France and I rush containing forces there and then behind them moving along the rails, the hammer of the V Armored. There isn’t enough pressure on my front line in the East to stop me from shifting all of my heavy divisions west to simply smash Spain down.
Spain will be capitulated back out of the war by mid-July.

Will The Mods Save Us?

Before we can wrap this all up into a set of conclusions, we need to discuss the modding scene. Hearts of Iron IV is unusual as strategy games go because of the huge popularity of its mods, which range from small quality of life changes to massive total conversions which transport the game’s core structures into completely different settings. Something like two-thirds of Hearts of Iron IV players play with mods at least some of the time, though it is important to caveat that figure both that not every mod is a total conversion and also not every person running mods runs them all the time. Vanilla HoI4 is still the modal experience of HoI4, but the mod community is huge and a lot of players are running mods.

Can the mods fix Hearts of Iron IV? Kind of?

Most HoI4 mods are subscribed to through Steam’s Workshop feature, so we can get a decent view of the space here and I want to be clear that we’re really considering two separate things: the community of modders (who make the mods) and the community of mod-players. Here is, as I write this, the currently most subscribed mods on the workshop:

We have a few quality of life mods (Chinese localization, FPS Map, a peace conference system revision), a timeline expansion (The Road to 56), a mod that shifts the system earlier (The Great War) and later (Cold War Iron Curtain) and one alternate world total conversion (Old World Blues, set in the Fallout universe).

And then we have alternate-history What If Germany Won World War I? (Kaiserreich), and alternate-history What if Germany Won World War II? (The New Order) and Millenium Dawn, a modern day conversion to the game that got so popular with neo-Nazis that the creator – who is not a Nazi – had to burn down his own forums as the only way to get them out. Fully half of the top six mods for this game are ones that have – shall we say – unique appeal to Nazi-inclined gamers.

And that is the state of affairs, I must note, after Paradox Interactive actively purges the Workshop of openly Nazi mods.

Now, I want to be clear: is Kaiserreich a pro-Nazi mod? No, it is not. But in a crowded modding marketplace where most people only look at the titles, you would have to be a little daft not to recognize the bit of marketing work being done by a mod which overhauls basically the entire map calling itself Kaiserreich – and what it means for the community that this name was evidently the second best possible choice after “The Road to 56.”

Is The New Order a pro-Nazi mod? No, it is not; if anything it is more skeptical of the Nazi social, economic and political program than the base game, which is to say that it expresses any skepticism at all (and it does as does Kaiserreich). But do these mods have some obvious appeal to modern neo-Nazis? Yes, obviously. While it is the case that both Kaiserreich and TNO at this point have a ton of content for countries that are not Germany, it is also the case that they’re called Kaiserreich and The New Order: Last Days of Europe and that there are two alternate history ‘what if Germany won…’ mods in the top six mods (the 21st most popular, Thousand Week Reich, is also this). Before we get to any other country getting a focused alternate history, we also have to pass a mod named after the Nazi victory slogan (Endsieg; again, the mod is no more Nazi than Hearts of Iron but the appeal is obvious), to get to the first country-specific non-German overhaul, Pax Britannica (36th in popularity; ‘what if Britain but science fiction’), which has 12% of the subscribers that Kaiserreich does.

This is, I must stress, the situation with all the Nazi mods removed and their creators banned by Paradox as soon as they are noticed. In short, the Nazi problem in the Hearts of Iron IV modding scene is old and well-known.

I want to be clear here that I am not accusing the makers of these specific mods (as opposed to now-removed infamous Nazi mods like “Aryan Goddess” and “Deus Vult” (made by a guy calling himself TauronSS)) of being Nazis or fascists or friendly to Nazis or fascists. What I am pointing out is this is exactly the modding scene you would expect for a game that had a serious Nazi-bar problem, but also had the developers actively purging any openly pro-Nazi or pro-fascist modding content. You’d end up with the most popular stuff frequently being borderline material that isn’t pro-Nazi per-se but happens to focus on the elements that Nazi players want to focus on the most without breaching the modding rules.

If I may strain an analogy, if you walked into a store that sold key-chains with initials on them and realized looking at the shelf that they sell three times as many ‘SS’ keychains as any other letter combination, you would not rush to assume that it just so happens that everyone in town is named Simon Smith. You might even draw the conclusion that the store owner – despite not being named Simon Smith and professing that he didn’t like the Simon Smiths – nevertheless seemed a bit too comfortable making their keychains.

Of course real-world alternate history mods are not the only kind. As we’ve discussed, HoI4 has a remarkably good operational military model, one of the best out there. And there are any number of mods which take that operational model and transport it into a context where it is simply no longer expressing a theory of history at all – mods like Old World Blues (set in the Fallout universe) or Equestria at War (set, incredibly, in the My Little Pony universe). Those mods are really popular too (albeit generally not as much as the alt-history-Germany mods, make of that what you will), and there is certainly an argument that by transporting the game into an alternate world they ‘save’ the operational simulator by ditching the bad history it is freighted to in the base game.

What I think the mod scene signifies is the complex nature of the Hearts of Iron IV player-base. The joke I have heard is that the HoI4 player-base is effectively split three ways: one third are hardened Nazis, one third are History Dads and one third are purple-haired LGBTQ ultra-libs. I doubt those numbers are right, but it speaks to both the diversity of this player-base and also to its very awkward and quite visible Nazi problem. But I don’t think the modding community can ‘save’ Hearts of Iron IV, because it is simply a reflection of the game’s player-base.

Italy capitulates in September of 1944, leading to a peace conference and the end of the war in Europe. My ‘War Contribution’ percentage of 65% (the next highest is 8%) means I basically get to dictate the peace to the world. I let France set affairs in Italy and Spain, while I take occupation of most of central Europe and also Iraq.
This was notionally in preparation for a ’round 2′ against the USSR, however I ran into a snag here that has ended the playthrough: because the USSR didn’t actually enter the war (and the game doesn’t count the seizure of the Baltics or Eastern Poland as generating World Tension), I actually have no way of declaring war on the USSR to recover the rest of Poland (the ‘Embargo the Soviet Union’ and ‘Operation Unthinkable’ focuses are gated by the USSR producing meaningful World Tension).
Consequently, I’ve opted to end the run here, although if I could declare war on the USSR at this point I would have no problems winning, given the combined strength of the allies and my access to all of the resources and industry of central Europe.

Conclusions

The last time I am aware of that Paradox released who-plays-what-country statistics was in 2023. At that point, the top 10 played nations in the game were:

Germany22%
Soviet Union12%
Nationalist China6%
Communist China6%
Italy4%
United States4%
Japan4%
France3%
The United Kingdom2%
Turkey2%

And it just seems relevant in a game that is about a war between the Axis powers, the Soviet Union and the western allies, the western allies – the democracies in that war – have fewer players collectively (9%) than the two halves of the Chinese Civil War (12%) or the Soviet Union alone (12%), much less, of course, Germany. Indeed, more people are playing Germany than any given three other countries added together.

There’s a relic of the game’s development I find interesting: the game’s main theme, dating from the base game’s release in 2016, was the theme of the (western) Allies. The initial cover art features MacArthur in the center, with one commander each from Britain, Germany, Japan and the USSR. In short, at launch, the game attempted to present, in important ways, the Allies as the ‘main characters,’ a stance that made more sense at the beginning when the focus trees of the Allies were roughly as (un)developed as those of the Axis.

I do not think anyone looking at Hearts of Iron IV today has any problem correctly assessing that its ‘main character’ is Nazi Germany. Evidently the player-base knows.

