A mind-bending trip into the cosmos aboard a speculative (yet theoretically possible) spacecraft near the speed of light
- by Aeon Video
How did law firms and other professional workplaces become places of such crushing and soulless work?
- by Dylan Gottlieb
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown 66% this century, fueled in part by a record-breaking number of convert baptisms in 2025.
The church had 10,752,986 members at the end of 1999. The church had 17,887,212 at the end of 2025, according to an annual statistical report released Saturday during the church’s 196th Annual General Conference.
Furthermore the growth is coming in every part of the world (as a qualifier I am not sure what the outflow is). Here is the full article, via Tyler Ransom.
The post LDS fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
NASA's Artemis II mission has yet to return to Earth—it will do so on Friday evening, splashing down into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego—but the agency is already nearing some key decisions on the next Artemis mission.
The US space agency announced six weeks ago that it was modifying its Artemis timeline to insert a mission before beginning planned lunar landings. This new mission, designated Artemis III and intended to fly in Earth orbit rather than to the Moon, would attempt to "buy down" risk to give the lunar landing mission (now Artemis IV) a higher chance of success.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday afternoon that the space agency is debating about which orbit to fly Artemis III in before locking in a blueprint, noting that the first "senior level" Artemis III mission design discussion had taken place earlier in the day.
One of Trump’s Truthed conditions for a ceasefire was the “SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” The White House appeared ready to declare that condition met. But even this morning, before reports emerged that Iran was once again closing the strait, there was some fine print.
As David noted in Morning Memo, Iran, through the ceasefire, now has quite a bit more control over the strait than it had before the war started, saying that it will control it jointly with Oman. The Financial Times reported this morning that Iran will charge boats crypto to get through, and, seemingly, leisurely inspect them as they make the passage. Here’s Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, in an interview with the FT:
“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini, whose industry association works closely with the state.
“Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush,” he added.
This all flew in the face of the alternate reality being advanced by the White House, with Trump claiming the U.S. is going to get a cut of these ships’ fees.
Later, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt refused to answer a question about who controlled the strait.
This afternoon, it appears the fragile ceasefire is growing more fragile, with Israel’s continued attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon emerging as a major point of contention. Iran and Pakistan, which served as an intermediary for the ceasefire, say Lebanon was covered by the agreement. Israel contends Lebanon was not, as does Leavitt. Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, said that “a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations” has become “unreasonable,” but didn’t go so far as to say the agreement had fallen apart.
First, just because Donald Trump is an inveterate liar, don’t assume that Iran is a reliable narrator about anything that was agreed to in this deal. (Was there a deal? We’ll get to that.) One thing both sides explicitly agree on, coming right from President Trump himself, is that the 10 point Iranian plan will serve as the basis for discussions over the next two weeks. The early accounts of what that document included focused on a lot things Iran wants, even including things it wanted before the war broke out. It doesn’t really focus on the things the U.S. notionally got into this war for. (We’ll get in a moment to what’s included in the document Iran released today.) For the U.S., this ceasefire is at best a ceasefire on the basis of a stalemate, where the fight is about a draw and both sides want to see if they can bring the fight to an end.
That’s the optimistic view. The U.S. has clearly been more eager to get to the negotiating table. It’s the U.S. that wants out most. The items on that list tilt heavily toward Iran. The Iranians appear to be exercising continued control of the Strait of Hormuz even if they may allow ships to go through — “allow” being the key word.
Iran has now released a new version of its ten points that seems wildly more aggressive then what Trump appeared to be referring to. It’s a maximalist set of demands which requires the U.S. to abandon the region and leaves Iran as the local hegemon. It sounds like they’re now trying to come in with a maximalist set of demands. Or maybe Trump was so desperate to get to a ceasefire that he agreed to this set of demands regardless. What’s true in either case is that to the extent we are going to see a negotiation it definitely seems like one in which the U.S. has the weaker hand and comes to the negotiation as the loser in the conflict. To emphasize the point, Iran doesn’t seem shy about embarrassing Trump during the early hours of the purported ceasefire. They’ve now announced that they will let only 12 ships transit the strait each day, even after Trump claimed he’d forced the Iranians to reopen it entirely. That’s just a fraction of the normal traffic. The Iranians are humiliating him at every turn, likely because they know he wants the ceasefire too badly to throw it into doubt.
Every way to look at this, whichever documents decisions are being based on, the U.S. is trying to get out of the war more than Iran is. That’s notwithstanding the fact that Iran has suffered almost incalculably more damage. But this comes back to a point we discussed at the outset of the conflict. It’s never about the absolute amount of damage. It’s about the stakes for each side. For Iran, it’s the survival of their government and an entire theological-political worldview. Donald Trump is trying to avoid losing control of both houses of Congress. Those aren’t comparable things. Trump stumbled into this conflict. He’s botched it badly and is now looking at the choice between a manageable strategic defeat or doubling or tripling down and guaranteeing something far worse. Trump seems to be working to get out on embarrassing but not catastrophic terms. But it’s not clear he can, given his need to dominate in all cases and how in hock he is to regional players who are aghast that Trump has somehow managed to create a situation where Iran emerges stronger from a conflict in which it has taken such a tactical beating.
This is what it’s like when you’re losing and you’re trying to wriggle out before you lose more. There’s no real other way to put it.
This is news:
A malicious supply chain compromise has been identified in the Python Package Index package litellm version 1.82.8. The published wheel contains a malicious .pth file (litellm_init.pth, 34,628 bytes) which is automatically executed by the Python interpreter on every startup, without requiring any explicit import of the litellm module.
There are a lot of really boring things we need to do to help secure all of these critical libraries: SBOMs, SLSA, SigStore. But we have to do them.
Important work is just flowing these days, and much of it (of course) concerns AI:
We study whether AI methods applied to large-scale portfolio holdings data can improve financial regulation. We build a state-of-the-art, graph-based deep learning model tailored to security-level data on the holdings of financial intermediaries. The architecture incorporates economic priors and learns latent representations of both assets and investors from the network structure of portfolio positions. Applied to the universe of non-bank financial intermediaries, covering nearly $40 trillion in wealth, the model substantially outperforms existing approaches in out-of-sample forecasts of intermediary trading behavior, including in crisis episodes. The model has more than ten times the explanatory power for the cross-sectional variation in asset returns during stress events compared to traditional approaches, and it outperforms existing systemic risk metrics at the institution level. Its learned representations show that the holdings network encodes rich, economically interpretable information about firesale vulnerability. The architecture is fully inductive, producing informative estimates even when entire asset classes or investors are withheld from training. We embed our empirical approach into a macroprudential optimal policy framework to formalize why these objects matter for policy and welfare. We show that even in an equilibrium environment subject to the Lucas critique, the predictive information from the model improves welfare by sharpening the cross-sectional targeting of policy interventions, and we demonstrate a complementarity between prediction and structural knowledge.
That is a new paper by Christopher Clayton and Antonio Coppola, of Yale and Stanford respectively.
The post Financial Regulation and AI: A Faustian Bargain? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The data pipeline from NASA's Artemis II mission opened to full blast a few hours after looping behind the far side of the Moon on Monday night, when the Orion spacecraft established a laser communications link with a receiving station back on Earth.
A cache of high-resolution images began streaming down through this connection. NASA released the first batch to the public Tuesday. Most of the images were taken by the four Artemis II astronauts using handheld Nikon cameras fitted with wide-angle and telephoto lenses. They also had iPhones to capture views out the windows of their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity.
After reaching their farthest point from Earth, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are accelerating back to Earth for reentry and splashdown Friday evening to wrap up the first crewed lunar mission in more than 53 years.
On the eastern, arid side of the Andes, the plains of southern Argentina stretch from the mountains to the Atlantic coast. The landscape often appears dry and brown, interrupted by colorful glacier-fed lakes, but a storm in early April 2026 blanketed swaths of the land in white. The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of the snowy Patagonian Desert on the morning of April 3.
Early fall has been wetter than normal in southern Patagonia, said atmospheric scientist René Garreaud of the Universidad de Chile, noting that satellite-based estimates showed above-average precipitation from late March through early April. Much of the region’s precipitation tends to fall on the western, windward side of the Andes, he said. “But strong winds are capable of blowing some snow east into the Argentinian side, as beautifully reflected in the MODIS image.”
Snow clings to the higher elevations, while valleys draining the large glacial lakes are bare. In this detailed Landsat image, a stark snow line appears along the outlet of Lago Argentino. Also note the color of the water. Lago Argentino and other nearby lakes contain an abundance of fine sediment, or glacial flour, pulverized by southern Patagonia’s plentiful glaciers. This suspended sediment makes the lakes appear milky blue or turquoise.
Though snow was widespread across the desert after the early-season storm, the wintry splendor was fleeting. A satellite view from the afternoon of April 4 showed that snow had melted from all but the highest mountain areas.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Very wet—but very warm—weather in the western U.S. has left many mountainous regions looking at substantial snowpack deficits.
Satellites observed a frozen landscape across much of the country after a massive winter storm.
Blazes spread across Los Alerces National Park, home to some of the world’s oldest trees.
The post Snow in the Shadow of the Andes appeared first on NASA Science.
At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
Trump has painted himself into a corner in his impulsive war against Iran. His job approval is dismal and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, is sending the cost of oil soaring, squeezing the global economy. Always in his life he has had someone to fix his mistakes—his father, Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, the “adults in the room” in his first administration who distracted him from catastrophic errors, and so on—but no one was willing to bail him out of the global disaster of his war on Iran.
So he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” an open threat to push his current embrace of war crimes all the way to genocide. No one knew if he was gearing up for a ground invasion of Iran in a war that has never received congressional authorization, or a massive bombing campaign, or even the use of nuclear weapons.
Or if he was making yet another empty threat.
Within the announcement were signs that perhaps it was bluster designed to let him claim victory and walk away. Despite his claim, there has been no “regime change” in Iran: the regime is very much still in place, although it has changed leadership in the wake of the bombing deaths of previous leaders. The new leaders appear to be more radical than their predecessors.
There was also the unmistakable echo of television advertising in his announcement. Either “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” or “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
At 6:32 this evening, we learned that the horrifying announcement of the morning was, indeed, cover for Trump to declare victory and get out of the crisis he has caused in the Middle East.
Trump posted: “Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.
“We received a 10 point proposal from Iran,” Trump continued, “and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Michael Rios of CNN reported that Iran’s media is claiming it has achieved a great victory, forcing the U.S. to agree in principle to its 10-point plan, which includes the end of sanctions against Iran, the removal of all U.S. combat forces from bases in the region, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. If these terms are correct, they leave the United States significantly worse off than it was before the war and leave Iran significantly stronger.
Trump called Rios’s story a fraud, and immediately sought to reassert his strength. He posted, “Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement,” and said that “CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’”
Political commentator Ben Rhodes summed up the situation: “In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”
And then, a minute after midnight, Trump posted:
“A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else! The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “Trump went from making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later, and he received no concessions in between. He’s an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”
The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.
Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” was not just a reference to Iran. If he had destroyed Iran in our names, unhampered by the Republican Congress members who have vowed to defend the U.S. Constitution, it would also have been an epitaph for the United States of America.
—
Notes:
X:
brhodes/status/2041680999537381857
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mivujg3kns2f
adamsteinbaugh.bsky.social/post/3mix4brpgkk2m
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3mixc77fw5k2n
atrupar.com/post/3mixgi5cuhk2y
pdehello.bsky.social/post/3mixgjhyxtu2z
ameresolicitor.bsky.social/post/3miwxi2owc22z
raskin.house.gov/post/3miwkw6froc2d
kim.senate.gov/post/3mix4uvzp5s24
Up betimes and to my office, and by and by, about 8 o’clock, to the Temple to Commissioner Pett lately come to town and discoursed about the affairs of our office, how ill they go through the corruption and folly of Sir W. Batten and Sir J. Minnes.
Thence by water to White Hall, to chappell; where preached Dr. Pierce, the famous man that preached the sermon so much cried up, before the King against the Papists.
His matter was the Devil tempting our Saviour, being carried into the Wilderness by the spirit. And he hath as much of natural eloquence as most men that ever I heard in my life, mixed with so much learning.
After sermon I went up and saw the ceremony of the Bishop of Peterborough’s paying homage upon the knee to the King, while Sir H. Bennet, Secretary, read the King’s grant of the Bishopric of Lincoln, to which he is translated. His name is Dr. Lany. Here I also saw the Duke of Monmouth, with his Order of the Garter, the first time I ever saw it.
I am told that the University of Cambridge did treat him a little while since with all the honour possible, with a comedy at Trinity College, and banquet; and made him Master of Arts there. All which, they say, the King took very well. Dr. Raynbow, Master of Magdalen, being now Vice-Chancellor.
Home by water to dinner, and with my father, wife, and Ashwell, after dinner, by water towards Woolwich, and in our way I bethought myself that we had left our poor little dog that followed us out of doors at the waterside, and God knows whether he be not lost, which did not only strike my wife into a great passion but I must confess myself also; more than was becoming me. We immediately returned, I taking another boat and with my father went to Woolwich, while they went back to find the dog.
I took my father on board the King’s pleasure boat and down to Woolwich, and walked to Greenwich thence and turning into the park to show my father the steps up the hill, we found my wife, her woman, and dog attending us, which made us all merry again, and so took boats, they to Deptford and so by land to Half-way house, I into the King’s yard and overlook them there, and eat and drank with them, and saw a company of seamen play drolly at our pence, and so home by water. I a little at the office, and so home to supper and to bed, after having Ashwell play my father and me a lesson upon her Tryangle.
Research: SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume
Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News about whether two SQLite processes in separate Docker containers that share the same volume might run into problems due to WAL shared memory. The answer is that everything works fine - Docker containers on the same host and filesystem share the same shared memory in a way that allows WAL to collaborate as it should.
Three years ago, I’d caught some videos online of paralyzed people walking again. This struck me as miraculous. It also confused me. If paralyzed people were moving again, why weren’t more people talking about this incredible occurrence?
The company helping people move again is called Onward Medical, and it’s based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2023, I booked a flight to Europe and went to visit Onward and met its CEO Dave Marver, who is this week’s guest.
During my trip, I did, in fact, witness amazing things. An Italian man named Michel was walking again with the help of a spinal implant device made by Onward. He could stand and walk and exercise daily. And a young Belgian woman named Julie used an Onward device to regulate her blood pressure. Before receiving the Onward technology, Julie had contemplated suicide because it took her hours each day to get out of bed – the result of blood pressure fluctuations that caused her to pass out. After receiving the device, she reenrolled in her PhD program. Her whole life had been turned around.