And before I get a chorus of loud complaints in the comments, I want to be clear what I am saying here and what I am not saying. I am not saying that everyone who plays Hearts of Iron IV does so because they like Nazi Germany or the Axis more broadly. Instead, what we see in the community around this game is one in which the majority of players are what we may fairly call ‘anti-Nazis’ but that at the same time the game has attracted an unusually vocal, unusually large minority following of extremists, kept in check primarily by the fact that their voices are actively, continually suppressed in the Paradox forums, the Steam Workshop and related communities like r/hoi4.1

And that prompts a follow on question: why? One answer, of course, is simply that this is a World War II game and the Second World War is an obvious touchstone for Nazi-sympathizers. But certainly one does not get the immediate sense that all World War II games and media draw this kind of following.

I think in the process of working through Hearts of Iron IV‘s vision of history we come to a clearer answer: Hearts of Iron IV, often in the interest of streamlining and game balance, has blundered into offering a vision of history which is inaccurate in the specific ways that are likely to be flattering to pro-Nazi and pro-fascist players.

Whereas in practice, historians generally regard World War II as a contest between economic and political systems in which fascism proved inferior,2 HoI4 presents battlefield skill and operational art as the most important thing in war, exactly as the Axis powers thought. Whereas in practice, the war and the Cold War that followed it demonstrated the considerable advantages of liberal democracies and free market economies, HoI4 presents both democracy and market economics as liabilities, weak systems that are nothing but negatives, exactly as the Axis powers thought. Whereas historically, the Nazi economic plan of economic stabilization through conquest and mass murder had functionally no hope of success, in HoI4, it can work and even produce an economic miracle, exactly as the Axis powers thought.

In short, although the war itself demonstrated that Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism simply didn’t work as ideological, economic, political or cultural systems, Hearts of Iron IV instead posits a world in which they work exactly as their proponents – exactly as modern fascists – wish they did.

And of course, whereas historically the armies of the Axis, especially but not exclusively those of Nazi Germany, committed horrific atrocities wherever they went, Hearts of Iron IV functions as a ‘clean Wehrmacht simulator,’ reinforcing the post-war lie peddled by Nazi officers that presented the Wehrmacht as innocent of Nazi crimes (which were attributed all to the SS). That line, of course, plays into modern neo-Nazi minimization of Nazi crimes in a progression that has become blandly predictable in certain online spaces: they didn’t happen, or if they did happen the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht didn’t do them, or if they did they were good actually.

Put even more bluntly, Hearts of Iron IV has unintentionally created a simulator that presents World War II as modern fascists would like it to be. One suspects that at least some of the folks at Paradox are not wholly unaware of this – somewhat infamously the advertising for the major Germany update, Götterdämmerung, in 2024 veered more than a little uncomfortably towards Nazi propaganda.

Of course at the same time the shame of it is this game is built atop a truly remarkable operational simulator which does a really good job in expressing why operations in World War II took the form they did, shaped by terrain and logistics as much as by tanks and shells. And while the civilian industrial model is pretty flawed, the military industrial model is equally instructive in presenting some interesting trade-offs, even if it is forced to treat German and Japanese mistakes as if they were valid policies that could have succeeded in the long-run.

I do not think it is impossible to play Hearts of Iron IV responsibly. But I do think players need to go into this game forewarned and forearmed that the design and balance decisions made to make it an interesting strategy game also serve to skew the history it is presenting in very frustrating ways. And equally, I think the developers at Paradox need to give a lot more thought to how – if these balance choices are unavoidable for gameplay reasons – they can offer responsible historical framing to make clear to players what and how large the concessions to gameplay have been.

It might equally be worth asking, given where, very evidently, the development time and focus in the game have gone, why this is a game where the western allies – who emerged triumphant from the war and the Cold War that followed it – are less heavily played and have far less content than the Axis (or even really just Germany), who lost it.

But, for as much as I enjoy playing it (I have almost 600 hours in HoI4 and more than 300 in HoI3), Hearts of Iron IV is easily the most historically troublesome and flawed entry in Paradox’s catalog, a produce to be consumed with care because of how skewed its historical perspective is and how little effort there is to signal to the player the nature of that skew.

Instead, the game tilts unsteadily on the very edge of unintentional fascist propaganda, the sort of product that we do not teach…but find ourselves having to un-teach.

The Aviationist
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
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Letters from an American

October 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Flávio Bolsonaro’s escape from Brazil to Miami turns out to have been arranged, in part, by White House officials including Trump advisor Jason Miller, who arranged for a charter jet to take the Bolsonaros from Argentina to Florida.

Edward Wong, Ana Ionova, Hamed Aleaziz, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that Trump himself ordered the State Department to give temporary status to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family on humanitarian grounds. U.S. officials told the reporters that the government will likely grant them permanent residency later.

Wall Street Journal reporters Vera Bergengruen, Samantha Pearson, Ryan Dubé, and Philip Wegmann write that Bolsonaro intends to set up a political system in exile, despite the fact that more than 50 countries, including Latin American leaders from a wide range of political persuasions, have recognized the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s election. Lula won by more than 4.4 million votes. International observers call that margin decisive.

Trump has refused to recognize Lula’s victory, suggesting that the votes against the right-wing Bolsonaro were rigged. But, as the Wall Street Journal reporters add, it is unclear how much political capital he will be willing to expend on propping up Bolsonaro’s pretensions to power.

Trump’s own energies have been devoted to trying to project authority and power, but he has succeeded primarily in illustrating that he is far more concerned with his development projects than with what’s going on in the White House. Yesterday he posted at length on social media about the East Potomac Golf Course he wants to redo—the one where the administration cut down more than 400 trees in defiance of a judge’s order—saying it “is highly dangerous, dilapidated, and absolutely disgusting” and calling for it to be “closed immediately for safety reasons!”

Last night, Eric Flack of WUSA9 reported that the National Park Service told a federal judge it is closing not just the East Potomac Golf Course, but also nearly all of Hains Point beginning on November 15. As Flack notes, this area includes “the perimeter running loop, the dedicated bike and pedestrian lane the Park Service completed in 2023, and the picnic areas and open space used year-round.” The Park Service did not say how long the closure would last. Trump promised: “After we are done, the East Potomac Course will be a place of immeasurable Pride for the City, all of the Golf Enthusiasts who live here, a Course worthy of and befitting our Nation’s Capital.”

Rachel Treisman of NPR reports that plans for the finished park show only a golf course. The current facilities for walkers, runners, cyclists, birders, picnickers, and so on, are not shown.

Trump is paying less attention to the affairs of government. Today, when asked about claims that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had fired Lieutenant General Sylvia for leaking classified information from the Pentagon, Trump responded: “She’s got problems. She’s gonna have big problems. She did. We’re very much looking for leakers and ah, she’s going to have big problems. Long-term problems.”

Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the director for strategy, plans, and policy on the joint staff that advises the president on military issues, is a man.

Tonight Shauneen Miranda of News From the States reported that Trump has cancelled his rallies in Kansas and Iowa, planned for this weekend. When a reporter asked if the Kansas cancellation meant he was “sick of traveling,” Trump exploded, calling the reporter “sick” and “disgusting” and saying, “You look like hell.”

Trump is also expending his energies in trying to convince Americans that the Democrats are rigging the 2026 midterms.

The administration has tried to force California to set aside 20,000 ballots in the election, claiming that those casting them might not be citizens. Yesterday, as Ryan Sabalow of Cal Matters reported, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter refused to agree, saying the Trump administration is engaging in “a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference.” Carter noted that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also sent letters to the secretaries of state in New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania claiming that the states’ voter rolls include noncitizens. Mullin publicly alleged there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada, then quietly dropped that number to 185. When Nevada officials chased down the 185 names, every single one belonged to a U.S. citizen.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote. “This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election.”