Onward has developed products that deliver electrical stimulation to the spinal cord. Some of these products work outside of the body and some require an implant. More recently, Onward has begun pairing its spinal implant technology with brain computer interface implants. This allows patients to think about their desire to move and have those thoughts translated into actions executed by the spinal implant.
In this episode, Marver walks us through the history of Onward’s technology development and how all of these products work. It’s a story of academic research being turned into life-changing technology. I would argue that no company does more to help people dealing with paralysis.
This episode will surprise you, and, I think, warm your heart.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
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We bring you - our loyal subscribers - the world’s first look inside the Tesla Semi factory.
As many of you will know, Tesla has been on a long journey to create a new line of Semi trucks capable of g…
So the world’s greatest military power went to war with a poor, medievalist theocracy. It was an incredibly uneven match. Here’s are the GDPs of Iran and the United States in 2024:
Yet Iran won. The Iranian regime has emerged far stronger than it was before, controlling the Strait of Hormuz and having demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on both its neighbors and the world economy. The U.S. has emerged far weaker, having demonstrated the limitations of its military technology, its strategic ineptitude and, when push comes to shove, its cowardice.
We’ve also destroyed our moral credibility: Trump may have TACOed at the last minute, but he threatened to commit gigantic war crimes — and for all practical purposes our political and civil institutions gave him permission to do so.
How did this happen? Naturally, the Iranian Minister of War credited divine intervention, declaring that “God deserves all the glory.” His nation, he said, fought with the “protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection.”
Well, theocrats gonna theocrat.
But I lied. That wasn’t a quote from an Iranian official. That’s what Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed Secretary of War, said while claiming that one of the worst strategic defeats in American history was a great victory.
There will be many analyses by military and strategic experts of the Iran debacle. But let’s not lose sight of the larger picture: We were led to disaster by the boastful ignorance of men like Trump and Hegseth — boastful ignorance made even worse by claims that God supports whatever they want to do.
With men like that running America, major disasters were just a matter of time. I’d like to think that they have been chastened by this debacle, that they have learned something. But I don’t believe that for a minute.
God help us.
MUSICAL CODA
Don’t worry, I’m not the patient — Jack (above) is. But between that and events, no regular post this morning.
I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.
— Giles Turnbull, AI and the human voice
GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks
Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and sharing the same paper.It's available via OpenRouter so I asked it to draw me a pelican:
llm install llm-openrouter
llm -m openrouter/z-ai/glm-5.1 'Generate an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle'
And something new happened... unprompted, the model decided to give me an HTML page that included both the SVG and a separate set of CSS animations!
The SVG was excellent, and might be my new favorite from an open weights model:
But the animation broke it:
That's the pelican, floating up in the top left corner.
I usually don't do follow-up prompts for the pelican test, but in this case I made an exception:
llm -c 'the animation is a bit broken, the pelican ends up positioned off the screen at the top right'
GLM 5.1 replied:
The issue is that CSS
transformanimations on SVG elements override the SVGtransformattribute used for positioning, causing the pelican to lose its placement and fly off to the top-right. The fix is to separate positioning (SVG attribute) from animation (inner group) and use<animateTransform>for SVG rotations since it handles coordinate systems correctly.
And spat out fresh HTML which fixed the problem!
I particularly like the animation of the beak, which is described in the SVG comments like so:
<!-- Pouch (lower beak) with wobble -->
<g>
<path d="M42,-58 Q43,-50 48,-42 Q55,-35 62,-38 Q70,-42 75,-60 L42,-58 Z" fill="url(#pouchGrad)" stroke="#b06008" stroke-width="1" opacity="0.9"/>
<path d="M48,-50 Q55,-46 60,-52" fill="none" stroke="#c06a08" stroke-width="0.8" opacity="0.6"/>
<animateTransform attributeName="transform" type="scale"
values="1,1; 1.03,0.97; 1,1" dur="0.75s" repeatCount="indefinite"
additive="sum"/>
</g>Update: On Bluesky @charles.capps.me suggested a "NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM ON AN E-SCOOTER" and...
The HTML+SVG comments on that one include /* Earring sparkle */, <!-- Opossum fur gradient -->, <!-- Distant treeline silhouette - Virginia pines -->, <!-- Front paw on handlebar --> - here's the transcript and the HTML result.
Tags: css, svg, ai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, ai-in-china, glm
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team:
Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing, an effort to use Mythos Preview to help secure the world’s most critical software, and to prepare the industry for the practices we all will need to adopt to keep ahead of cyberattackers.
This blog post provides technical details for researchers and practitioners who want to understand exactly how we have been testing this model, and what we have found over the past month. We hope this will show why we view this as a watershed moment for security, and why we have chosen to begin a coordinated effort to reinforce the world’s cyber defenses.
“Our new model is so good, it’s too dangerous to release to the public” is a message that sounds like it could be marketing hype. But it seems like it’s probably true. Examples cited by Anthropic include finding and exploiting a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug (that can crash any device running OpenBSD) and an 16-year-old bug in the widely used FFmpeg media processing library.
See also: Techmeme’s extensive roundup.
Kottke:
This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit.
Follow NASA on Flickr for more.
Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.
I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.
OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog:
Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion.
For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for public companies in that valuation range:
| Market Cap | 2025 Net Income | |
|---|---|---|
| Berkshire Hathaway | $1,028 B | $67 B |
| Walmart | $980 B | $22 B |
| Samsung | $855 B | $29 B |
| Eli Lilly | $832 B | $21 B |
These four companies, as of today, rank 11–14th on the list of largest companies by market cap.
In a post last week, I quoted a Deutsche Bank projection estimating that OpenAI is going to lose $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. OpenAI’s refutation of this estimate is that no, they’re merely going to lose $111 billion in that timeframe. Even in the company’s own optimistic scenario, they’re going to lose, on average, as much money per year as any of these companies earn. (Well, except for Berkshire, which earned significantly more than the others last year.)
I’m not trying to be thick here. Obviously the idea behind OpenAI’s astronomical valuation is that at some point they’ll stop losing money, and then, presumably starting at some point in the 2030s, they’re going to start generating mountains of profit. P/E ratios are not effective for evaluating a startup in hyper-growth phase, but the idea is that eventually a successful startup will achieve a balanced P/E ratio. That seems possible for OpenAI. It also seems far, if not very far, from certain. My gut feeling, now more than ever, is that it is unlikely to happen, and that the most likely scenario is that the entire company goes into history alongside companies like Enron. They’re generating steadily increasing revenue now, yes, but by selling dollars of compute for pennies. First CityWide Change Bank had a better business strategy than that — they gave you the correct change.1
I purposely stretched the valuation range in my table above into the $1T market cap range so I could include Berkshire Hathaway, a company I’ve always greatly admired. Warren Buffett has long promoted the idea of seeking to invest in companies not just with moats, but with defensible moats. I still haven’t seen a good refutation of the leaked internal Google white paper whose actual title was “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. What Google does have are highly profitable existing products and services.
Back to OpenAI’s funding announcement, skipping over the next 1,111 words, all of which struck me as meaningless blather (and, if I had to bet, largely written by ChatGPT):
That is why we are building a unified AI superapp. As models become more capable, the limiting factor shifts from intelligence to usability. Users do not want disconnected tools. They want a single system that can understand intent, take action, and operate across applications, data, and workflows. Our superapp will bring together ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and our broader agentic capabilities into one agent-first experience.
This is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and deployment strategy.
This is not “product simplification” at all. This is product complication. Web browsers are incredibly complex apps. OpenAI’s web browser — Atlas — is a failure. No one uses it. And they think they’re going to simplify things by cramming Atlas — an unpopular web browser almost no one has heard of — together with their chatbot and developer tool? Would it strike you as a simplification, or a sign of product design depravity, if Apple announced that it was merging Safari and Messages into one “superapp”? Focused, discrete apps are the best proven way to manage complexity.
Maybe merging all their apps into one will work out for OpenAI. But even if it does, it won’t be simpler. Microsoft Outlook is an email client and calendar app crammed together, and it has tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of users. But no one calls it “product simplification”. OpenAI’s “superapp” strategy reads to me like a company that is in a panic. And in that panic, they might be poised to eradicate the product focus that their current users like about ChatGPT in the first place.
And that’s just my read from before their late-Friday news dump of executive leadership shuffling. Hayden Field at The Verge reports (gift link):
OpenAI is undergoing another round of C-suite changes, according to an internal memo viewed by The Verge.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment — who was until recently the company’s CEO of applications — says in the memo that she will be stepping away on medical leave “for the next several weeks” due to a neuroimmune condition. While she’s out, OpenAI president Greg Brockman will be in charge of product, including leading OpenAI’s “superapp” efforts. On the business side, CSO Jason Kwon, CFO Sarah Friar, and CRO Denise Dresser will take charge.
The Verge runs Simo’s full memo at the bottom of their story, if you want to read it yourself. Simo’s title used to be CEO of applications, now it’s CEO of AGI deployment, but the last thing she oversaw before departing on an open-ended medical leave was ... checks notes ... negotiating the acquisition of a YouTube tech news show for “low hundreds of millions of dollars” (per the Financial Times). That’s the deployment of something, but not artificial general intelligence.
Simo, too, is credited with the “superapp” strategy (which I will not stop putting in dick quotes). It certainly sounds like something someone from Facebook would think up. But now she’s not going to be there to oversee it. I wish Simo well with her health issues, which seem significant, but none of this paints a picture of a well-run company with any sort of cohesive strategic vision.
Until last week, I hadn’t seen Zoë Schiffer’s profile of Simo for Wired from November, soon after she joined OpenAI as a CEO, but not the CEO:
Simo hasn’t been seen much at OpenAI’s San Francisco office since she began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is felt at every level of the company — not least because she’s heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI money. Simo is dealing with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) that makes her prone to fainting if she stands for long periods of time. So for now, she’s working from home in Los Angeles, and she’s on Slack. A lot.
“Being present from 8 am to midnight every day, responding within five minutes, people feel like I’m there and that they can reach me immediately, that I jump on the phone within five minutes,” she tells me. Employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI’s famously Slack-driven culture can be overwhelming for new hires. But not, apparently, for Simo. Employees say she is often seen popping into channels and threads, sharing thoughts and asking questions.
OpenAI’s work environment seems not merely overwhelming, but torturous. I have no reason to believe Simo’s medical leave is anything but a legitimate medical leave, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she never comes back. (What’s the point of being CEO of AGI deployment when there is no AGI to deploy?)
I don’t see the path from here to there, where there is a justification for a trillion-dollar-ish valuation for this company.
There’s a joke to be made here about this “$122 billion in committed capital” being called such because the investors throwing good money after bad into OpenAI ought to be committed. ↩︎
Links for you. Science:
Inside the Turmoil at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s C.D.C.
Drought drives elevated antibiotic resistance across soils
Claims about genetic superiority ignore the real drivers of human inequality
You’re likely already infected with a brain-eating virus you’ve never heard of
Administration Targeted Climate Lab in Effort to Free Trump Ally, Lawsuit Claims
If states ban fluoride, more kids will get cavities and Medicaid costs could soar, study finds
Other:
Trump Cannot See That the Opposition Is Real
Does Generative AI “Work”? That’s a Misleading Question.
A Dunning-Kruger War, Courtesy of the Dunning-Kruger President
How DC’s mayor and council chair thwarted every effort to better the streetcar
The Trump Administration Turns a Blind Eye to White-Collar Crime. The failure to prosecute elite wrongdoing is a bipartisan trend that’s hastening under Trump.
Trump casts a mail ballot again in Florida even as he calls the method ‘cheating’
It’s time to stop posting on X
Trump showed classified map to passengers on his plane in 2022, memo says
It’s not just vaccines: Parents are refusing other routine preventive care for newborns
Elon Did Some Securities Fraud. Also AI inequality, Tesla/SpaceX Terafab, JPMorgan monitoring and AI startup parties.
Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South
Democrats Flip Florida Statehouse Seat That Includes Trump’s Mar-A-Lago
This Is Why Flying Is So Awful
1930s mural by famous S.F. artist uncovered in Pacific Heights home
Our Experience with i-Ready
Inside Trump’s daily video montage briefing on the Iran war (he is so stupid)
Transportation lobbyists have donated thousands to Sean Duffy’s son-in-law as he runs for Congress
Speaking of Good Republicans
Trump’s new Homeland Security chief is worse than you thought
The AI Industry Is Lying To You
The Throne: What happens when we say, “When it finally happens…”
All of DOGE’s work could be undone as lawsuit against Musk proceeds
Trump appeared to have business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds
American Jews Won’t Be Silenced. We Have Every Right to Oppose the Iran War
Bizarre stupidity of the Hatzola ambulance ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories
The ugly history behind Trump’s birthright citizenship case in the Supreme Court
Disney’s Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood
TV antennas are making a comeback in the age of digital streaming
Why Trump Wants ICE to Ditch the Masks at Airports
Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids
Netanyahu aide’s racist slurs about Mizrahi Jews spark outrage
Imagining a 2028 Presidential Campaign for a Limited Presidency
Following a ridiculous ridge in March and associated record-shattering warmth, a more transient pattern has established in April Well, I won’t belabor the point: March 2026 was a month that will long be remembered for its astonishing warmth across California and the broader West. Snowpack in most regions is now near or below all-time record […]
The post After a historically hot March, an active April weather pattern will bring thunderstorms, cooler temperatures, and likely even some Sierra snow first appeared on Weather West.
1. Waymo rollout in NYC is halted.
2. Back “plus” is the better answer (NYT). I am glad this is now settled, Alex T. can attest I have been insisting on this for a while. Note my earlier prediction.
3. Nicholas Decker on Ludwig Straub.
4. Crypto and quantum computing. Likely an important piece, here is GPT Pro on that paper.
5. “The Suno upgrade for song generation seems quite good as well.” So much is new!
6. Hollinger on NBA tanking (NYT).
7. Is there an evolving Iran bargain with China? (speculative, mostly we still do not know what is going on, you should discount most of what you are reading on this topic).
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Charity Majors spent a year telling engineers they needed to learn to code to stay relevant. Then, in about three months, that advice became obsolete. In this conversation, she talks about why engineers who built careers on beautiful, readable code are struggling more than anyone else, why junior developers might have a hidden advantage right now, and what it means that nobody has a headstart anymore. Everybody’s ignorance has been reset to 100.
This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.
These days, we’re all living in a constant state of crisis, foisted upon us by a world where those who are meant to keep things stable are the least stable factors in our lives. The chaos and stress of that reality makes it difficult to make any plans, let alone to make decisions if you have responsibilities for a team or organization that you’re meant to be leading. It’s easy to imagine there’s nothing we can do, or to feel hopeless. But a resource that just arrived served as a timely reminder for me that a crisis doesn’t have to be paralyzing, and we don’t have to feel overwhelmed when trying to plan how we’ll respond as leaders.