The administration has asked a federal appeals court to rule by Friday on an emergency attempt to stop California from including those 20,000 ballots in the ballot count. In the meantime, as Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog reported, this afternoon the leadership of the Department of Justice directed California’s top federal prosecutors to launch criminal investigations of local and state officials, claiming they are administering illegal voting.

In a “but her emails” kind of moment, the administration is also jumping on yesterday’s New York Times story by Kellen Browning that a staffer for the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Alaska, Mary Peltola, searched for and recruited a man with a name similar to that of the Republican candidate, Dan Sullivan, as a spoiler for the race.

Browning reported that this sort of activity, called “ballot stacking,” is “common in politics and generally considered legal—and [has] been employed by both parties in Alaska,” and that Republicans had used it against Peltola herself two years ago. The author suggested the story was important simply because it “reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.”

The source for the story, Peltola’s former campaign manager Elisa Rios, said Peltola was not directly involved in the project but was “definitely aware.” Before publication of the story, Browning notes, Rios “contacted The Times and said she wanted to take back her previous statements. ‘As discussed on our call earlier today, I am confirming that I have retracted all statements made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race in connection with any article you may or may not be writing,’ Ms. Rios wrote. ‘I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.’”

Peltola’s campaign, Peltola, and Daniel J. Sullivan all deny any involvement in a ballot-stacking plan. Sullivan says he ran because he was dissatisfied with the performance of Senator Sullivan. Ballot stacking runs into legal trouble if a candidate is paid to run. No one has said this is the case in the 2026 Alaska race.

On October 23 the Justice Department sued Alaskan election officials to block the certification of a winner in Alaska’s Senate race unless the Republican won, saying the inclusion of Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot might confuse voters who wanted to elect Senator Dan Sullivan, who, unlike Daniel, is listed on the ballot both as a Republican and as the incumbent.

With the publication of the New York Times story, Trump promptly took to social media to call the scheme illegal “ELECTION FRAUD.” He called for Peltola and Daniel J. Sullivan to be removed from the Alaska ballot, letting Republican Senator Dan Sullivan run essentially unopposed.

The Justice Department promptly issued at least three dozen subpoenas and requests for the preservation of documents. On Wednesday night, Republican Alaska governor Mike Dunleavy announced he was ordering an investigation into whether Peltola’s campaign should face criminal charges or civil penalties, although he did not identify any illegality.

Michael Kosnar, Megan Brand, and Raquel Coronell Uribe of NBC News reported that, at Dunleavy’s request, “Alaska’s Department of Public Safety Deputy Commissioner Austin McDaniel said Thursday that the Alaska Bureau of Investigation had started looking into the ‘alleged conduct in a recent New York Times article.’”

Today the New York Times ran two stories noting that ballot stacking is common and legal. A piece by Reid J. Epstein explained that while the Alaska race “has drawn the most attention,... both parties are quietly trying to use little-known candidates in other battlegrounds to siphon votes.” Epstein explained that in Ohio, for example, Republicans are promoting a socialist candidate to take votes from Democratic candidate, former senator Sherrod Brown.

Another piece by Madison Malone Kircher, titled “Ballot Stacking in Elections? History Shows It’s Not Unusual,” listed some of the more spectacular instances of ballot stacking in U.S. history, including the 2020 Florida state senate race in which a Republican paid Alexis Pedro Rodriguez to challenge an incumbent Democrat, state senator José Javier Rodríguez. It worked. The challenger won more than 6,000 votes, 32 more than the incumbent, and the Republicans flipped the seat. In that case, the exchange of money crossed the legal line, and the challenger later pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes.

But the context for the Alaska story arrived too late: Trump and Republicans are pushing the story as hard as they can to suggest Democrats are cheating in the midterm elections.

Another ballot-stacking story from this week adds even more context to the Alaska story. Donald Shaw of Sludge, the home for investigative journalism on money in politics, reported that a review of tax records shows that the nonprofit organization that helped to get Cornel West on the 2024 presidential ballot got all of its $7.7 million in funding that year from a right-wing political network bankrolled by Elon Musk. West, a leftist Black intellectual, was widely seen as a spoiler to siphon votes from Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

And there is, in fact, reason to be concerned about the Alaska election process. Eric Stone and Hannah Flor of Alaska Public Media reported on Tuesday that polling places in some rural areas failed to open as schedules said they would. Democratic state senator Bill Wielechowski wrote to Division of Elections director Carol Beecher and Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom on October 23 to say that “at least 18” rural early voting locations “have failed to open as legally required.” He noted that in the primary, “dozens of rural Alaskan voters did not have their absentee in-person votes counted because it took too long for their ballots to arrive by mail to the Division’s regional office,” and expressed concern the same thing could happen in the general election. He called the Division’s failures “shocking.”

Dahlstrom responded: “Of the eighteen sites listed in your letter, three have now declined to open, twelve have confirmed they are open, and we are working to hear from the remaining three locations.” She noted that these early polling locations were free to change their hours.

Meanwhile, there has been widespread talk that Trump intends to restart the military assault against Iran after the election, and it appears a plan is in place should he decide to do so. Yesterday, at the Middle East Institute, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said that the war plan that has been prepared for the administration “is insane…. It will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law.” He continued: “[T]he plan that they have developed will lead, in my view, to a prolongment and an escalation of this war that will be devastating for our security interests.”

—

Notes:

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/how-bolsonaro-fled-brazil-decoys-a-private-jet-and-a-friend-in-the-white-house-a752b829

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/americas/flavio-bolsonaro-trump-brazil-us.html

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/legal/east-potomac-golf-course-president-trump-interior-department/65-68782d64-df36-4443-88e3-4e5c4f3980bd

https://www.npr.org/2026/10/23/nx-s1-6010488/east-potomac-trump-golf-hains-point

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-calls-reporter-disgusting-when-questioned-about-not-traveling-to-kansas

https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/trump-cancels-weekend-kansas-and-iowa-rallies-5-days-ahead-election

https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/10/trump-ballot-claims-california-ruling/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28856709-carter-order/

https://electionlawblog.org/2026/more-attempted-intimidation-of-election-officials-from-doj-exclusive-doj-orders-criminal-probes-of-california-officials-over-ballots/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/doj-demands-ruling-by-friday-on-emergency-bid-to-stop-california-from-counting-ballots-from-alleged-noncitizens/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/alaska-dan-sullivan-conspiracy-peltola.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/trump-justice-department-lawsuit-alaska-senate-rcna605229

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/midterms-third-party-independent-candidates.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/trump-peltola-sullivan-alaska-senate.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/elections/ballot-stacking-alaska.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/mike-dunleavy-orders-investigation-mary-peltola-campaign-dan-sullivan-rcna606316

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/midterms-third-party-independent-candidates.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/elections/ballot-stacking-alaska.html

https://readsludge.com/2026/10/26/musk-linked-dark-money-network-funded-the-group-behind-cornel-wests-ballot-push/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28847757-letter-to-lt-governor-and-doe-10-23-26/

https://alaskapublic.org/news/politics/elections/2026-10-27/some-rural-alaska-absentee-voting-sites-failed-to-open-ahead-of-midterms

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28847756-letter-to-senator-wielchowski-re-avos-102626/

https://newrepublic.com/post/217352/plan-insane-democratic-senator-murphy-warning-next-stage-iran-war

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42813

statuses/42824

statuses/42816

X:

ChrisMurphyCT/status/2115809671151751545

Bluesky:

bcfinucane.bsky.social/post/3mz2jgkbjuk2m

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, October 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Watch today’s live recording here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

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

You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
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Threads
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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, October 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

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

You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok

Marginal Revolution

Friday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Dwarkesh interviews Robert Caro (!).

2. New and pretty brutal results on CTE and football.

3. Interview with Dan Wang.

4. Updated version of the Saez-Zucman audit.  Contestable and speculative assumptions are now separated from true defects.

5. Rosalind Arden interviews Greg Clark on social status.

6. GPTs vs. Claudes, in games.

7. The latest from Sam Altman.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Irrational Exuberance

Self-reinforcing quality / adopting verification pattern

After implementing the small-change pattern, Imprint Engineering’s next focus in improving our development loop has been implementing a verification loop for our software development. This is an increasingly common pattern, particularly popularized by poteto’s pstack, but you’ll find similar ideas emerging in other places as well, e.g. Niko Matsakis’ post on the correctness ratchet, among others.

This captures some of the confusion I’ve seen in our initial rollout, and the particulars of how we are implementing the approach.

What verification pattern is, and what it isn’t

The verification pattern suffers from confusing naming: when you tell a team that you’re planning to roll it out, they’ll often ask you what mechanism you’re using to verify the codebase, don’t we already have tests, linters and so on?

However, the verification pattern itself is more similar to the chain-of-thought pattern, which aims to steer the harness towards your desired outcome in a clear way. For example, we require that each pull request generate a verifications/{pr_num}.md file that describes each step the harness took to verify the changes, and also what it was unable to verify.

You can argue that your harness was already performing these steps, but it’s actually hard to say whether it was or wasn’t. My sense is that it often wasn’t happening: I’ve seen too many pull requests go to CICD that had failed basic lints that could have been run locally to believe the harness was always running them. Now the harness has to explicitly document that it’s done those steps, or acknowledge it hasn’t. This allows the harness to self-drive more effectively.

Equally importantly, this generates a renewing source of data about where your harness is struggling to verify its work. That list is your roadmap for improving the ability of your harness to self-drive work more reliably over time.

Our verification loop

Verification loop from creating changes through verifying changes

The core of our verification loop is five steps:

  1. Implement something that you’ve identified or that has been identified by an automated system to resolve. Let’s say addressing a new error that’s shown up in the logs.
  2. Create a pull request containing that work after your harness has verified it locally. Pull requests cannot be moved from draft to ready until they have a verifications/{pr}.md verification file available
  3. Provide feedback on the pull request, at minimum from our ai-code-review tool that automatically reviews all pull requests, but potentially also from humans
  4. Incorporate and reject feedback on the pull request. For low quality feedback, we explicitly dismiss it using a /dismiss {reason} syntax in the pull request comment responses
  5. Maintain our systems on a daily basis by pulling in the above steps to improve our software:
    1. Use pstack’s /maintain-verification-skill skill to update the feature maps and tools used based on what has changed and where verifications have run into issues. Automatically generate a pull request with these changes for review
    2. Review all verification files to identify where they struggled to verify, and generate issues for review that would reduce those gaps
    3. Review which feedback from ai-code-review was incorporated and which was rejected, tightening up its guidance

This is working pretty well for us so far, typically each of our major code areas (frontend, backend, data, and native) wakes up with 4-6 pull requests to review as output of this process, improving our codebase’s correctness while we sleep.

feedback tool

The above feedback loop still misses meta-issues in our CICD and testing patterns. To address that, we’ve implemented the feedback tool pattern described by Teddy Riker in Designing for Agents, which has worked very well for us with respect to addressing places where CICD and harnesses themselves are failing above the level of verifying a specific pull request.

feedback and verifications are complementary, not competing, techniques. For example, if the container’s runner crashed before completing, the feedback tool would often report on this issue, whereas the verification file wouldn’t even get generated.

Explore (raise ceiling) vs exploit (raise floor)

One of the fundamental tradeoffs in how organizations approach AI adoption comes down to an explore vs exploit tradeoff. When you explore by having the full team do its own thing, you explore for ideas which can raise the ceiling, but when you centralize you raise the floor by ensuring everyone gets better PR review and better tooling.

The other related–and extremely open–question is whether exploration tends to over-optimize for the particulars of a given individual or team’s preferences, which often reduces cohesion across a codebase. At this point, I think of misaligned guidance as “context poison”, and am pushing hard to eliminate duplicate guidance on any topic, to ensure we have consistent, cohesive direction.

So far, our approach is running this as a centralized process for our repositories, building a single, continually improving, corpus for each area using the self-reinforcing loop built around the verification pattern. I think it’s working well for us, although certainly I’ll admit that there’s some skepticism about how far we go towards centralizing, and I think that skepticism is warranted: we do want to continue exploring, even if we are primarily exploiting. The best techniques for AI-enhanced development in 2027 will be ideas that are mostly unknown today.

The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

Laurie Davies, was this really necessary?

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

Was sitting at home the other day, sorting through all the irksome and irritating mail of crazy season, when this caught my eye …

It’s a campaign post from Assemblywoman Laurie Davies, the incumbent in the 74th and a public figure who seems 99 percent likely to retain her seat. In these parts, the former Laguna Niguel mayor is familiar, present and fairly well-regarded for not being a complete and total asshole. Did she vote for Trump? Certainly. Is she courageous enough to speak out against the national ugliness? No. Is she evil? Certainly not. She’s just a fairly run-of-the-mill regional political figure.

She has also, however, stooped to an unbecoming low.

As you can see, the campaign post features an image of her opponent, former San Juan Capistrano Mayor Sergio Farias—with his skin darkened beneath a lizard-like hue. For comparison’s sake, here’s what the dude actually looks like …

And if there’s one thing I know about political advertisements, nothing is accidental. The wording is precise and deliberate. The colors are there for a reason. And fuckery with photos isn’t just an intern messing up. It’s meant to be.

In this case, Davies (as white as fresh snow) is intentionally labeling Farias as the scary and dark outsider. Hell, it’s not just the blackened, green skin. The wording screams, BE AFRAID! and SOCIALIST IN OUR MIDST! and LOVES GANG BANGERS! What you are witnessing is the marriage of doctored photo and scary phrases into one nonsense piece of cardboard.

Truth be told, Farias is a revered and admired public servant who deserves better. These are, in the truest sense, local races, where community and kindness should matter. There are things you can do and things you 100-percent should not.

This should not have been done.

Spaceflight Now

Turkey aims for first Moon-orbiting mission in 2027

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
The Turkish Lunar Mission 1 (TLM-1) spacecraft is shown in a clean room following the completion of vehicle integration. Image: Tübitak Uzay

Turkey aims to launch its first mission to the Moon in next year, the first in a planned two-mission series, which includes an orbiter and a lander.

The First Turkish Lunar Mission (TLM-1) is contracted to launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket between April and June with mission managers aiming for an April flight. A launcher for TLM-2 has yet to be selected.

If successful, Turkey would become the ninth sovereign nation (or collection of nations as is the case with the European Space Agency) to operate a payload in the lunar environment, following China, ESA, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.

Dr. Burak Yağlioğlu, the project manager for the Turkish Lunar Mission, gave an overview of the mission objectives and progress to launch during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), hosted by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in Turkey earlier this month.

“As a nation with a moon on its flag, going to the Moon is a very, very, very long dream for us and that’s why it has a very important national meaning, going to the Moon with our own capabilities,” Yağlioğlu said during his presentation at the IAC. “The Moon is also very important for the Earth.”

“The Moon is the Earth’s gateway to the solar system, so it may be discussed as a hub for interplanetary missions or deep space exploration, but if we look into some of the pillars of these aspects, we have science, technology development, international cooperation, resource utilization, and in the end, the ultimate goal: sustained presence,” he added.

The Turkish Lunar Mission, also referred to as the Lunar Research Program, is comprised of two initial, uncrewed phases. TLM-1 is an orbiter built by Turkish company, Tübitak Uzay, along with another company, DeltaV, which provided a hybrid propulsion system that uses nitrous-oxide as the oxidizer and a polymeric solid as the fuel.

Teams also have support from the Turkish Space Agency (TUA).