The topic of crisis has been on my mind again as I’ve been looking at the work of some friends who are the most fluent experts on the topic of crisis that I know, prompted by the release of Marina Nitze, Mikey Dickerson and Matthew Weaver's new book, Crisis Engineering.
There’s nothing more valuable than people who can step in during a moment of crisis and provide clarity, not just on how to make it through that moment, but how to seize that opportunity to actually make better things possible. A few years ago, at some of the most stressful and harrowing moments I’ve had as a leader in my business career, I got to connect with a remarkable team who ran towards the crisis that our organization was in, and helped our team get through that moment and not just persevere, but to thrive. I thought a bit about the famous Mr. Rogers line about “look for the helpers”, and Matthew, Marina, and Mikey's team at their company Layer Aleph really were the equivalent of the helpers when it comes to the place where where technology meets the real world.
I’d first heard legend of their way of working in the days and weeks after the notoriously rough launch of Healthcare.gov (This was back when the federal government aspired to competency, inability to deliver was considered a scandal, and media would accurately describe something that didn’t function as a failure.) A small, scrappy, multifunctional team had been able to transform the culture of this hidebound segment of the federal government, and deliver a set of services that are saving American lives to this day. That story is detailed well in the book, but at the time, the conventional wisdom was that this was a catastrophe so impossibly complex, in a bureaucracy so hopelessly broken, that nobody could possibly fix it. And then they did. (With the help of a lot of brilliant and motivated colleagues.)
As it turns out, this was just one of many such efforts that the team would be a part of, and helped define the overall approach that they, and their collaborators, would take in addressing these highly public crises. There are so many situations where a combination of cultural and technical challenges conspire to cause extremely visible failures or disruptions that seem intractable. But over time, a set of practices and principles emerged from their work that took the response out of the realm of superstition and guesswork and into something that was almost a science. These techniques work when systems are crashing, when machines get hacked, when data are leaked, when business models are crumbling, when leadership is in disarray, when customers are angry, when users are leaving, when competitors are attacking, when funders are fleeing. In short, when the crisis is at your door.
It was years after their evolution from those early post-Healthcare.gov days into a mature practice that I reconnected with the Layer Aleph team. By then, I was running a company, and a team, that was under an extreme amount of stress, and in a situation that could easily have amounted to an existential crisis. They were able to engage with conviction and compassion, but importantly, they weren’t making it up as they went along. I think this is an idea that’s important to understand in the current moment, too — there is such a thing as expertise. We do not have to settle for incompetence and cronyism. Good people of good character with real credentials and relevant experience can bring it to bear on even the most challenging situations, and when they do, even the most intractable problems are solvable.
And now, that expertise is something they’ve captured and shared.
I don’t often unabashedly endorse books about business and technology; too often I find them to be based on thin premises, padded out with cliches. But what the team here have done with their new book Crisis Engineering is something special — they documented their own experiences of turning real crises into a chance to design new, resilient systems.
Even better, they talk about how other organizations can do the same thing. The reason that I can testify that it works is because I have seen it, and I’ve seen my own team benefit from their work. In fact, I think it was during the conversations after the dust had settled from some of that work that the very phrase “crisis engineering” first emerged as a description of this way of thinking about complex problems. I’m thrilled that it’s become a useful shorthand for naming and discussing this powerful and unique way of tackling some of the most intimidating situations that companies or organizations might take on. It’s built confidence for myself, and my whole leadership team from that era, that we’ll be ready when the next challenge arrives. With apologies to Rihanna, I do want people to text me in a crisis.
The more confidence we can build in our teams that a crisis is an ordinary event that we can plan for, the more ready they will be for that moment when it arrives. That’s why I can’t recommend the book highly enough. Set aside some time to read it, and to make notes on how you might put it into practice when crisis inevitably comes to visit. You’ll be lucky to have had this resource before you need it.
You can read more about the book on their site. (And, as always, nothing I post on my site is sponsored content — I’m enthusiastically endorsing this book because I believe in what these folks have written and genuinely believe it’s worth your time to read if you lead an organization or team.)
Yesterday, just hours before President Trump's announced deadline for widespread destruction of power plants and bridges in Iran, a group of Iranian-American economists circulated this open letter, which I signed on to It began as folows:
An Open Letter to President Trump on Iran Strategy From a Group of Concerned Economists
"Dear President Trump,
While we share the Administration's concerns about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) nuclear program and destabilizing activities, strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure, including power plants, industries, bridges, and universities, some of which have already begun, are strategically counterproductive, escalating costs to Americans while reducing our ability to achieve America’s objectives.
Iran's ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz through mines, fast-attack boats, coastal missiles, and drones does not depend on power plants or refineries. Destroying civilian infrastructure removes Iran's incentive to reopen the Strait; it does not remove its capability to close it.
Striking infrastructure devastates the livelihood of 92 million civilians. Aside from its resulting humanitarian crisis, it will further widen the scope of the war and allow the IRGC to position themselves as defenders of the nation, and rebuild their badly damaged internal support. Infrastructure strikes and a prolonged war also let them blame economic misery on foreign aggression rather than their own mismanagement. "
##########
This morning I don't find much evidence of it on the internet.
Professor Mostafa Beshkar in Indiana has posted it on Twitter (as X used to be known), and here it is in the Indiana student newspaper, with the signers (who you can also find here):
LETTER: To President Trump on Iran strategy from a group of concerned economists
But open letters aren't just written, circulated and signed to change policies (especially in a matter of hours). They also serve to express solidarity, and even as a shout into the void they let those concerned with Iran, and with America, express their fear and loathing of war crimes and boasts about the intention to commit them.
Here is Dean Ball on Mythos. And now more from Dean. Here is John Loeber. While I am seeing some likely overstatement, probably this is a real turning point nonetheless, and we need to think further about what is best to do. No b.s. on data center slowdowns and algorithmic discrimination, rather actual thought on how to regulate something that actually will matter. And be glad we got there first. But how long will it be before an open source version, even if somewhat inferior, is available? Will OpenAI and Google soon be showing similar capabilities? (And how will that shift the equilibrium?) Should we upgrade our estimates of the returns to investing in compute? How will the willingness of attackers to pay for tokens evolve, relative to the willingness of defenders to pay for tokens? Which are our softest targets? As a side effect, will this also lead to higher economic concentration, as perhaps only the larger institutions can invest in quality patches rapidly enough? How many things will be taken offline altogether? It was the government of Singapore that started moving in that direction in 2016 with their Internet Surfing Separation. Which of the pending hacks and leaks will embarrass you the most?
And if nothing else, this is proof we are not all going to be jobless, albeit for reasons that are not entirely positive.
The post Mythos assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
For many users in Germany, payment rules are the part of online gambling they notice first and complain about most. Games, bonuses, and site design matter, but none of that helps if a deposit is blocked, a limit is reached sooner than expected, or a payout feels slow and uncertain.
Germany’s legal online gambling market has operated under a national framework since July 2021, and that framework puts strong controls on how money moves in and out. From a player’s point of view, that makes payments the point where regulation becomes real.
The monthly deposit cap is not tied to one site. It follows the player across licensed operators. In practice, that means a person can deposit up to 1,000 euros in total across the regulated market in a calendar month, with activity tracked through the LUGAS monitoring system.
Many people first compare offers, payment methods, and withdrawal terms before opening an account, and some also check these platforms on websites like cazinouri.de to get a quick overview. Once they start playing, though, the real challenge is understanding that one payment decision on one platform can affect what is possible everywhere else.
A user may lower a limit and see the change apply right away, but a higher limit only becomes effective after a seven-day wait. On top of that, higher limits require proof, like income records or bank statements.
Limits above 1,000 euros can be granted, but only under strict conditions, and the step from 10,000 to 30,000 euros is reserved for a very small share of active players. Even failed payment attempts can count against the limit in some cases, which makes the whole setup feel stricter than many users expect.
Another reason payments become the main pain point is that the cap does not sit alone. It works together with gameplay restrictions that slow down spending in some products, especially virtual slots.
Germany’s rules limit stakes on virtual slots to 1 euro per spin and require games to last at least about five seconds on average. On paper, the system is meant to protect users.
They are told they have a monthly deposit allowance, but the rest of the rulebook still tightly controls how quickly that money can be used. This creates a feeling of constant friction rather than a clear and predictable playing experience.
The first test of a platform is often the first deposit. If that process is confusing, rejected, or delayed, users start worrying about the withdrawal before they even place a bet. Industry reporting in 2025 has highlighted that payments are now one of the main drivers of user retention, and repeated failed deposits often lead people to abandon a platform.
In Germany, that matters even more because the legal market asks users to accept tighter checks in exchange for higher safety standards. When the legal path feels too slow or too rigid, some users start looking at sites that appear easier.
The most practical step is to treat payment rules as part of the product. Users should check whether a provider is officially licensed in Germany, understand that the monthly cap is shared across operators, and plan ahead if they expect to request a higher limit.
It also helps to complete identity and affordability checks early, keep track of failed payment attempts, and read the site’s withdrawal terms before depositing anything. None of this makes the rules lighter, but it reduces nasty surprises.
Photo: Mika Baumeister via Unsplash.
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The post Why Payment Restrictions Are the Biggest Issue for Users in Germany appeared first on DCReport.org.
Hungary’s defense and space tech contractor 4iG also announced deals with L3Harris and Apex for defense systems and satellite manufacturing
The post Hungary taps Northrop Grumman for first national geostationary communications satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.
As Artemis 2 begins its return to Earth, scientists are just starting to review the images and observations taken by the crew as they flew around the moon.
The post Artemis 2 science gets underway as Orion begins its return trip appeared first on SpaceNews.
The contract was awarded by the Space Development Agency for 2027 demonstrations
The post Capella Space wins $49 million contract for military communications satellite demo appeared first on SpaceNews.
Secure World Foundation report highlights growing reliance on orbiting systems and spread of interference technologies
The post Space security moves to forefront as threats to satellites spread appeared first on SpaceNews.
Bulgarian satellite maker EnduroSat and British defense tech startup Shield Space aim to deploy a cubesat next year capable of maneuvering near other satellites for inspection, ahead of plans to develop a mothership that could house dozens of them for on-demand missions.
The post Inspection cubesat demo planned as first step toward orbital defense mothership appeared first on SpaceNews.
Astroscale has completed the critical design review for two cubesats slated to launch next year to help the British military monitor space weather and track objects in LEO.
The post Astroscale passes key design milestone for UK military space-tracking cubesats appeared first on SpaceNews.
We applaud the lunar base vision laid out by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on March 24. Placing this stake in the lunar regolith is long overdue. What is missing from the mission architecture, however, is a vision for long-term economic development on the moon. It will be a profound missed opportunity if NASA does not […]
The post A lunar base or a lunar economy? appeared first on SpaceNews.
LeoLabs ‘Delta’ moves beyond collision warnings to identify potential adversarial activity
The post LeoLabs debuts space monitoring tool for military users appeared first on SpaceNews.
(Note: This article went to press for the April issue of SpaceNews Magazine before NASA announced potential changes to the CLD program.) NASA signaled last summer it planned to accelerate efforts to replace the aging International Space Station. Nearly nine months later, that push appears to have slowed.In a directive signed at the end of […]
The post Industry navigates NASA’s start-and-stop approach to commercial space stations appeared first on SpaceNews.
In what is a very good, if disturbing, article about the Trump administration’s assault on national data, I noticed this tidbit (boldface mine):
On January 8, 2026, Donald Trump broke a foundational norm of American politics and barely anyone noticed. The political press corps, quite reasonably preoccupied with the administration’s numerous other entanglements, mostly turned a blind eye when Trump posted unreleased economic data to his Truth Social account the night before it was scheduled to be released….
A former Bureau of Labor Statistics employee with knowledge of the incident, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the statistics agency’s handling of the imbroglio to me. By their account, after the improper release, the acting commissioner of BLS called the acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who shares the prerelease data along with analysis to the president, and threatened to revoke the White House’s early access if Trump flouted data release procedure again. The two eventually came to an understanding that the issue arose because only the first page of the prerelease materials bore an embargo label, and so the president assumed that all subsequent pages were available to publicize. Going forward, the acting CEA chair and acting BLS commissioner agreed to include an embargo note on every page to prevent confusion. (BLS did not respond to a request for comment.)
So do we really believe that explanation? While it is quite possible that Trump lacks object permanence to the extent he needs THIS IS TOP SEKRIT written on every page, I have doubts that even Trump is that stupid.
Anyway, Trump should resign or be impeached.
Two new papers/initiatives indicate severe risks from AI, interestingly in opposite directions. The first is that the most advanced frontier models are now capable of finding and exploiting software in ways that could be used to crash or control pretty much all the world’s major systems.
Anthropic: We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.
Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.
That’s from Anthropic. The irony is that the company that has developed a frontier model capable of infiltrating and undermining more or less any computer system in the world is the one that has been forbidden from working with the US government. It’s as if a private firm developed nuclear weapons and the American government refused to work with them because they were too woke. Okey dokey.
The second paper on AI risks is AI Agent Traps from Google DeepMind. They point out that AI agents on the web are vulnerable to all kinds of attacks from things like text in html never read by humans, hidden commands in pdfs, commands encoded in the pixels of images using steganography and so forth.
Putting this together we have the worrying combination that very powerful AI’s are very vulnerable. Will AI solve the problems of AI? Eventually the software will be made secure but weird things happen in arms races and its going to be a bump ride.
The post AI Risks appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Sophisticated kidney exchange is coming to more Indian States.
The Indian Express has the story from Karnataka:
"In a significant move that could help patients awaiting a kidney transplant, the Karnataka Government has issued guidelines permitting multi-pair kidney paired swap transplantation. This will expand the scope of organ donation beyond the traditional two-way system.
The Karnataka Multi-Pair Kidney Exchange Transplantation Guidelines 2026 were issued via a government order on April 4.
“A significant number of donor-recipient pairs in Karnataka are unable to undergo transplantation on account of biological incompatibility… Applications have been received from registered transplant hospitals in Karnataka seeking approval for multi-pair Kidney Paired Exchange Transplantation involving three or more donor-recipient pairs,” the order said."
From poetry to politics, this radio show asked listeners to speak their minds. Decades later, their words still resonate
- by Aeon Video
Today is your chance for shameless self-promotion. We’re doing an open mic at The Honest Broker, and everyone is invited to share their latest and greatest projects.
I’m confident this will generate fascinating responses.
The last time I invited readers to talk about their work, I got a thousand comments in just the first 24 hours. I spent days sampling some of the projects, and was impressed by the quality—we have a very talented group of readers here. And the variety is off the charts.
Many of you are musicians or writers or visual artists or creatives in another idiom. Or maybe you have started a business, or are doing charity work, or are involved in some other worthy endeavor. Whatever it is, let us know about it.
I’m handing this off to you, so take it away. But one last word before I go: Please check out some of the projects others are touting. I’ll bet you won’t be disappointed.
We study the effects of large-scale humanitarian aid using novel data from the American Relief Administration’s (ARA) intervention during the 1921-1922 famine in Soviet Russia. We find that the allocation of relief closely tracked underlying food scarcity and was uncorrelated with subnational politics. We show that ARA rations reduced food prices, raised caloric intake, lowered the prevalence of relapsing fever, and increased rural birth cohorts. The aid benefited poorest peasants most and proved most effective in provinces with higher levels of human capital. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, absent ARA relief, the 1926 population would have been 4.4 million lower.
That is from a new paper by Natalya Naumenko (my colleague), Volha Charnysh, and Andrei Markevich.
The post Herbert Hoover is still underrated appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
NASA's Artemis II mission, carrying four astronauts on an out-of-this-world journey, flew around the Moon on Monday.
The crew members took turns describing the stunning landscape below and captured images of Earth rising behind the Moon, in communications with Mission Control in Houston. What they did not send back in real time, due to a lack of communications bandwidth, was this high-resolution imagery.
That changed on Monday night, when Orion established an optical link with ground stations on Earth to send high-resolution images back to the planet. NASA has been uploading them to Johnson Space Center's Flickr page.
We’re over a decade into the Trump era. To assess the damage his two terms have wrought and how, exactly, we got here, TPM’s David Kurtz was joined on Substack Live by friend of TPM and charter member of our DC bureau, Brian Beutler, who now writes the Off Message newsletter.
In a wide-ranging conversation, David and Brian discussed Trump’s propaganda campaign around his war in Iran; how the Democrats could act as a true opposition party; and what the U.S. could look like come Jan. 2027 or 2029 depending on how the next two rounds of federal elections shake out.
Check out their full live below.
Khaya Himmelman has the story here.
Trump on Truth Social, 6:32 p.m. ET, with the climb-down, describing what he claims will amount to a “double sided CEASEFIRE!”:
Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.
This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
I try not to burden you with procedural minutiae in the key Trump II cases, but an unexpectedly strange 30-minute status conference ended a short time ago in the Abrego Garcia II civil case. What would normally be a snoozy housekeeping matter — in this instance, to set a briefing schedule on the Trump administration’s renewed bid to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia – went off the rails a bit.
In retrospect, it’s clear that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland came in to the conference call already annoyed with the Trump administration for trying to bum-rush her into making a quick decision on removing Abrego Garcia to Liberia, and then the DOJ career attorney on the case almost immediately stepped in it, for reasons that remain baffling.
First, Xinis asked about reports that soon after filing to remove Abrego Garcia to Liberia instead of his designated country of Costa Rica — arguing it wasn’t viable — the administration reached an agreement with Costa Rica to begin accepting a substantial number of similarly situated third-country deportees. Does that change the administration’s position in this case? Xinis asked.
DOJ’s Ernesto Molina Jr. responded: “I have raised that issue. I have not heard that it has changed the government’s position.”
Then it got weird.
Unprompted, Molina said Abrego Garcia is free to self-deport to Costa Rica at any time and that he doesn’t have to wait for the government to remove him to Liberia or anywhere else. I’m scratching my head because Abrego Garcia is still under indictment in Tennessee and cannot legally leave the country without violating court orders in his criminal case.
Xinis was incredulous. “Are you saying that that indictment is going to be dismissed? Because that’s a really important fact.”
“No, you honor,” Molina replied.
“You know Mr. Abrego can’t go anywhere pending criminal indictment,” an astounded Xinis said. “There’s nowhere he can voluntarily go without violating a court order.”
It wasn’t clear whether Molina was changing the government’s position, misspoke, or got his tongue tied somehow. But Xinis wasn’t done.
“This is chimerical. This is fantasy,” Xinis said of the notion that Abrego Garcia can just voluntarily self-deport.
“Yes, your honor, that is correct,” Molina conceded.
At that point, Xinis turned to the original point of annoyance: The goverment’s demand that she rule by a date certain on the third country removal or it will deem her as having denied its motions.
“You have no legal authority to tell me when I am to decide anything in my court,” Xinis said, later adding: “You can’t deem an order adjudicated before it’s adjudicated.”
Xinis clearly suspected something was up. “What’s the rush on this?” she asked, openly wondering why the government was pressing her to decide quickly on the third-country removal while conceding it’s not dismissing the indictment.
“The same Department of Justice that is prosecuting Mr. Abrego Garcia in Tennessee is the same Department of Justice in this case. It smacks of an emergency of your own making, not a real one,” Xinis said. “Be clear: There is no emergency if what you’re telling me is true, that you want to prosecute Mr. Abrego Garcia in Tennessee.”
The faux urgency and the new claim that Abrego Garcia could leave the country at any time confounded her.
“I’m just trying to figure out why I get these interesting and sharply worded memorandum … if I don’t move on the schedule you’d like me to.”
“I regret if the court viewed the government statements as commanding, if you will,” Molina replied.
“There seems to be no inclination that the Department of Justice is dismissing this indictment.” Xinis said. “The bottom line is you either want him here for your criminal case or you don’t.”
If it’s both, she said, that “raises some serious concerns.”
It never became clear if Molina was hinting at a new government position in the case or just bungled things.
The hearing concluded with the usual housekeeping to set a briefing schedule in latest phase of the litigation that began in March 2025.
Here are a few additional thoughts about the state of the war between the U.S. (and Israel) and Iran.
First, we had news from Reuters over the weekend that the U.S. and Iran might be on the brink of a ceasefire agreement, maybe as soon as Monday. It now seems like that was yet another example of a mix of over-optimism from broker countries trying to bring the sides together and, even more, the White House trying yet again to force a quick-to-fade market bounce. Yesterday afternoon I saw this piece in Haaretz which says that Pakistan (a lead country trying to broker a deal between the two sides) believes that Iran is now under the effective control of the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that this commander thinks Iran is winning and that he’s not willing to compromise on Iran’s key demands or accede to the United States’. It also notes that Pakistan thinks the U.S. is more eager for a deal than Iran.
I don’t think you need to be Pakistan to see that last point. Everything President Trump does sends that message. Now, in the wake of the Trump’s threat to “end” Iranian civilization tonight, Iran has reportedly cut off participation in ceasefire talks with the U.S..
A few moments ago I saw this snippet in the Times:
“The first thing that came to my mind is that I think Trump is under a lot of pressure, and that he has lost his mind,” said Lili, who works in the arts scene in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Where does Lili do her writing? I think she’s got a good handle on the situation.
Coming into today I had been meaning to write a post on all the ways in which, while this is not going great for the United States, it’s not going very well for Iran either. Iran can say it will be collecting tolls on tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Doing it is another matter. As much as the U.S. is trashing the international system, these are still international waters. The first time Iran sends someone a toll bill and they don’t pay, does Iran attack that tanker? After hostilities have ceased? Do they want to start the war all over again?
My best guess is that in the near term we’re probably going to see tanker owners making informal arrangements to get their deliveries through. The mix of uncertainty and cost there will keep oil prices high. Over time it will be much harder for Iran to make that stick. Most reporting says that the commander of the IRGC is now in functional control of the Iranian state. It may be easier for the regime hardliners to retain control during the on-going conflict than after it. There’s likely some incentive to keep the conflict going at least at a low level.
The Times says Lili is part of the Tehran arts scene. You have to figure that’s ground zero for parts of the population that would like to see the clerical regime go. As the U.S. has repeatedly learned, even when people hate their governments they really don’t like being under aerial bombardment. But after the conflict stops you’ll have an already really unpopular government using much higher levels of repression and with lots of thing broken. That won’t be an easy spot to be in.
For the U.S., this is turning out to be a kind of tour de force, high stakes, real-world escalation of how tactical victories, even brilliant ones, can coexist with catastrophic strategic defeats. Let’s set to one side for a moment the horrible and unimaginable threats the U.S. president is making. (This really is the moral aesthetic and idioms of pro-wrestling brought to the international stage.) My best guess is that Trump is going to find some humiliating climbdown. Am I confident? Not especially. But if Trump turns the U.S. military loose on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, that’s catastrophic for Iran. But it’s catastrophic in a different way for the U.S. It’s the ultimate pyrrhic victory. Again, you can blow up tons of stuff but secure a huge strategic defeat at the same time. Which is what we now appear ready to do, whether Trump backs down or doesn’t. Both forks on this road are incredibly damaging for the U.S., even though only one unleashes a new level of destruction in Iran.
Lili has this right. Trump is under a lot of pressure and he’s basically losing his mind. I do not say that in an exonerating sense of course. But he is unraveling, decompensating under the pressure and the fact that his standard tactics of bullshitting and TACOing aren’t working. (We learned in a report yesterday that the Saudis’ hard demand in the ceasefire talks is strict limits on the range of Iran’s ballistic missile program, certainly a deal-killer if the Iranians think they’re winning the conflict, which reportedly they do. Good luck with that.) It’s not that he’s unraveling under the pressure of this conflict. It was his unraveling under the pressure of domestic defeats, loss of power that led him to learn into his presidential prerogative powers where he can still act with untrammeled power. First Greenland, then Venezuela (which to his mind went great), and now this, which is really not going great and through which he is now deepening his domestic unpopularity to a dramatically new level. He’s also baking inflationary pressures into the U.S. economy which will likely last through the rest of his term.
Here is one very good paragraph of many:
Cowen is excellent on the question of why the marginalist insight had to wait so long, and why it eventually came in a simultaneous eruption across countries and three intellectual temperaments. The answer involves the slow assembly of preconditions: advances in calculus, the rise of statistical thought, the professionalization of economics as a discipline, and certain changes in the philosophy of science associated with the Victorian debate between inductive and deductive methods. Progress in science, Cowen suggests, is rarely a matter of the lone genius, but rather of the alignment of previously dispersed elements. The genius arrives when the ground has been prepared to receive the insight.
And another:
There is a discomforting codicil to all of this. Perhaps, Cowen suggests near the book’s end, the intuitions of 20th-century microeconomics were always a kind of compensation for a deeper ignorance. Perhaps we elevated intuitive reasoning, with its clean parables of marginal utility, and elegant supply-and-demand diagrams, because they were what we had, and we mistook their availability for adequacy. Machine learning models that find hundreds of thousands of factors in financial data are not exactly refuting marginalism. They are revealing the scale of what marginalism was never equipped to see. Our intuitions were always a small corner of understanding, swimming in a larger froth of epistemic chaos. The illusion has been stripped bare.
Here is the full review. Here is the book itself. Via Mike Doherty.
The post Stephen Pimentel has an excellent review of *The Marginal Revolution* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I hate to say “I told you so” — not because saying “I told you so” is unseemly, but because the fact that I have to say it means I’m probably living in a world where things have gone badly.
I didn’t want to live in a world where gasoline costs over $4 a gallon. I didn’t want to live in a world where America tore up nearly all of its long-standing alliances and threatened to invade and conquer parts of Europe. I didn’t want to live in a world where China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. I didn’t want to live in a world in which the President of the United States posts things like this to his social media account:
I didn’t want to live in this world, but my countrymen forced me to live in it. I wrote many, many posts urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, despite all her shortcomings. They did not. And now I have to live with the consequences of my failure, and the failure of my fellow-travelers, to persuade the American people to avoid shooting themselves in the foot back in November 2024.
Whatever smugness I get from being able to say “I told you so” is vastly, infinitely outweighed by the dismay I feel over seeing my warnings be vindicated in real time.
And I also admit that my warnings were not entirely prescient when it came to Trump. I foresaw that Trump would attack America’s institutions, implementing rule-by-decree, purging competent people in favor of cronies, flouting the law, and wielding the power of the presidency to harass and intimidate his critics. I foresaw that Trump would send ICE into American communities to do violence and harass peaceable Americans. I foresaw that Trump would realign America toward Russia, cut off aid to Ukraine, and try to bully Ukraine into surrendering territory.
But I did not actually foresee his biggest mistakes. I didn’t predict that his tariff policy would be nearly as insane as it was — declaring sky-high tariffs on dozens of countries at once, and then selectively walking them back, and then repeating the process again and again.
And I did not foresee the Iran war. I never bought into his antiwar campaign stances — he has always been a bully, and he has always been enamored of the idea of military toughness. But I saw Trump, fundamentally, as a coward — someone who would launch the occasional air strike, but would be too intimidated by the prospect of a military defeat to launch a major war. I saw his cowardice as the core of truth behind the cynical promises of geopolitical isolationism and restraint.
So I can’t quite say “I told you so” in this case. I knew Trump was very bad news, but I didn’t realize quite how multidimensionally bad. I suppose even after all the Trump-bashing I did, I have to issue a mea culpa. I anticipated that Trump would be chaotic, dictatorial, and cruel, but I failed to anticipate how stupid he would be.
Even when the Iran war started, I thought that Trump would probably back off and chicken out pretty quickly. But as with his denial of the 2020 election result, he appears to have stumbled into a losing effort that he feels he can’t back out of.
Unlike with Trump’s limited strikes on Iran in early 2025, or his killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Iran has not simply taken its lumps with grace. With the decapitation of its leaders and Israel pressing for regime change, Iran’s leadership was on what Sarah M. Paine calls “death ground” — they had no choice but to resist with everything they had. And so they’ve continued to fire drones and missiles from underground launchers at a diminished but steady pace. These strikes have occasionally hit valuable U.S. military assets, taking out an AWACS plane (one of only 16 the U.S. has) and some THAAD missile defense radars, and reportedly making several U.S. military bases too dangerous to use.
But the Iranians’ most damaging attack, by far, was to close the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil, gas, and fuel prices soaring. This is hurting American consumers and tanking Trump’s popularity, but it’s hurting other countries around the world — who don’t have their own shale gas and shale oil reserves to weather the shock — even more.1
The Iran war has put Trump in a no-win situation. He’s clearly losing a war against a far inferior power. If he stays in the war, and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, then he keeps losing; if he withdraws, he lost and it’s over. And even if he chickens out as usual, there’s no reason to think Iran will simply open the Strait; now that they see that they can bring Trump’s America to its knees with their oil weapon, they’ll probably use it to extract more concessions.