The roughly 3.6 ton TLM-1 spacecraft maneuvers using two propulsion systems: a bi-proellant chemical propulsion system for the thrusters and a hybrid propulsion system for its main engine. The hybrid system will be fired once in Earth orbit for the translunar injection burn and again for the lunar insertion burn.

Dr. Burak Yağlioğlu, the project manager for the Turkish Lunar Mission, shares an overview of the TLM-1 mission, scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2027. Image: International Astronautical Federation/Tübitak Uzay

TLM-1 is designed operational life of at least five months and is designed to operate in a 100 km circular polar lunar orbit once it reaches the Moon.

Yağlioğlu said it’s a point of national pride that more than 80 percent of the equipment onboard the TLM-1 (56 out of 65 elements) are made domestically in Turkey.

“We have several Turkish partners while we develop this spacecraft, so we actually have the heritage, we have the experience, we have the capability, but we also try to build an ecosystem with startups and new companies to make our system like a national team, and we actually had new actors contributing to our lunar mission two,” Yağlioğlu said.

TLM-1 includes a suite of four science payloads: the Lunar Neutrals Telescope (LNT), the Lunar Narrow Field of View Radiometer (LNR), the Radiation Calorimeter, and the Radiation Dosimeter. It’s three imaging and navigation payloads are: a High Resolution Camera, a Wide Angle Video Camera, and a Vision Based Navigation System.

These combination of instruments will be used by researchers to better understand various elements of the lunar environment, like radiation; impacts from solar wind and meteoroid impacts; magnetic anomalies; and surface temperature.

“With the TLM-1, we have an integrated observatory. So, if we just recall the external drivers and modulating conditions, we are going to measure them with LNT and LNR and with the cameras we have, maybe we will identify some meteorite impacts too,” Yağlioğlu said.

“But in addition to that, we also have the radiation measurements or environments. So all of them will contribute to the scientific outputs.”

This week, the TLM-1 spacecraft begins the first in a series of environmental tests, starting with a thermal vacuum chamber test.

As for the status of the TLM-2 mission, Yağlioğlu said it’s still early in development, but it will include a lander that will deploy a rover on the surface of the Moon. He noted the the TLM-1 design is modular and many elements can be replicated for the TLM-2 lander.

One demonstration of transferable capabilities will come when they are performing the end-of-life deorbiting of TLM-1.

“With the propellant left, we would like to design a guidance to a target area and make a controlled impact,” Yağlioğlu said. “So this will be a kind of rehearsal for the lander mission too.”

A launch date for TLM-2 hasn’t been announced.

Interconnected

Filtered for spelunking the archives

Back in February 2023 I launched Braggoscope, my unofficial spelunker for official best show ever, BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time (write-up here).

You can listen to all 1,000+ episodes online for free (and see all books in the online reading lists). i.e. there’s a lot so don’t miss the visual explorer to find the good stuff.

(“Spelunker” from George Oates’ use of the term: "an interface to let you wander around a big dataset, and … to show relationships between things.")

1.

Notturnometer, late night classical music and opera:

every piece played since July 2008 on BBC Radio 3’s_Through the Night_, built from the BBC’s own programme data. Discover the most popular works, composers, and individual performances across 6,644 episodes.

Built by Nick Sweeney.

As a classical music newb (but I know what I like when I hear it) I would love this site as an overlay on Apple Music to help me navigate. Help me see the well-trafficked roads.

2.

The Gilbertoscope by Sameer Padania.

Need reading inspiration? Here are over 2,000 books chosen on BBC’s A Good Read presented by Harriett Gilbert.

Note to self: here are all the times books by Graham Greene have been recommended and I really need to pick up Brighton Rock.

3.

3books.net: books recommended on The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times).

1,680 books. More reading inspiration.

ALSO listening inspiration. e.g. here’s the record for Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, which is a fave, and now I want to listen to the episode it is mentioned in.

Built by Michael Sippey.

4.

BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix: new DJ mixes every week since 1993, hosted by Pete Tong.

This is a genuine community labour of love, originally a massive spreadsheet: Essential Mix Index.

Mixes have a track listing, where available, and a link to a YouTube search.

I am delighted to discover this mix by Blu Peter from 1997. Music peaked with mid 90s trance.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127).

Auto-detected kinda similar posts:

Mike the Mad Biologist

A Bad Week for D.C.’s Crime Stats

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

As of 9am Friday, there were four homicides in D.C. this week. To date this year, D.C. has reported a total of 83* homicides this year. Last year, during the same time period, we had 114 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 226 homicides during that same time period.

Property crimes were level, and violent crimes, other than homicides, declined this week. At this rate, this will be the first year since the last year of Biden’s presidency where homicides don’t decline by 33%.

Hoping for a much better week next week.

*Three of the 86 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).

Nieman Lab
Patt Morrison

California's super-rich conquered the world, but not always the voters

Big-money tycoons have leveraged their fortunes to shape the state with their railroads, mines, newspapers, oil businesses and ranching and agriculture.
Marginal Revolution

Better Incentives, More Kidneys, More Lives

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

The organ procurement system has long been a miasma of inefficient monopoly providers. In 2024 I quoted some shocking facts from a great Statecraft interview with Jennifer Erickson and Greg Segal:

“Organs are literally lost and damaged in transit every single week. The OPTN contractor is 15 times more likely to lose or damage an organ in transit than an airline is a suitcase.”

Organs are not GPS-tracked!

“In an era when consumers can precisely monitor a FedEx package or a DoorDash dinner delivery, there are no requirements to track shipments of organs in real time — or to assess how many may be damaged or lost in transit.

“If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage,” Axelrod said.

Here’s one more astounding statistics:

“Seventeen percent of kidneys are offered to at least one deceased person before they are transplanted….”

Did you get that? The tracking system for patients is so dysfunctional that 17% of kidneys are offered to patients who are already dead–thus creating delays and missed opportunities.

Fortunately, even then there were changes in the works. In 2019 President Trump issued Executive Order 13879 to improve the performance of OPOs with better incentives and to allow living donors to recover more of their costs. The government being what it is, it has taken years to implement some of the new rules and enforcement of the  OPO performance measures was deferred to 2026-2027. Nevertheless, there have been improvements. For example, many OPOs now GPS-track kidney transfers. And a new report estimates there have been significant gains from the changes.

  • The Advancing American Kidney Health initiative was launched by President Donald Trump via Executive Order 13879 on July 10, 2019. In this Data Point, we estimate the range of increased growth in transplants that might be attributed to the policies launched through the Executive order and the economic value of that increased growth.
  • The estimated impacts of the Executive Order (EO) range from a conservative 1,055 additional transplants annually to an upper estimate of 2,110 additional transplants. The range reflects variation in the counterfactuals used to compare with post-2019 transplant growth.
  • Under the conservative-case scenario, the policy is estimated to be associated with approximately 23,214 additional kidney transplants between 2019 and 2040, generating about 147,410 life-years gained and 21,821 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. Under the optimistic-case scenario, the policy is estimated to be associated with approximately 46,428 additional kidney transplants between 2019 and 2040, generating about 294,819 life-years gained and 43,643 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained.

The biggest and most consequential change would be to allow payment to living organ donors. The End Kidney Deaths Act, H.R. 2687, proposes a $50,000 refundable tax credit over five years for qualifying nondirected living kidney donors. The act has bipartisan support. Because dialysis is so expensive—and the federal government pays for much of it through Medicare’s special kidney-failure entitlement—the Act could save taxpayers money as well as saving lives.

Hat tip: The indefatigable Elaine Perlman.

The post Better Incentives, More Kidneys, More Lives appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Aeon | a world of ideas

In praise of the dilettante

Jay Miller
Updated

Black and white photo of a man with many arms doing different tasks: smoking, writing, reading and using scissors.