This is why Trump is writhing in the grip of his own bad decisions, looking desperately for a way out. He reduced oil sanctions on Iran, basically begging them to open the Strait, but they didn’t; instead, Iran just gets to sell more oil and make more money. He has repeatedly declared victory in the war, hoping that everyone will just agree that he won, allowing him to quit gracefully — but no one thinks he actually won.
AI is rapidly changing how software is written, deployed, and used. Trends point to a future where AIs can write custom software quickly and easily: “instant software.” Taken to an extreme, it might become easier for a user to have an AI write an application on demand—a spreadsheet, for example—and delete it when you’re done using it than to buy one commercially. Future systems could include a mix: both traditional long-term software and ephemeral instant software that is constantly being written, deployed, modified, and deleted.
AI is changing cybersecurity as well. In particular, AI systems are getting better at finding and patching vulnerabilities in code. This has implications for both attackers and defenders, depending on the ways this and related technologies improve.
In this essay, I want to take an optimistic view of AI’s progress, and to speculate what AI-dominated cybersecurity in an age of instant software might look like. There are a number of unknowns that will factor into how the arms race between attacker and defender might play out.
On the attacker side, the ability of AIs to automatically find and exploit vulnerabilities has increased dramatically over the past few months. We are already seeing both government and criminal hackers using AI to attack systems. The exploitation part is critical here, because it gives an unsophisticated attacker capabilities far beyond their understanding. As AIs get better, expect more attackers to automate their attacks using AI. And as individuals and organizations can increasingly run powerful AI models locally, AI companies monitoring and disrupting malicious AI use will become increasingly irrelevant.
Expect open-source software, including open-source libraries incorporated in proprietary software, to be the most targeted, because vulnerabilities are easier to find in source code. Unknown No. 1 is how well AI vulnerability discovery tools will work against closed-source commercial software packages. I believe they will soon be good enough to find vulnerabilities just by analyzing a copy of a shipped product, without access to the source code. If that’s true, commercial software will be vulnerable as well.
Particularly vulnerable will be software in IoT devices: things like internet-connected cars, refrigerators, and security cameras. Also industrial IoT software in our internet-connected power grid, oil refineries and pipelines, chemical plants, and so on. IoT software tends to be of much lower quality, and industrial IoT software tends to be legacy.
Instant software is differently vulnerable. It’s not mass market. It’s created for a particular person, organization, or network. The attacker generally won’t have access to any code to analyze, which makes it less likely to be exploited by external attackers. If it’s ephemeral, any vulnerabilities will have a short lifetime. But lots of instant software will live on networks for a long time. And if it gets uploaded to shared tool libraries, attackers will be able to download and analyze that code.
All of this points to a future where AIs will become powerful tools of cyberattack, able to automatically find and exploit vulnerabilities in systems worldwide.
But that’s just half of the arms race. Defenders get to use AI, too. These same AI vulnerability-finding technologies are even more valuable for defense. When the defensive side finds an exploitable vulnerability, it can patch the code and deny it to attackers forever.
How this works in practice depends on another related capability: the ability of AIs to patch vulnerable software, which is closely related to their ability to write secure code in the first place.
AIs are not very good at this today; the instant software that AIs create is generally filled with vulnerabilities, both because AIs write insecure code and because the people vibe coding don’t understand security. OpenClaw is a good example of this.
Unknown No. 2 is how much better AIs will get at writing secure code. The fact that they’re trained on massive corpuses of poorly written and insecure code is a handicap, but they are getting better. If they can reliably write vulnerability-free code, it would be an enormous advantage for the defender. And AI-based vulnerability-finding makes it easier for an AI to train on writing secure code.
We can envision a future where AI tools that find and patch vulnerabilities are part of the typical software development process. We can’t say that the code would be vulnerability-free—that’s an impossible goal—but it could be without any easily findable vulnerabilities. If the technology got really good, the code could become essentially vulnerability-free.
For new software—both commercial and instant—this future favors the defender. For commercial and conventional open-source software, it’s not that simple. Right now, the world is filled with legacy software. Much of it—like IoT device software—has no dedicated security team to update it. Sometimes it is incapable of being patched. Just as it’s harder for AIs to find vulnerabilities when they don’t have access to the source code, it’s harder for AIs to patch software when they are not embedded in the development process.
I’m not as confident that AI systems will be able to patch vulnerabilities as easily as they can find them, because patching often requires more holistic testing and understanding. That’s Unknown No. 3: how quickly AIs will be able to create reliable software updates for the vulnerabilities they find, and how quickly customers can update their systems.
Today, there is a time lag between when a vendor issues a patch and customers install that update. That time lag is even longer for large organizational software; the risk of an update breaking the underlying software system is just too great for organizations to roll out updates without testing them first. But if AI can help speed up that process, by writing patches faster and more reliably, and by testing them in some AI-generated twin environment, the advantage goes to the defender. If not, the attacker will still have a window to attack systems until a vulnerability is patched.
In a truly optimistic future, we can imagine a self-healing network. AI agents continuously scan the ever-evolving corpus of commercial and custom AI-generated software for vulnerabilities, and automatically patch them on discovery.
For that to work, software license agreements will need to change. Right now, software vendors control the cadence of security patches. Giving software purchasers this ability has implications about compatibility, the right to repair, and liability. Any solutions here are the realm of policy, not tech.
If the defense can find, but can’t reliably patch, flaws in legacy software, that’s where attackers will focus their efforts. If that’s the case, we can imagine a continuously evolving AI-powered intrusion detection, continuously scanning inputs and blocking malicious attacks before they get to vulnerable software. Not as transformative as automatically patching vulnerabilities in running code, but nevertheless valuable.
The power of these defensive AI systems increases if they are able to coordinate with each other, and share vulnerabilities and updates. A discovery by one AI can quickly spread to everyone using the affected software. Again: Advantage defender.
There are other variables to consider. The relative success of attackers and defenders also depends on how plentiful vulnerabilities are, how easy they are to find, whether AIs will be able to find the more subtle and obscure vulnerabilities, and how much coordination there is among different attackers. All this comprises Unknown No. 4.
Presumably, AIs will clean up the obvious stuff first, which means that any remaining vulnerabilities will be subtle. Finding them will take AI computing resources. In the optimistic scenario, defenders pool resources through information sharing, effectively amortizing the cost of defense. If information sharing doesn’t work for some reason, defense becomes much more expensive, as individual defenders will need to do their own research. But instant software means much more diversity in code: an advantage to the defender.
This needs to be balanced with the relative cost of attackers finding vulnerabilities. Attackers already have an inherent way to amortize the costs of finding a new vulnerability and create a new exploit. They can vulnerability hunt cross-platform, cross-vendor, and cross-system, and can use what they find to attack multiple targets simultaneously. Fixing a common vulnerability often requires cooperation among all the relevant platforms, vendors, and systems. Again, instant software is an advantage to the defender.
But those hard-to-find vulnerabilities become more valuable. Attackers will attempt to do what the major intelligence agencies do today: find “nobody but us” zero-day exploits. They will either use them slowly and sparingly to minimize detection or quickly and broadly to maximize profit before they’re patched. Meanwhile, defenders will be both vulnerability hunting and intrusion detecting, with the goal of patching vulnerabilities before the attackers find them.
We can even imagine a market for vulnerability sharing, where the defender who finds a vulnerability and creates a patch is compensated by everyone else in the information-sharing/repair network. This might be a stretch, but maybe.
Even in the most optimistic future, attackers aren’t going to just give up. They will attack the non-software parts of the system, such as the users. Or they’re going to look for loopholes in the system: things that the system technically allows but were unintended and unanticipated by the designers—whether human or AI—and can be used by attackers to their advantage.
What’s left in this world are attacks that don’t depend on finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, like social engineering and credential stealing attacks. And we have already seen how AI-generated deepfakes make social engineering easier. But here, too, we can imagine defensive AI agents that monitor users’ behaviors, watching for signs of attack. This is another AI use case, and one that I’m not even sure how to think about in terms of the attacker/defender arms race. But at least we’re pushing attacks up the stack.
Also, attackers will attempt to infiltrate and influence defensive AIs and the networks they use to communicate, poisoning their output and degrading their capabilities. AI systems are vulnerable to all sorts of manipulations, such as prompt injection, and it’s unclear whether we will ever be able to solve that. This is Unknown No. 5, and it’s a biggie. There might always be a “trusting trust problem.”
No future is guaranteed. We truly don’t know whether these technologies will continue to improve and when they will plateau. But given the pace at which AI software development has improved in just the past few months, we need to start thinking about how cybersecurity works in this instant software world.
This essay originally appeared in CSO.
EDITED TO ADD: Two essays published after I wrote this. Both are good illustrations of where we are re AI vulnerability discovery. Things are changing very fast.
According to a new law, the Hong Kong police can demand that you reveal the encryption keys protecting your computer, phone, hard drives, etc.—even if you are just transiting the airport.
In a security alert dated March 26, the U.S. Consulate General said that, on March 23, 2026, Hong Kong authorities changed the rules governing enforcement of the National Security Law. Under the revised framework, police can require individuals to provide passwords or other assistance to access personal electronic devices, including cellphones and laptops.
The consulate warned that refusal to comply is now a criminal offense. It also said authorities have expanded powers to take and keep personal electronic devices as evidence if they claim the devices are linked to national security offenses.
Do you see the horse's head?
Take a tour through volcanic history on the edge of the Sierra Nevada near Mammoth Lakes, California. Between the tall granite peaks to the west and the Basin and Range province to the east, overlapping volcanic complexes imprint the landscape with a collection of craters, cones, and calderas. The area, still restless today, draws interest from geologists studying Earth’s processes and from planetary scientists exploring its commonalities with volcanic terrain elsewhere in our solar system.
A string of volcanic features between Mono Lake and Mammoth Mountain is visible along the left side of this Landsat image. Known as the Mono-Inyo Craters, this chain of about three dozen lava domes, lava flows, and tephra rings formed within the past 10,000 years. Explosive eruptions in the area date back even further, but evidence of those older events is no longer apparent at the surface.
Among the most recent activity in this chain, explosive eruptions formed Panum Crater near Mono Lake about 700 years ago. A strombolian eruption deposited a ring of pumice, ash, obsidian fragments, and other material around the vent. After that, a lava dome made of pumice and obsidian built up in the center, creating the concentric-circle pattern visible today.
South of the Mono-Inyo Craters, Mammoth Mountain is perhaps best known for its ample skiable terrain, but it has a volcanic side, as well. The mountain is made up of at least 25 overlapping lava domes. Its last magmatic eruptions took place about 57,000 years ago, but steam-driven phreatic eruptions and other unrest have occurred much more recently.
Scientists believe a magma intrusion beneath the mountain in 1989 set off a spate of seismicity and volcanic gas emissions. Venting of carbon dioxide gas has killed trees in the area, and the U.S. Geological Survey continues to monitor the mountain’s CO2 emissions. Researchers have previously worked with NASA airborne remote sensing technology to measure ecosystem responses to elevated volcanic CO2 around Mammoth Mountain. More recent projects have expanded these efforts to other volcanoes and incorporated satellite imagery to detect signs of gas emissions. These methods partly rely on changes observed in vegetation and could aid in earlier warnings of volcanic hazards.
The most dramatic volcanism in the region, however, is far older. A massive eruption 760,000 years ago formed the Long Valley Caldera. This oval-shaped area, measuring 10 by 20 miles (16 by 32 kilometers), is bounded by snowy ridges, with Mammoth Mountain just off its southwest rim. Crowley Lake, a reservoir on the Owens River, drains the area to the southeast.
The caldera was formed during a six-day-long eruption, during which 150 cubic miles (625 cubic kilometers) of material were ejected. (That’s about 20 times the amount that was spewed in the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, the largest on Earth in the 20th century.) As a result, the surface over the magma storage area subsided thousands of feet to create a vast depression. Scientists with NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team conducted research in the area in 2023 to better understand how similar massive eruptions on Mars and other planets and moons in our solar system may have altered their environments.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
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The hill-shaped features are a sign of explosive volcanic activity—a rarity on the Red Planet.
The volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula continues to erupt after centuries of quiescence.
The volcano in Hawaii is one of the most active in the world, and NASA tech makes it easier for…
The post A Volcanic Medley Near Mammoth Lakes appeared first on NASA Science.
After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA's Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing.
"No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal," said Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew circumnavigating the Moon. "There are no adjectives. I’m going need to invent some new ones to describe what we’re looking at outside this window."
Live images from the Orion spacecraft showed the Moon growing larger during final approach Monday. Video from GoPro cameras outside the capsule streamed down in low-resolution format, due to limitations on bandwidth coming back from deep space, but the Artemis II astronauts were expected to downlink sharper telephoto snapshots overnight Monday into Tuesday morning.
1. Claims about the role of China, and its economics. And there is a lot of remaining uncertainty, but here is one of the saner Iran war takes.
The post Two assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”
Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.
Today was another surreal day in the second Trump administration.
At the traditional White House Easter Egg roll this morning, Trump, whose right hand was swollen and covered with makeup after his weekend away from the cameras, stood with First Lady Melania Trump on a White House balcony, accompanied by a human-sized Easter Bunny. The columns of the White House stood festooned in soft red, white, and blue plaid over the crowd of young children and their parents in festive pastel clothes excited for the day’s events. The band played “Hail to the Chief.” After a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Trump told the audience that “it’s a day where we celebrate Jesus, it’s a day where we celebrate religion, and it’s an honor to be the president of the United States.” Then things veered off course. He continued: “Our country is doing so well like it has never done before. You’ll see that very shortly, and things that we’ve done have not been done before. We’ve broken every record on the stock market, we’ve broken every record on our military.”
And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”
While the children were rolling their eggs along the ground with spoons, Trump spoke to reporters, telling them about Iran, “If it were up to me, I’d like to keep the oil. I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand.” He suggested that attacking Iran’s infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime because “they killed 45,000 people in the last month. More than that. It could be as much as sixty. They killed protesters. They’re animals, and we have to stop them, and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
He claimed again that former presidents are telling him they wish they had done what he did in attacking Iran; all four living ex-presidents have denied speaking to him. Sitting with children drawing pictures, he told them they could sell his autograph on eBay for $25,000. He signed their pictures, and while he signed, he told the children that former President Joe Biden was “incapable of signing his name” so he had aides follow him around with an autopen machine.
A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”
The celebratory speeches about the war compared a rescued airman to Jesus Christ and gave a great deal of detail about the rescue operation, but they didn’t deliver much information to the journalists packed into the room about negotiations or goals or the president’s ultimatum that Iran must agree to his demands by 8:00 tomorrow night or face “obliteration.”
Trump reiterated: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.” He said that while the regime governing the country has changed—meaning its leadership, because the actual regime is still in power—that his reason for undertaking the war was not regime change, but rather to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
He assured the journalists that he has had a plan all along. “I saw somebody said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have a plan.’ I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, Here’s my plan, we’re going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we’re going to do this, and then we’re gonna, and if you don’t do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is…. Every single thing has been thought out by all of us. But I can’t reveal the plan to the media. So, you know, but we’re just thrilled by the success of this operation.”
Trump has said Iranians are upset when the strikes stop, and a reporter challenged him to explain “Why would they want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power?” He answered: “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. The Iranians have, and we’ve had numerous intercepts—’Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing! Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding, and when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, “Please come back, come back, come back!’”
After noting he was responsible for the killing of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, he added: “I did one other but this one was not picked up. Osama bin Laden—If you read my book, I said you’ve got to take him out one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book. To be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.”
A special operations team located and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. Trump’s frequent claim that his book called for a raid against Osama bin Laden has been just as frequently debunked as a lie.
Today was an exhausting day as Americans seem to have little choice but to pay attention to a man who is bizarrely threatening what appear to be war crimes against Iranians while spinning wild tales. The members of both chambers of Congress are away for another week and Republican leaders are showing no sign of calling them back, leaving the American people to face whatever Trump has in mind for tomorrow on our own.
In contrast to Trump’s vision of government according to the whims of a single man, no matter how bonkers those whims might be, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—who, as a naturalized citizen, is not eligible for the presidency—is illustrating what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Mamdani’s videos about governing New York City inform New Yorkers about what their government does. At the same time, though, they lift up and honor the workers who make the wheels of government turn. During his campaign, Mamdani promised his administration would see to it that potholes got filled, and as the road maintenance workers made the trip to fill the 100,000th pothole of the year, he tagged along. The video humanized the process and dignified work that often doesn’t get attention.
Another video today about the 311 call center in New York City that helps residents find resources to help solve everything from where to recycle a mirror to how to get an apartment repaired featured Tangie Williams putting a face to the people in the center as she coached Mamdani himself through a call. Williams told Mamdani that the calls that “tug at my heart” are elderly people who have no family and need both to be heard and to access help, which she provides with evident joy.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/06/politics/fact-check-trump-false-bin-laden-claim
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/06/us/video/trump-signature-autograph-kids-easter-egg-digvid-vrtc
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/us/politics/hegseth-religious-tone.html
YouTube
X:
atrupar/status/2041168951518871901
Bluesky:
charlotteclymer.bsky.social/post/3miuaolyn522d
mayor.nyc.gov/post/3mitrgour722p
mayor.nyc.gov/post/3miulrvyj4c2y
atrupar.com/post/3mitkxo5h4i2y
atrupar.com/post/3mitn66d5og25
atrupar.com/post/3miuynvonp22t
atrupar.com/post/3mitr3qtaym2q
atrupar.com/post/3mitr4yjeke2c
sanho.bsky.social/post/3mitrpm2njc26
atrupar.com/post/3mittoaexfr2u
atrupar.com/post/3mittpbeoms2r
Heroic effort apparently involving hundreds of special operations forces, aided by CIA deception, successfully plucked that downed airman, a weapons officer, who had been forced to eject with his pilot from a F15E fighter jet struck by Iranian anti-aircraft weapons deep inside Iran.
From all accounts, it was a hairy military mission to find and retrieve the airman, elude the myriad Iranian ground forces hunting for him, and to escape without further injury. Even with the reported glitch in which two military transports that landed at an Iranian airstrip did not restart when it was time to get out — the disabled planes were blown up – it hardly took away from the audacious rescue.
The bravery involved received its deserved acclaim for brashness and execution, as have many of the strictly military feats of this war. But for Donald Trump to trumpet the rescue without acknowledging the larger gambles that he has undertaken with this war seems incongruous. The rescue was needed because we are now attacking civilian targets – bridges, utilities and factories – towards a goal that none of us can state forthrightly.
Iranian forces that Trump and the Pentagon tell us are unable to function anymore shot a top U.S. weapon out of the air – puncturing the myth of total conquest.
Late this week, we got leaks of U.S. intelligence that Iran is using decoys to draw U.S. fire and has been able to recover quickly from attacks on mobile missile launchers and hidden missile and drone supplies. Simply put, a supposedly toothless Iranian defense is still strong enough to cause plenty of international trouble, starting with a stranglehold on Strait of Hormuz shipping and extending to real death, injury and damage in neighboring Gulf states as well as in Israel.
Today is another deadline set by Trump alone for Iran’s total capitulation, a surrender that is marked only by unenforceable promises not to do anything on Trump’s list of proposals. Iran shows no sign of agreeing, and the “bomb them to hell” threats to follow will dial up the conflict anew.
Weirdly, Trump issued a profane Easter message that dwelt not on peace, as preached by say, Pope Leo XIV, but on more war – and incongruously praising Allah.
Europe has organized 41 countries ready to act in concert without the United States or Israel to deal with Iran and the Strait. Trump is ready to dump the entire NATO alliance. Because of the pressure of oil on global economies, Trump has re-authorized the sale and distribution of Russian and even Iranian oil – directly helping our adversaries. And our Congress is caught in its own disfunction.
What is the price of Trump’s delusionary view of incoming information? What is the cost of isolation backed by use of force by whim? What are we to make of America’s moral, diplomatic, economic or even military prowess in a world being adjudged only by compliance with Trump’s gut rather than any measure of reason? Where are the limits for Israel in grabbing southern Lebanon as another buffer zone, along with Gaza and the West Bank without a word of caution from the U.S.?
How long can we hold our breath?
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Holding Our Breath: Who Doesn’t Love A Good Rescue Story? appeared first on DCReport.org.
Up very betimes, and angry with Will that he made no more haste to rise after I called him. So to my office, and all the morning there. At noon to the Exchange, and so home to dinner, where I found my wife had been with Ashwell to La Roche’s to have her tooth drawn, which it seems aches much, but my wife could not get her to be contented to have it drawn after the first twich, but would let it alone, and so they came home with it undone, which made my wife and me good sport.
After dinner to the office, where Sir J. Minnes did make a great complaint to me alone, how my clerk Mr. Hater had entered in one of the Sea books a ticket to have been signed by him before it had been examined, which makes the old fool mad almost, though there was upon enquiry the greatest reason in the world for it. Which though it vexes me, yet it is most to see from day to day what a coxcomb he is, and that so great a trust should lie in the hands of such a fool.
We sat all the afternoon, and I late at my office, it being post night, and so home to supper, my father being come again to my house, and after supper to bed, and after some talk to sleep.
Live data with major airport delay times for North America. Available on the web — with a nice “TV Mode” too — and, of course, within the app.
Just lovely data visualization work from Sheets.works — a consulting firm that specializes in, I swear, Google Sheets.
Links for you. Science:
Even After Being Eaten, This Beetle Has Two Ways Out Alive
Scientists Narrow Down the Hunt for Aliens to 45 Planets
SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic Surge in Invasive Group A Streptococcal Disease
NIH grant terminations affected women scientists more than men, study finds (paper here)
PhagePickr: A bacteria-centric computational tool for designing evolution-proof phage cocktails
Was Life Seeded from Space? ‘Complete Set’ of DNA Ingredients Discovered on Asteroid
Other:
RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted
Life Behind the Liquor Counter
A devastatingly unambitious draft
Inside the Culture of Silence in Washington
Trump’s MAHA pick for surgeon general flounders amid GOP doubts
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website
MAHA’s political power tested as surgeon general pick stalls
Trump Must Resign. And everyone should say so.
How a media campaign of lies and innuendo created the myth of ‘Iran’s nuclear weapons’
Baltimore is first U.S. city to sue over Grok deepfake porn as legal pressure mounts on Musk’s xAI
Treason in the Futures Markets
Who Will Govern AI?
Delivery Robot Drives Through Bus Stop Shelter, Shattering Glass Everywhere
Air Force Academy Prepares Ideological Overhaul, With Erika Kirk Bringing “Bold Christian Faith”
Altman’s Secret Agents
When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos
Could Iran Be A.I.’s Black Swan Event?
This New Wave of Anti-Trans Legislation Threatens Us All
The Quiet Americans: Republican veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan used to be among the most vocal critics of new military adventures in the Middle East. Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, a veteran himself, wonders where they all went.
7 On Whose Side? WJLA’s ‘Squatter’ Narrative Highlights Landlord Woes, Demeans Low-Income Tenants
American Aviation Is Near Collapse
Senate blocks amendment on transgender athletes during weekend session on voting bill
“Unforgiven” is about an incompetent
‘We Warned About It’: Doctors Are Leaving Israel in Growing Numbers
Major League Baseball can now call balls and strikes with 100% accuracy… but will only use the system in the most annoying way possible
Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use
ICE at the airport reminds affluent white Americans of the consequences of politics
Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.
Bike lanes that greatly reduced crashes on National Mall set for removal
The Dreaded NYC Library Budget Dance Continues…
And every professional Democrat should be saying that. In light of Trump’s incessant babbling about the Iran War (at yesterday’s press conference, among many other doozies, Trump said the U.S. should place a toll on the Strait of Hormuz), there have been many calls for Trump’s impeachment–which is a good idea. But I also realize many professional Democrats are reluctant to call for impeachment for various reasons.
But there is no reason at all for Democrats to avoid calling for his resignation: he is increasing incoherent, even by his standards*, and he has created multiple crises, with the possibility of his latest one, Iran, spiraling out of control.
And calling for his resignation is like Temu impeachment: while a formal process that would mandate attention would be better, it still allows Democrats to question his inherent incompetency.
Update: This morning Trump posted on Truth Social, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
*While his aging has made him more decrepit and sloppy, much of his dysfunction should be attributed to his narcissism.
“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin
In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian.
“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026
Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century. Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new post-revolution reality.
A confident company doesn’t need to blow $150 million on a YouTube show just to keep the press coverage positive.
Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only update at Stratechery:
At the same time, I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari; meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast? What is going on here?
Source: NBER
With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science.
OK, that’s an exaggeration — but not that much of an exaggeration. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal calls for a gigantic increase in military spending combined with severe cuts to social programs. But as the chart above shows, it also calls for debilitating reductions in research funding.
Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved. Here, for example, is the number of new grants approved by the National Science Foundation:
Source: Nature
Large numbers of existing grants have also been frozen or terminated, especially in the study of infectious diseases.
Add to this a sharp drop in visas issued to foreign students, who often play a direct role in research and who help support academic departments that do research:
Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt — not a few years from now, but over the course of the next year or two.
This new assault on U.S. science is taking place at a time when the role of American science in the world has already been greatly eroded. The chart below, based on research recently reported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, measures national strength in science by the share of publications in highly ranked journals. In the 1990s the United States had more such publications than the rest of the world combined. Since then we’ve dropped into third place — well behind China and slightly below the European Union. And this was before the Trump administration’s attack on science had time to take its full effect.
Some erosion in U.S. scientific preeminence was inevitable given China’s growing sophistication and wealth. But we’ve also fallen behind Europe, even though everyone says that Europe is lagging economically and technologically. Claims about Europe’s underperformance are, in fact, dubious if one looks hard at the data. But it’s still striking to see America lagging.
What’s going on? There are presumably multiple factors behind America’s scientific lag. But even before Trump II the growing hostility of the U.S. right to science surely had some negative effect. And since the rise of MAGA G.O.P. attitudes toward science in general have become overwhelmingly hostile. This is true even for the Republican rank and file:
And while I haven’t been able to find good survey data, it’s obvious that the anti-science turn has been even more pronounced — and began earlier — among the Republican political elite. Chris Mooney published The Republican War on Science in 2005, and even then was describing a longstanding trend.
Why have Republicans turned so anti-science? Part of the answer is that they believe that scientists don’t support them. And they’re right! A study of who scientists give money to shows that only a small percentage gave money to Republicans even 20 years ago, and that almost none of them donate to Republicans now:
Social scientists have always been strongly pro-Democratic, while there used to be a significant number of physical, “hard” scientists supporting the GOP. But these days physicists are almost as uniformly Democratic, or at least non-Republican, as sociologists.
Why are there almost no Republican scientists? It’s not a mystery. GOP political orthodoxy includes positions that are at odds with the scientific consensus on multiple issues, ranging from the validity of the theory of evolution, to the reality of climate change, to the efficacy and safety of vaccines. In each case the scientific consensus is solidly grounded in evidence. But even before the rise of MAGA the U.S. right was increasingly hostile to evidence-based policymaking — especially, of course, where the evidence is unfavorable to fossil fuel interests or quack medicine, both financial mainstays of right-wing politics.
So scientists don’t support Republicans, and the feeling is mutual. Today’s Republican Party doesn’t like science or scientists. It doesn’t like having its preconceived views challenged by appeals to evidence. It knows that very few scientists are on its side electorally. In general, it sees scientific research as a threat to its grasp on political power.
Add in MAGA’s combination of rabid anti-intellectualism and allergy to any hint of criticism, and one has the makings of a drastic anti-science turn in policy. “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto.
And as I said, we aren’t talking about something that will happen over the course of multiple years: The U.S. scientific enterprise is threatened with severe damage, even collapse, over just the next year.
There are many reasons to find this prospect horrifying: Think of all the beneficial advances, affecting almost every part of life, that won’t happen because U.S. science — still crucial to the world — has been eviscerated.
But think, also, of America’s international standing. Can a nation that has forfeited its role as a leader, or even a contender, in global science, still be a Great Power?
No.
MUSICAL CODA
Anthropic didn't release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Project Glasswing.
The model is a general purpose model, similar to Claude Opus 4.6, but Anthropic claim that its cyber-security research abilities are strong enough that they need to give the software industry as a whole time to prepare.
Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely.
[...]
Project Glasswing partners will receive access to Claude Mythos Preview to find and fix vulnerabilities or weaknesses in their foundational systems—systems that represent a very large portion of the world’s shared cyberattack surface. We anticipate this work will focus on tasks like local vulnerability detection, black box testing of binaries, securing endpoints, and penetration testing of systems.
There's a great deal more technical detail in Assessing Claude Mythos Preview’s cybersecurity capabilities on the Anthropic Red Team blog:
In one case, Mythos Preview wrote a web browser exploit that chained together four vulnerabilities, writing a complex JIT heap spray that escaped both renderer and OS sandboxes. It autonomously obtained local privilege escalation exploits on Linux and other operating systems by exploiting subtle race conditions and KASLR-bypasses. And it autonomously wrote a remote code execution exploit on FreeBSD's NFS server that granted full root access to unauthenticated users by splitting a 20-gadget ROP chain over multiple packets.