A wayfaring cosmopolitan who never gets stuck, the dilettante is the right anti-hero for our hyper-specialised age

- by Jay Miller

Read on Aeon

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Following the Midterms at TPM

Josh Marshall
Updated

As we get ready for the final days of the 2026 midterm campaign, I wanted to flag some key parts of our coverage. First, don’t miss our midterms liveblog which you can find on the front page and also at this link. We’re starting with a focus on election interference issues and then we’ll shift toward broader Election Day news and results as we move into next week. Next, the TPM team has done a comprehensive analysis of just who certifies election results in each of the Senate swing states and what funny business they can pull. You can see that here. We also have our take on which 13 races we think will define the midterms, which you can read here. Finally, join us here Tuesday night. For the first time we’re going to be doing live video coverage of election night. Think of it as comparable to what you might see on CNN or MS NOW but with more insight about how to understand the results, what’s happening in key counties and precincts rather than just the toplines and just TPM level analysis. I hope you’ll join us.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Musings

Josh Marshall
Updated

No big news or even original analysis in this post, just a general observation. I was just looking at the VoteHub Senate predictions. This is a relatively new entrant into the election modeling/forecasting world. They’re a bit more cautious than Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, seeing the most likely outcome as Democrats taking 52 seats versus 53. That’s probably actually technically the median result of running numerous modeling simulations. In any case, I was looking at the categories in which they place different races. For instance, they put Texas, as “Lean D”, so more likely to flip than Ohio, Maine and Iowa. I’m not sure that’s wrong. But it’s just wild to see.

A year ago the conventional wisdom was that only Maine was a plausible pick up opportunity, maybe North Carolina. But Democrats have been disappointed by North Carolina plenty of times in the fifteen years or so. And Democrats would be lucky just to hold on to Georgia. We’re simply talking about a range of states that no one was even considering a year ago.

What struck me, though, looking at this, was how hard it is for me to even have a hunch on some of these states because they’re just so Republican that I have no baseline for even evaluating them in partisan terms.

Let me restate the obvious which is that I don’t work with data analysis and modeling like all the folks in that space do. These are my own efforts to figure things out, which are a mix of experience, intuition, etc., not really data-driven in any sophisticated sense. But like Kansas? Who knows? That’s a seriously Republican state! The thing about Kansas is that it’s more Republican than the Republican party, by which I mean that Kansas was Republican when the GOP was a predominantly northern party. It’s still totally Republican when the GOP is a predominantly southern party. It hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in almost a century. We have a range of different data points which make it seem like this really might be happening there. In fact, if you really strain to look at the data in just the right way maybe it’s not even a toss up. But those are just shards of evidence here or there. There are plenty of plausible ways that Republican Roger Marshall could end up winning by mid- or even high single digits and the whole thing was a mirage.

But what baselines, what frameworks do you use to evaluate when and whether a state like Kansas is primed to elect a Democrat. Truly who knows? It hasn’t happened in a century. And it’s not just Kansas. A number of these states are similar, at least to the extent that recent history, at least to me, provides very little frame of reference for evaluating a competitive partisan race.

Oklahoma Watch
Marginal Revolution

Are there too many misdemeanor convictions?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Maybe so:

Misdemeanors account for three-quarters of criminal cases filed annually in the United States, yet causal evidence on the impacts of misdemeanor conviction is scarce. We combine administrative and survey data to provide novel evidence of how misdemeanor conviction affects the socioeconomic outcomes of defendants and their families. Using data on nearly seven million defendants from 11 states, we characterize the types of people involved with the misdemeanor system. We estimate causal impacts of a conviction relative to a charge using seven county reforms that sharply reduced conviction rates. Regression discontinuity design estimates yield precise null average effects of the reforms on criminal and labor market outcomes. Defendants dismissed by the reform are unlikely to re-offend if dismissed, but also unlikely to be harmed by conviction—marginal defendants are older and more likely to have been charged with minor crimes than the average defendant. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that conviction harms young and first-time defendants, implying that interventions targeting dismissal toward these groups would be beneficial. Finally, our causal estimates imply a negative Marginal Value of Public Funds of misdemeanor conviction, even under plausible estimates of general deterrence effects.

That is from recent research by Nikhil Rao and James Reeves, note that Rao is this year on the job market from University of Michigan.

The post Are there too many misdemeanor convictions? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Hacker News
Marginal Revolution

Chronicle of Higher Education interviews me on AI and education

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Scott Carlson did the work (gated, but free with registration), here is one excerpt:

Cowen: …Another proposal I’ve made is that schools should let people do one class, only one class, AI-only — no professor, except a professor grades at the end. The professor grades not answers to an exam but the workflow of how the student used AI to learn the Glorious Revolution, or the Civil War, or whatever the student learned. Eventually, another AI will grade your AI log. But let’s start today with a professor, and try this for one class. I’m not sure how it will go. But especially for small schools that don’t offer that many classes, a student now can create a class in literally everything.

If it’s successful, let them try two classes. I think the students doing this on their own are more likely to figure out how to blend AI and education than we would from a distance with some kind of centralized vision. Let them experiment.

Carlson: Students should be leading the change at colleges and universities?

Cowen: Absolutely. Students know more about AI than their professors do. Some of this comes from cheating, which is unfortunate. But the notion that the professors teach the students AI — I wish. It’s not always possible. You could imagine setting up a class where the students teach the professors AI, and we give the students credit for teaching. I’m half joking, but it’s not, in fact, a crazy idea. We need to experiment along a number of fronts. I’m quite convinced no one knows how to do this. It hasn’t been done before. So again, just one class. In general, schools hate this idea. They see it as opening the door to rendering some professors obsolete.

And this:

Carlson: There are a number of students who are deeply opposed to AI. What place do they have in this university that you’re thinking about?

Cowen: I would love to have different schools with different policies. If some universities try to ban AI altogether, that’s great. Let the competitive process operate. Personally, I would bet against those schools. For a long time, I’ve been worried that within a given tier of school — big state school, community college, Ivy League — there’s not enough diversity. AI policies will force a kind of diversity on us. So I’m all for no-AI schools, even though I would not go to one.

Recommended.

The post Chronicle of Higher Education interviews me on AI and education appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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danah boyd | apophenia

No one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught me that he was wrong.

zephoria
Updated

According to recently released discovery materials, Meta directly targeted Jonathan Haidt by trying to stir up academics to oppose him. The odd thing is that many of us scholars who disagree with him knew nothing about this and weren’t involved in it. And so now scholars like the amazing Candice Odgers are being doubted about the sincerity of their critique. WTAF upside down world are we living it?

What’s super frustrating is that many scholars in the teens-tech-mental health space are repeatedly accused of fabricating research or being corporate shills when our research is politically inconvenient. I know that I have been. Repeatedly. And it sucks.

When I was still in graduate school, I was asked to serve on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. One of my responsibilities was to oversee the research effort. I worked with other scholars to track down all studies that focused on content, contact, and conduct related harms involving the internet. The politicians were primarily interested in the question of pedophiles. When I provided the report to then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, he told me to go find different data. He did not like what I had found. I didn’t know what to say.

Predation is real. It’s devastating. But it’s a more complex dynamic than most people’s mental image allows for. And when it comes to internet-enabled predation, the biggest risk is not teenagers using the latest social media site. The biggest risk is single moms using online dating apps. Pedophiles seek out these women to get access to their children. It’s sick. But no one wants to hear that. They want to focus on the digital tools young people use.

After our report was published, I started getting calls from journalists. I earnestly and naively responded to all of them. One of the journalists was from PBS Frontline. She called me up repeatedly, drilling me on questions about arguments in the report. I responded by providing study after study to every inquiry, pointing her to different researchers who were experts on different parts of this puzzle. After a few weeks of this, I got what would be the last call from her. She started out by apologizing to me.