Plus this comparison with Claude 4.6 Opus:
Our internal evaluations showed that Opus 4.6 generally had a near-0% success rate at autonomous exploit development. But Mythos Preview is in a different league. For example, Opus 4.6 turned the vulnerabilities it had found in Mozilla’s Firefox 147 JavaScript engine—all patched in Firefox 148—into JavaScript shell exploits only two times out of several hundred attempts. We re-ran this experiment as a benchmark for Mythos Preview, which developed working exploits 181 times, and achieved register control on 29 more.
Saying "our model is too dangerous to release" is a great way to build buzz around a new model, but in this case I expect their caution is warranted.
Just a few days (last Friday) ago I started a new ai-security-research tag on this blog to acknowledge an uptick in credible security professionals pulling the alarm on how good modern LLMs have got at vulnerability research.
Greg Kroah-Hartman of the Linux kernel:
Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality. It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us.
Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real.
Daniel Stenberg of curl:
The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.
I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.
And Thomas Ptacek published Vulnerability Research Is Cooked, a post inspired by his podcast conversation with Anthropic's Nicholas Carlini.
Anthropic have a 5 minute talking heads video describing the Glasswing project. Nicholas Carlini appears as one of those talking heads, where he said (highlights mine):
It has the ability to chain together vulnerabilities. So what this means is you find two vulnerabilities, either of which doesn't really get you very much independently. But this model is able to create exploits out of three, four, or sometimes five vulnerabilities that in sequence give you some kind of very sophisticated end outcome. [...]
I've found more bugs in the last couple of weeks than I found in the rest of my life combined. We've used the model to scan a bunch of open source code, and the thing that we went for first was operating systems, because this is the code that underlies the entire internet infrastructure. For OpenBSD, we found a bug that's been present for 27 years, where I can send a couple of pieces of data to any OpenBSD server and crash it. On Linux, we found a number of vulnerabilities where as a user with no permissions, I can elevate myself to the administrator by just running some binary on my machine. For each of these bugs, we told the maintainers who actually run the software about them, and they went and fixed them and have deployed the patches patches so that anyone who runs the software is no longer vulnerable to these attacks.
I found this on the OpenBSD 7.8 errata page:
025: RELIABILITY FIX: March 25, 2026 All architectures
TCP packets with invalid SACK options could crash the kernel.
I tracked that change down in the GitHub mirror of the OpenBSD CVS repo (apparently they still use CVS!) and found it using git blame:
Sure enough, the surrounding code is from 27 years ago.
I'm not sure which Linux vulnerability Nicholas was describing, but it may have been this NFS one recently covered by Michael Lynch .
There's enough smoke here that I believe there's a fire. It's not surprising to find vulnerabilities in decades-old software, especially given that they're mostly written in C, but what's new is that coding agents run by the latest frontier LLMs are proving tirelessly capable at digging up these issues.
I actually thought to myself on Friday that this sounded like an industry-wide reckoning in the making, and that it might warrant a huge investment of time and money to get ahead of the inevitable barrage of vulnerabilities. Project Glasswing incorporates "$100M in usage credits ... as well as $4M in direct donations to open-source security organizations". Partners include AWS, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the Linux Foundation. It would be great to see OpenAI involved as well - GPT-5.4 already has a strong reputation for finding security vulnerabilities and they have stronger models on the near horizon.
The bad news for those of us who are not trusted partners is this:
We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available, but our eventual goal is to enable our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale—for cybersecurity purposes, but also for the myriad other benefits that such highly capable models will bring. To do so, we need to make progress in developing cybersecurity (and other) safeguards that detect and block the model’s most dangerous outputs. We plan to launch new safeguards with an upcoming Claude Opus model, allowing us to improve and refine them with a model that does not pose the same level of risk as Mythos Preview.
I can live with that. I think the security risks really are credible here, and having extra time for trusted teams to get ahead of them is a reasonable trade-off.
Tags: security, thomas-ptacek, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, nicholas-carlini, ai-ethics, llm-release, ai-security-research
I did not intend to write about the Iran war today; I’ve written about it plenty, and I figured my subscribers could use a break. But when the president of the United States openly threatens another country with genocide, it’s hard to think about anything else. By now you’ve surely seen this:
If you are reading this after Tuesday, April 7, you know how it turned out, at least in the short run. But until then, this is the situation: Because he loves attaching a deadline to a threat in order to create a ticking clock that heightens dramatic tension and encourages viewers to tune in to the next episode, Trump has told Iran that if it doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm eastern time, then he will destroy all the country’s power plants and bridges. But that alone wouldn’t obliterate Iranian “civilization” for all time. For that, you’d need nuclear bombs.
Despite all we’ve been through, I doubt Trump would actually nuke Iran and kill all its 92 million citizens. But I’m not 100% sure he wouldn’t, and neither is anyone else. This is one of the most horrifying things: When Trump is told that his current plans would make him a war criminal, that may make him even more likely to raise the stakes higher, bring more destruction, kill more people, and cause more global instability.
Part of him wants to be praised as a peacemaker, to have everyone say he stopped fifty-seven wars and finally get that Nobel Peace Prize. But another part of him yearns to be the destroyer of worlds.
This is an exchange he had with a New York Times reporter at his press conference on Monday:
Reporter: Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure violate the Geneva Conventions and international law.
Trump: Who are you with?
Reporter: I’m with the New York Times.
Trump: Failing. Failing. Circulation way down at the New York Times. What’s going on there?
Reporter: Are you concerned that your threat to bomb power plants and bridges amount to war crimes?
Trump: No, not at all. No, I’m not. I hope I don’t have to do it. But again, I just said 47 years they’ve been negotiating with these people. They’re great negotiators and because- they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon. And if somebody that takes my place someday is weak and ineffective, which possibly that will happen because we had numerous presidents that were weak, ineffective, and afraid of Iran, we’re never going to let Iran have a nuclear weapon.
Trump doesn’t bother saying that America doesn’t target civilians, or that we take care to minimize collateral damage, or anything like that. He doesn’t recoil from the idea that he’d be committing war crimes or argue for why civilian infrastructure is actually a legitimate military target. He just dismisses the criticism out of hand. Unlike his predecessors, he says, he is not “weak and ineffective,” and he’ll prove it by being more brutal and less concerned with the niceties of international law, the Geneva Conventions, universal horror at genocide, or even the most fundamental human morality. He has identified a goal, and if he achieves that goal to his satisfaction, the fact that he committed horrors along the way is immaterial.
In January, Trump was asked in an interview with the Times whether there is any constraint on his power in foreign affairs. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he responded. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” For him to say “my own morality” was particularly curious and may have been just a slip of the tongue, because there has never, not for a single moment, been any evidence that Trump possesses any morality at all. He believes in no abstract principles or standards of conduct that apply equally to himself and others. It’s impossible even to say what “morality” means to him.
When Trump breaks ordinary political norms, there are always two things going on at once. First, he breaks the norm because he doesn’t like being constrained in that particular way; the norm would keep another president from, say, personally attacking a judge who ruled against the administration, and that’s something Trump just wants to do. Second and more important, breaking the norm is a kind of meta-transgression. It’s an assertion of power, a statement that Trump is beyond all the rules that govern everyone else.
I can’t help but suspect that when he first suggested bombing civilian infrastructure and critics quickly began using the phrase “war crime,” that made him more, not less willing to go through with it. What better demonstration of his unlimited power would there be than to do something so shocking that all the world’s whiny libs will cry “War crimes!” and he’ll laugh in their faces?
This has been a consistent enough theme from the administration’s key figures that it is congealing into an ideology. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” said Stephen Miller a few months ago, “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Pete Hegseth is secretary of defense today because he and Trump bonded over his advocacy for accused and convicted war criminals, and when the war began, he promised that the military would proceed with “No stupid rules of engagement.” Rules are for wimps; real men commit war crimes.
It’s not as though Miller and Hegseth had to work to convince Trump to agree with them; don’t forget that all the way back in 2016, he advocated murdering the families of suspected terrorists and pledged to reinstate George W. Bush’s torture program (“I would bring back waterboarding, and I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”). And now, Axios reports that “Trump might be the most hawkish person in the top echelons of his administration on Iran, according to a U.S. source who spoke to him several times in recent days. ‘The president is the most bloodthirsty, like a mad dog,’ another U.S. administration official said, downplaying stories that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio were egging him on. ‘Those guys sound like the doves compared to the president.’”
The foundation of Trump’s movement, and the thing that made him so appealing to all the worst people in America, was the promise of liberation. No longer would you be constrained in what you can say or do by society and its rules, by “political correctness,” by women and minorities and liberals, by the annoying demand to consider the wishes and feelings of those around you. By becoming your worst self, you would at last be free.
Now Trump has his war, and even if it’s not turning out quite the way he wanted, he has a chance to show how free and powerful he is. War crimes, you say? Just watch me.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Transcript
This is America’s darkest hour.
Hi, Paul Krugman with an update Tuesday morning. Earlier today, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social,
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.
Not going to be a problem if we ever do get the war crimes trial that all of this deserves. A statement of motive, intent is completely clear.
I don’t need to say how vile it is. It is shocking, although at some level, if you didn’t see this as a real possibility, then you weren’t paying attention. Not much to say here except to talk about how those of us who are not Donald Trump should behave.
First of all, any military commander given orders to start destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran should disobey that order, should say it, should not even quietly resign. This is a time to stand up and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable. This is a violation of everything that the military stands for. It’s a violation of everything that America stands for.
Second, any member of the Trump administration: to continue in your position doing your job as Trump takes America on the course of becoming a criminal nation, a criminal terrorist nation, you cannot continue in good conscience.
Particularly, if you play any role in making this happen, then you are a war criminal too. Then you ought to be brought up someday before an international tribunal. But even if you’re in a peripheral role, even just putting your head down and saying, well, I’m an assistant secretary at the agriculture department or something like that, that’s not good enough. This is not a regime that you can serve in good conscience.
Republican politicians, any Republican, I mean, there are people already saying, “oh, you know, I don’t approve of destroying civilizations, but” — that “but” makes you an accessory to the crime, if you are failing to stand up against it.
And I really don’t like this notion that only Democrats have agency. This is a very common thing. All of this is made possible by the lockstep slavish obedience of Republicans. Nonetheless, Democrats have a role here, too. And this is not a time to attack Trump’s war because it costs too much money or to attack it because it’s bad for energy markets or raises the price of groceries. I mean, it does do all of that. All of that is true. But we’re way past that point now. We’re at the point where you need to unambiguously condemn the immorality and criminality of what’s going on. No mincing of words.
Damned if I know what’s going to happen. I mean, at some level, I think that the civilization that may be destroyed tonight is our own. I mean, are we civilized if we do this kind of thing? If America as a nation doesn’t stand up against this, what are we?
So, God help us. Normal life will continue. It’s going to be a really weird thing to be out there, you know, grocery shopping and taking the subway and all of those things. But this is, in a way, the defining moment. The fate of the whole American idea is on the line.
I have no idea how this ends.
Crypto used to be seen mostly as a risky corner of the market. For a long time, it attracted people who were comfortable with sharp price swings and constant speculation. That is still part of the picture, but it is no longer the whole story. More people now look at crypto as one possible piece of a broader financial plan, alongside savings, retirement accounts, stocks, bonds, and other long-term assets.
Part of that shift comes from access. Buying crypto is easier than it used to be, and people go to platforms like switchere.com, for example, to buy or sell. But convenience alone does not explain the growing interest. Crypto now sits much closer to the financial mainstream than it did before. It is being discussed by wealth managers, large institutions, and regular investors who want to understand whether a small allocation could serve a real purpose.
The biggest change is that crypto is no longer treated only as a fringe bet. Large financial firms now cover digital assets more seriously, and regulated investment products have made the space easier to access. Many investors are more willing to explore a new asset class when it starts to appear in familiar financial settings, not just on niche trading platforms.
People feel less certain than they once did about how to protect and grow wealth over time. Inflation has squeezed purchasing power, rates and markets have moved sharply, and some traditional assets already look expensive.
Crypto has benefited from that search. Some people see Bitcoin as a scarce digital asset with a fixed supply. Others are more interested in blockchain networks that support payments, digital ownership, or programmable financial tools.
Most people building a serious financial plan do not want every part of their portfolio responding to the same pressures at the same time. Crypto can add a different type of exposure, even if only in a small amount. That does not guarantee protection in a downturn, and crypto can fall hard with other risk assets. Still, some investors value having at least one asset class driven by a different mix of technology, adoption, liquidity, regulation, and market sentiment.
Growth potential also plays a role. Crypto remains volatile, but that volatility is exactly why some people are willing to keep a limited position. They are not necessarily expecting it to replace the rest of their portfolio. They simply want measured exposure to an area that could keep expanding as digital payments, tokenized assets, and blockchain-based systems become more common.
Most people exploring crypto today are not looking for one magic solution. They are usually looking for one of four things.
Crypto prices can move fast and without much warning. A position that looks manageable during a rally can feel very different during a deep selloff. That is why crypto usually makes more sense as a limited slice of a portfolio, not as money someone may need in the near term.
Security is another major issue. Investors have to think about exchanges, wallets, passwords, recovery phrases, and the possibility of hacks or fraud. Traditional bank accounts come with protections that people already understand. Crypto works differently, and mistakes can be hard to reverse.
Some digital assets have scale, developer activity, real users, and a clear role. Many others do not. That is one reason experienced investors often focus less on hype and more on utility, network strength, and staying power.
The more mature approach is to place it within a clear structure. That usually means handling the basics first, such as emergency savings, debt, insurance, and long-term investing in core assets. After that, a person can decide whether crypto deserves a small role.
Some investors use crypto for a small growth allocation. Others use it as a speculative bucket they can afford to lose. Some want exposure only through more familiar products. If there is no clear reason for owning it, the position is probably too emotional or too random.
Photo: pvproductions via Freepik.
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The post Why More People Are Exploring Crypto As Part of a Broader Financial Strategy appeared first on DCReport.org.
1. Natasha Sarin on slow motion bank runs? (NYT)
2. The Moon. And the colors.
3. How free market is Hungary?
4. “Where no human hand has touched the refereeing process.”
5. Is Clavier-Übung III the most underrated music by Bach? (NYT)
6. Ethnic targeting of bioweapons is not so easy.
7. Did Protestants give co-eds to China?
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is his home page:
Ludwig Straub is a professor of economics at Harvard University. His research areas are macroeconomics and international economics. Among his topics of interest are the recent decline in the natural rate of interest, rising levels of private and public debt, and the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy. Ludwig also has an active research agenda solving and analyzing heterogeneous-agent models. Among his most recent papers is a 2025 paper studying the short-run effects of tariff shocks.