Unbeknownst to me, some of Richard Blumenthal’s ardent supporters for his Senatorial campaign were outraged that I dared to challenge the politician’s arguments about internet safety. They were determined to prove that I was falsifying data on behalf of the tech industry. The Frontline reporter told me she was assigned to uncover my duplicitousness. She had concluded I hadn’t done anything but report on the scientific insights of the field. She spiked the story, but she warned me that I had pissed off some very powerful people and I would probably have to deal with being demonized going forward for standing up for research. Ugh.

Ironically, I first started truly despising Facebook-the-company while I was working on that task force. I got to watch up close how the company built a coordinated campaign against MySpace, intentionally creating the impression that MySpace was dangerous while Facebook was safe. And I witnessed teenagers process this through the language of racism and classism, prompting me to write a very controversial essay that turned into my paper “White Flight in Networked Publics?” I was fascinated – and disgusted – by the executive who seemed to do the dirty work on behalf of the CEO and COO, unbeknownst to others in the company. I called him the bulldog. The bulldog continued to harass all sorts of different people.

These days, I have absolutely nothing nice to say about Meta-the-company despite knowing a few amazing people who work there. I think the company is unethical to the core. And the products have enshittified so badly that they’re unrecognizable compared to what teenagers used to use. Hence my argument that “Social Media is Now Parasocial Media.” But I still stand by my research on teens and the research of others who have done rigorous analyses putting teens’ lives into context. Teenagers live in the world we create for them – and they use what’s available to them, regardless of how they feel about it. In the past, teens turned to Facebook to socialize and make sense of public life. Today, Facebook is dead to teens and Instagram feels more like some sketchy version of MTV. Socialization is on group chats, some of which unfold on WhatsApp. But most teens have nothing nice to say about Facebook.

Many teenagers in our contemporary world are struggling. I’ve gotten to see that upfront through my work at Crisis Text Line, which I adore. And I’ve gotten to consistently witness how the problems that they face cannot be explained by their tech use. Because of this, removing tech from their lives will not solve the major problems. And for some, like many of the teens who text Crisis Text Line in their darkest moments, losing access to a cell phone will eradicate an essential lifeline.

I have no interest in defending tech companies, but I am deeply committed to defending teenagers’ agency and choices in the world that we have given them. I am determined to make sure that those teens who don’t have supportive parents have pathways to get help. And my research has repeatedly led me to conclude that when we fail to empower teenagers to transition into adult worlds, we do them more harm. And when we focus on the tech, we fail to help those who need the help the most.

Many of the problems that I have with tech use are actually about adult tech use. Too many adults treat their phones as a pacifier to help them self-regulate. They’ve taught this bad habit to their kids. Too many adults fail to role model healthy sociality digitally and in-person friendship. Too many adults use their phones to be distracted from their own children. And then we’re surprised by the mirrors that teens offer back at us. “I learned it from watching you, dad.”

What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests – and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize.

Still, I’ve had to grit and bear as I am attacked by other scholars for taking money from tech (as if any money in late-stage capitalism is clean money). And I had to stomach calls from representatives of the National Academies that I can’t even talk with their committee members because Jonathan Haidt told them that I was a corporate shill. And I’ve had to not weigh in on numerous recent debates because my peers and news outlets tell me I am tainted. In this political climate, I am unable to convince people that my research stems from the lessons I learned from teens, not what I learned from tech. I’ve mostly shrugged. But when journalists started going after Candice, I lost my mind and felt the need to share my story. The idea that she is being painted as a corporate shill is ludicrous.

Cuz here’s the thing… It IS possible to despise the tech companies AND understand why teenagers use their products and find value from doing so. Listen to teenagers; they get these contradictions. Their hatred of the tech companies is growing exponentially even as they use the tools those companies provide. (You should see their attitudes towards AI companies. Oooh-whee…) It’s also possible to care about kids’ mental health AND think that the solution doesn’t start and stop with tech. And it’s possible to do rigorous research AND discover that tech isn’t the biggest monster in teens’ lives that anti-tech advocates think it is.

Truth be told, I’d have no problem if certain social media platforms would be banned for everyone. I think that many of the products in this space have devolved into garbage. My objection is a teen-specific ban. I oppose legal controls of teenagers because adults are trying to cope with the guilt about their own failings. We are living through an era of anxious parents. It’s heartbreaking the costs of this anxiety.

Of course, if politicians want to implement an age-specific ban to target those most harmed by social media platforms, I’d be totally fine with banning elders from social media. That would do society a lot of good. Just think of what it would mean in terms of identity theft and fraud, not to mention disinformation. But that’s the rub. We believe that adults’ freedom of choice needs to never be constrained, but that it’s perfectly OK to micromanage teenagers. THIS is what I object to. I believe that teenagers deserve rights and agency. I think it’s utterly asinine that the United States never ratified the UN Rights of the Child. This doesn’t make me a corporate shill. This makes me an advocate for teenagers.

As I wrote over a decade ago, we’ve made ridiculous decisions that have undermined teenagers’ ability to socialize and connect with friends. And it keeps getting worse. Teens have lost the right to roam. In many parts of the country, they’re overscheduled and have nowhere to go to hang out with friends besides each other’s homes. Teenagers don’t have sustained access to mental health services (and they often have to go through their parents’ insurance to get access). They’re living through a polycrisis. And what they’re seeing in the world of adults is depressing. There’s a lot that we can do to help young people. But much of it starts locally. Much of it starts with adults checking their own behaviors. Much of it starts with intentionally investing in the social lives of young people. Giving them options. Creating space for them. Ensuring that they have robust social fabrics. Tech is a relief valve, and an increasingly terrible one. But taking tech away won’t do squat to address the underlying issues. And, worse, banning social media is basically an advertisement for it. Cuz right now, social media is dying a slow death among teens cuz it sucks so much. But teens are still looking for spaces in which they can connect and socialize and make sense of the world around them. What will it take for us to actually invest in young people?

Spaceflight Now

As it happened: spacewalkers install new solar array

Spaceflight Now
Updated

NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk are performing a spacewalk to install the 7th of 8 ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSA) to upgrade the orbiting outpost's power system.

  1. NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk are awaiting the start of today’s spacewalk. They are buttoned up inside what NASA calls Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), better known as space suits.

  2. The crew is running slightly ahead of the timeline according to NASA commentator Rob Navias. The spacewalk is due to get underway at about 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC) but first the spacesuits will be fitted with SAFER units, jet back packs that will be used in the unlikely event a crew member becomes untethered from the space station. They will then move into the crew lock portion of the Quest airlock for depressurization.

  3. The Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER), a small, self-contained jet pack, is now being fitted to Anil Menon’s space suit.

  4. Menon has now moved into the outer Crew Lock portion of the Quest Airlock. He can be easily identified by the red stripes on his space suit, indicating he is designated EV1 for this excursion. This will be his fourth spacewalk since arriving at the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz craft in July.

  5. Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk is now being fitted with his SAFER back pack.

  6. Kutryk, who will be referred to as EV2 by Mission Control, has now joined Menon inside the Crew Lock section of Quest. Next up will be closure of the hatch.

  7. The hatch between Equipment Lock and Crew Lock sections of the airlock is now being closed ahead of depressurization of the outer compartment.

  8. Meanwhile at the Kennedy Space Center, the Pegasus barge is departing for the Stennis Space Center. It’s carrying a New Glenn second stage for test firing at the Mississippi facility.

  9. The airlock depressurization is underway. Pressure in the compartment will initially drop to 5 psi where it will be held for space suit checks before being lowered to a vacuum.

  10. Airlock pressure now 9 psi.

  11. Space suit leak checks underway as the pressure in the airlock has reached 5 psi.

  12. Leak checks are reported good and depressurization to vacuum will now continue.

  13. Now 4 psi in the airlock.

  14. Approaching 2 psi now.

  15. Astronaut Nichole Ayers in Mission Control has taken over from the station crew in communicating instructions to the spacewalkers. She is designated Spacewalk Communicator for this excursion. Astronaut Jenni Gibbons is the CAPCOM in mission control, an acronym from the early days of the space program standing for Capsule Communicator.

  16. Pressure inside the Crew Lock section of the Quest airlock is approaching vacuum.

  17. The airlock has reached vacuum and the spacewalkers are starting to open the outer hatch.

  18. The hatch is now open.


  19. Spacewalk officially underway

    The astronauts space suits are now on internal battery power. NASA considers this the start of the spacewalk. The official start time was 7:57 a.m. EDT (1157 UTC), according to Mission Control commentator Rob Navias.

  20. “The night is dark and full of wonder,” said Menon as he opened the thermal cover that protects the airlock hatch. He will be first to leave the airlock.

  21. Menon is now outside the airlock. This spacewalk is expected to last about seven hours.

  22. Joshua Kutryk has also left the airlock. He has now become the fifth Canadian astronaut to make a spacewalk.

  23. Previous Canadian spacewalkers (with the date of their first spacewalk) were: Chris Hadfield (STS-100, April 2001), Steve MacLean (STS-115, September 2006), Dave Williams (STS-118, August 2007), and David Saint-Jacques (Expedition 59, April 8, 2019).

  24. Menon and Kutryk have made their way down the space station truss to the location of the pallet holding the International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) that they will be installing today.

  25. The two spacewalkers are working to release a series of bolts that hold the iROSA to its storage pallet.

  26. The astronauts are using pistol grip tools to release the bolts holding the array.

  27. Now an hour into today’s spacewalk.

  28. Menon is now in a foot restraint, riding on the end of the Canadian robot arm, while Kutryk continues to work in the area of the iROSA pallet.

  29. Final bolts are being released holding the ISS roll-out array in its carrier.

  30. Menon is holding the new International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) at the end of the robot arm after it was removed from the stowage pallet on the station’s truss.

  31. Now more than two hours and 16 minutes since the start of today’s spacewalk, Menon is being moved on the end of the Canadarm-2 to begin aligning the IROSA with the bracket for power channel 2A.

  32. Kutryk is translating along the station to position himself for installing the IROSA.

  33. Now more 2.5 hours into the spacewalk, Ayers told Menon and Kutryk that when they’re working on the mod kit for the new IROSA that they shouldn’t make simultaneous or sudden movements.

  34. The solar array has been soft-docked to the 2A electrical power channel.

  35. The manual maneuver of the Canadarm-2 of about half a meter is complete, moving to Menon’s right. His spacesuit has the red stripe on his legs. Kutryk continues working on the IROSA mod kit. The ISS is about 10 minutes away from going into a night pass where they can start making the electrical connections on the IROSA. Navias says things have proceeded as expected so far on today’s spacewalk with no bolt issues.

  36. Now more than three hours into the spacewalk Menon and Kutryk are working to release a hinge restraint on the IROSA. This will allow it to fully unfurl to its full length of about 60 feet. Menon is now being translated away from the IROSA.

  37. Teams in Mission Control Center Houston are determining whether they will use this current night pass to begin hooking up the power cables first or to unroll the IROSA first. Navias says they are still running ahead of the timeline.

  38. Kutryk and Menon are preparing to open the IROSA after engaging the soft capture. There are about 20 minutes remaining in the night pass. Menon says they should proceed with the power cable mating and Kutryk agrees.

  39. Navias says if all of the power connections cannot be completed during this nighttime pass, Menon and Kutryk will pause and wait for the next one, since they don’t want to be interacting with them when power is flowing.

  40. Both Menon and Kutryk are at their de-mate locations. They are working to complete the remaining power hookups during this night pass with Navias reiterating that they are running ahead of the clock.

  41. A little more than 3.5 hours into the mission, Menon and Kutryk have mated three out of the four major power connectors for the IROSA. They will pause on this work for about an hour until they are fully in a night pass again. They are in a safe configuration to pause this work.

  42. Navias says that there have been no issues experienced during this spacewalk as the ISS is currently in a day pass. The station is currently traveling at an altitude of nearly 428 km, passing over the North Pacific Ocean. Our new ISS tracker can show you the station’s position around the globe 24/7: https://spaceflightnow.com/tracker/

  43. Now a little past the four-hour mark in today’s spacewalk, Navias says teams are running about an hour ahead of the original timeline. With three out of the four power connections attached, the fourth will be mated during the next night pass. Right now, Kutryk and Menon are cleaning up the work site as the space station passes over the South Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 426 km.

  44. Menon and Kutryk are in the midst of releasing the final two restraint bolts. Once the IROSA begins to unfurl, it will take about 10-12 minutes to fully extend. The space station is currently passing over the South Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of about 434 km.


  45. IROSA roll-out begins

    The seventh IROSA is now unfurling. The process will take about 10-12 minutes.

  46. The seventh IROSA has been unspooling for about seven minutes in front of the legacy solar arrays.

  47. With the IROSA now fully extended, and the space station back in a night pass, Menon is preparing to attach the fourth and final main electrical connector. Navias says because they are running as far ahead on the timeline as they are, Menon and Kutryk may also get to some work-ahead items while they have time outside the space station today.

  48. Menon is now driving two tension bolts, which will make the IROSA as taut as possible.

  49. Some of the work-ahead items for Kutryk and Menon will include removing the booms that helped store the seventh IROSA. They may also get to some prep work for next Thursday’s spacewalk, per Navias.

  50. Menon and Kutryk are cleaning up the work site at the P4 truss and are proceeding towards some work ahead items for next Thursday’s spacewalk.

  51. As the 285th spacewalk continues, Kutryk and Menon are beside the eighth and final IROSA that they will install next Thursday. They are moving towards the flight support equipment where they will remove a couple of beams to make that upcoming EVA a bit easier.

  52. Kutryk hands over one of the beams on the final pair of IROSAs to Menon as the space station passes over the South Atlantic Ocean.

  53. Now a little more than six hours into the spacewalk, Kutryk and Menon will proceed towards releasing some of anti-rotation devices (ARDs), which are launch locks that are holding the final set of IROSAs in place and previously did the same for the set that the duo installed on the P4 truss earlier in the EVA.

  54. Menon and Kutryk have returned to the airlock and are exchanging thankyous with their support teams in Mission Control. They have been given a go to close the outer hatch of the airlock.

  55. Mission Control has timed the end of today’s spacewalk at 3:08 p.m. EDT (1908 UTC). A duration of 7 hours 11 mins.

  56. The airlock depressurized and the inner hatch between the crew and equipment locks is now open.

  57. The Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER) jet packs have been removed from the space suits. Glove checks and photos will be taken to document any damage that might have occurred.

  58. Menon’s helmet has now been removed.

  59. Kutryk has also removed his helmet.

  60. NASA commentator Rob Navias saying today’s spacewalk was “essentially flawless”.


  61. "Essentially flawless" spacewalk

    Over seven hours and 11 minutes, the alternating darkness and sunshine of low Earth orbit set the pace as NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk successfully installed and unfurled the seventh of eight new solar panels designed to power the outpost through its retirement in 2030. Read Houston Harwood’s full report.

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Multi-Day Heavy Rain Event in the Four Corners; Soggy Sunday Expected in Florida

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Owners, Not Renters: Raffi Krikorian on Open Source AI

Created by Claude with light editing by Tim O’Reilly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clothesline Paradox

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

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

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

AI should be thought of as infrastructure

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

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

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

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

In conclusion

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

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