Here is his Google Scholar page. The Medal citation gives an overview of his work. Congratulations!
The post Ludwig Straub wins the Clark medal appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is the document, excerpt:
In January, I released the results of an experiment showing how Claude Code could helpfully extend old papers “automagically.” It was pretty astonishing to me. Claude was able to come up with a plan, scrape the web, write code, run regressions, create tables and figures, and write a whole memo on what it had found—all in about 45 minutes.
Are AI tools perfect? No. Claude made some interesting mistakes in that extension, and since then, I’ve seen it make a whole bunch more. Are human researchers perfect, though? Hell no.
The evidence that AI tools should now be an essential part of your toolkit is overwhelming—look at the recent work that my Stanford colleague Yiqing Xu has put out, for example, which allows for the automated verification of empirical research. This is so clearly valuable. When it comes to empirical work, we’re never going back to the pre-AI world.
Here is a thread on the paper, heedworthy throughout. If you do not have some kind of decent plan here, other economists will leave you in the dust. Even if it is only a minority of “other economists” their total leverage and impact will be extreme.
The post Andy Hall advice on AI and economic research appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
An excellent and highly original movie, I cannot say much without infringing upon the surprise of the basic premise. Exquisitely choreographed in its timing, scene by scene. So anti-Woke that it will make some uncomfortable? The reviews which are very negative are unfair and stem from this fact. I recommend it, but yes some of you will go away feeling offended. I can report that one theme is that couples who are getting married often do not know each other well. Here is the trailer.
The post *The Drama* (no real spoilers) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Trump: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Here is the rest of the message.
The post Solve for the equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Tell us about the innovators, collaborators and change-makers whose contributions have left a lasting mark on the sector
The post Nominate space industry leaders for the 2026 SpaceNews Icon Awards appeared first on SpaceNews.
Vantor employees were gathered for a sales kickoff in January, when an executive announced that a WorldView Legion satellite passing overhead would snap a photo of the California venue. Later, a buzzer sounded to alert the audience that the 30-centimeter-resolution image was available on the Vantor Hub portal. It had been 13 minutes. The demonstration […]
The post Earth observation operators push to deliver satellite images within minutes appeared first on SpaceNews.
Four astronauts from the United States and Canada became the humans to travel the furthest from the Earth April 6 as they went around the moon on the Artemis 2 mission.
The post Artemis 2 swings around the moon appeared first on SpaceNews.
Starfish Space has raised more than $100 million to scale up production of its satellite servicing spacecraft.
The post Starfish Space raises more than $100 million appeared first on SpaceNews.
Newly anointed NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman made a $20 billion announcement on March 24, 2026. To the delight of space enthusiasts everywhere, Isaacman said NASA was cancelling its project to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and would reorient to building a $20 billion base on the surface of the moon. The new base, […]
The post NASA’s new moon base project requires operational technology systems in space, but they are vulnerable. appeared first on SpaceNews.
There has been recent attention to using LLMs to generate novel (and often correct) mathematical proofs, prompted by plain English prompts.
A recent Amazon blog post by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth recounts how they have been able to collaborate with a LLM in the production of increasingly sophisticated proofs of new results. They anticipate that this is a development that will only continue to grow in usefulness. At the same time, they worry about what impact it may have both on the training of new mathematical scientists, and on the peer review process (as the cost of writing polished and correct papers falls faster than the cost of evaluating them for importance). Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first fields to feel the strain of this imbalance has been theoretical research into machine learning models.
How AI is changing the nature of mathematical research
What machine learning theorists learned using AI agents to generate proofs — and what comes next.
“Specifically, how can intuition and “good taste” in scientific research be developed when AI automates many of the steps that have historically been used to train young researchers? Peer review is another challenge: AI-generated research papers, quickly churned out at scale, highlight the limitations of peer review and modern-day publishing structures and also exacerbate already emerging challenges to incentives for scientific success. Without claiming to have answers or solutions to these concerns, we are personally living through them and will discuss each in turn.
…
“Historically, people earn expertise in the mathematical sciences through struggle as junior researchers. PhD students spend years working through the details of technical arguments to gain hard-won intuitions about when a proof approach is promising, when they are being led astray by a problem, or what constitutes a novel and interesting research direction.
“But these aspects of being a researcher are exactly what AI tools are “giving away”. If doctoral students can simply ask AI for proofs — which is extremely tempting, especially when it is in service of advancing research — how do they develop the experience and skill that, for now at least, are required to use AI tools productively in the first place?
…
“Breaking and remaking peer review
“From our perspective, peer review is not only, or even primarily, a process to verify the correctness and quality of research. Rather, its purpose is to focus a scarce resource — the attention of the research community — in the right places. Science progresses as researchers build on each other’s work, but there is already too much work out there for anyone to keep up with. The publication process should help identify the most interesting and promising directions, so they can be more efficiently and thoroughly developed.
…
“AI tools make it much easier to produce work that looks polished and correct, dramatically lowering the barrier to generating “papers” that can be submitted to journals and conferences. Many of these papers are neither interesting nor actually correct — but discovering this requires significant effort from reviewers.
This is straining an already overburdened machine learning publishing ecosystem struggling with tens of thousands of submissions per venue. We have seen that reducing the time and effort needed to produce "a paper" — not necessarily a good paper — is beginning to destabilize our existing institutions for peer review. The most recent iterations of AI and ML conferences have seen the number of submissions growing by large multiples, with a significant number of papers polished by AI, but ultimately of low quality, making it surprisingly far through the review process before being noticed and called out.
“This is a problem across research fields, partially because it’s creating a market for AI-generated papers. This has in turn engendered a countermarket for AI-assisted detection of AI-generated papers — much like the familiar technological arms races around things like spam and its detection, but with the integrity of scientific publication at stake, not just the filtration of annoying or fraudulent e-mails.
…
“Without a serious, community-wide re-evaluation of peer review, AI threatens to arrest scientific progress at the community level even as it accelerates it at the level of individual researchers.”
Our culture valorises the big, coherent self: reading Robert Musil helps me embrace the beauty of my no-self existence
- by Mette Leonard Høeg
In the 1990s, Americans used to work much more than non-Americans. Nowadays, about half of the gap in hours worked has reversed. To evaluate the convergence of working hours, we develop a tractable model of labor supply enriched with multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals, an extensive margin of participation, multi-member households, and an elaborate system of taxes and benefits upon non-employment. Using detailed measurements from micro-level and aggregate datasets, we identify model parameters and sources of heterogeneity across individuals for various countries. We run a horse race between competing explanations and find that U.S. hours per person declined after 2000 owing mainly to the rise of government health benefits provided to the non-employed. Non-U.S. countries have generous benefits for the non-employed, but this generosity has not changed as much over time as in the United States, and public health coverage does not depend on employment status or income levels. For these countries, the rise of labor supply is generally accounted for by a mix of factors, such as the rise of wages and the falling disutility of work.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post Why do Americans No Longer Work So Much More Than Non-Americans? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The subtitle is Evidence for Direct, Reliable, and Portable Genetic Effects, and the authors are Tobias Wolfam, et.al. The abstract:
The interpretation of polygenic scores (PGS) for general cognitive ability (GCA) remains contested, with concerns about indirect genetic effects, environmental confounding, cross-ancestry portability, and the gap between PGS prediction and twin heritability estimates. Relying on a newly constructed PGS using within-family designs in two independent sibling cohorts (UK Biobank, N=4,642 pairs; ABCD, N=736 pairs), we demonstrate that direct genetic effects account for the large majority of PGS prediction (within-family attenuation Correcting for measurement error in brief cognitive assessments, the within-family association with latent general ability is approximately 0.45, substantially higher than observed-scale estimates. Cross-ancestry portability follows theoretical expectations (66% effect retention in African Americans). Within families, higher PGS predicts greater educational attainment, occupational status, and reduced cardiometabolic disease risk, with no evidence for gene-environment interactions or substantial adverse pleiotropy. These findings replicate using a benchmark predictor based on publicly available data, confirming they reflect properties of cognitive genetic architecture rather than idiosyncrasies of a particular score.
I expect results like this will hold up. Here is commentary from GPT Pro.
The post Interpreting Polygenic Prediction of Cognitive Ability appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Florida is among the wettest U.S. states, but that doesn’t mean it is drought-free. Nearly all of Florida faced at least “moderate” drought, and nearly 80 percent faced “extreme” conditions in April 2026, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Unusually dry conditions gripped the state for much of 2025, but the intensity and extent of the drought ratcheted up starting in January 2026.
Data from a NASA and German Research Center for Geosciences satellite mission show that the drought has left its imprint on the state’s underground water supplies, which are often tapped for drinking water and farming. The map above combines data from the twin GRACE-FO (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On) satellites and ground-based measurements to estimate the relative amount of groundwater stored underground as of March 30, 2026. The colors depict the wetness percentile, or how the amount of shallow groundwater compares to long-term records (1948–2010). Blue areas have more water than usual, and orange and red areas have less. Aquifers in the northern and central regions of the state are particularly dry.
The drought is being felt throughout Florida. Some water districts have imposed restrictions on when water can be used for certain activities, such as lawn watering and car washes. News reports suggest that the dry weather poses a threat to crops, many of which already suffered severe damage during hard freezes in February. Large wildland fires have flared up in some areas, and even wetland ecosystems like the Everglades face unusually dry conditions.
U.S. Drought Monitor records indicate that the current drought is the most widespread and severe to affect the state since 2012. Many areas have received less than half their normal rainfall since September 1, 2025, according to the National Weather Service. St. Petersburg has seen only 7.7 inches (195.6 millimeters) of rain since September 1, compared to the normal 19.0 inches, making this the driest year on record for that period.
However, the current drought does not yet rival the worst drought that has parched the state, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Their analysis indicates that the 2000–2001 drought was more intense, lasted longer, and affected a larger area. GRACE-FO observations are among the sources of information that the U.S. Drought Monitor considers when mapping drought conditions in its weekly assessments. Forecasters anticipate that a slow-moving rainstorm set to hit Florida this week may offer some relief.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using GRACE-FO data from The National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Very wet—but very warm—weather in the western U.S. has left many mountainous regions looking at substantial snowpack deficits.
Drought in the Nueces River basin is reducing reservoir levels, leaving residents and industry in the Corpus Christi area facing…
A multi-year drought has put extra strain on farmers and water managers in the Middle Eastern country.
The post Drought Parches Florida appeared first on NASA Science.
One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their agenda, even though they know it’s false. There is an apparently infinite attention appetite for commentators who troll for attention by saying how “kids these days” don’t want to work hard.
As has often been documented, the hoary chestnut of saying “nobody wants to work anymore” dates back decades, if not centuries, and it’s never been true in all those years of deletion. It is, firstly, a tactic that bosses use for negging workers in a vain attempt to try to drive down wages (and to successfully get media to blame people for their own underemployment), but it also serves as an effective demonstration of just how little society understand about what actually motivates people.
I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard. The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:
If people have these things, and believe in what they’re doing together, they will joyfully work their asses off.
It is genuinely one of the best feelings in life to be completely exhausted while sitting next to someone who’s been right beside you, shoulder to shoulder, fighting to accomplish the same goal. I’ve known that to be true whether we were launching a new company into the world, campaigning to get a candidate we believed in elected, organizing to rally people around an issue, raising funds for an important cause, or even just trying to get people together for a big event or party.
Every time, the feeling of being soul-tired next to folks who you know you can trust because they showed up and worked their asses off just like you did, is among the most motivating and inspiring things you can experience. Nobody who’s ever been lucky enough to have had a moment like that could ever think that people “don’t want to work”.
What people face too often is being ground down by systems, institutions, and unjust leaders who insist on creating roles where people are forced to do dehumanizing, isolated, meaningless work, while not being given the agency to make smart and empowered decisions about how the work gets done. Or worse, they’re forced to do work in service of goals that are actively harmful and destructive, and contrary to their own values, or just contrary to basic human decency. It’s not that people are unwilling to work, it is that they are working — to balance their own humanity with the crushing burdens of having to provide for themselves and their families. It is exhausting for a good person to have to do bad work or harmful work or pointless work, just to pay the bills. Being less “productive” in those situations isn’t a shortcoming, it’s a measure of still having an immune system that’s resistant to these moral injuries.
Preserving your soul and sanity in an organization with no morals is very hard work. If you think your workers aren’t working hard, maybe you’re ignoring the toughest part of their job.
And even in more moderate organizations, where things aren’t overtly evil so much as frequently frustrating and burdensome and stressful, there are still plenty of reasons that people aren’t as “productive” (as defined by bosses). Many of these reasons could be addressed by leadership taking accountability for the context and communication provided to workers for their responsibilities. Empowered workers who are given high levels of trust and autonomy tend to be extremely productive, and don’t need babysitting from management. If you treat adults like idiots, they will respond in kind.
There’s also the issue of what people are provided beyond their paychecks. Ideally, everyone on a team will have enough resources to do the job properly, but in a mission-aligned organization even that can be optional at first, because scrappy teams are pretty adept at making something out of nothing if they really have to. There just needs to be a point where they’re not starved of appropriate resources anymore, and it’s a leader’s ethical responsibility to provide everything people need to thrive and be healthy and happy in the long term. The key point here is that people are not driven by greedy, selfish motivations in organizations that accomplish meaningful things; if there’s trust that they’ll be taken care of, and that leaders are worthy of that trust, people will over-deliver in service of the common goal.
But in many organizations, people are given crappy tools, miserable working environments, overbearing surveillance of their workplaces and digital workspaces, meaningless and abstract metrics to achieve, and all of these are delivered with corporate communications that don’t sound like any human being ever. The executives who inflict all of this on the workers hope that they don’t notice that none of the execs are expected to endure any of this.
Finally, fundamentally, there is pay. Compensation and real-world wages have been plummeting for decades; the growing chasm of wealth inequality has been well-documented for many years. But the quiet indignities around that degradation in standard of living have increased, as well, with the chipping away at leisure time through always-accessible digital tools making people have to be on call for their jobs during every waking hour.
The erosion of social norms around employment has been so complete over the last few decades that people born in this century don’t even believe that there was a time when it was not only routine for Americans to be union members, but for private sector companies to provide, and honor, pensions for their employees to benefit from in retirement. The mere suggestion of the idea would get a public company CEO fired in the current era.
Why would someone work for an institution that is actively working to undermine their well-being? Most large companies are spending more time strategizing against their employees than against their competitors. Too many nonprofits and other ostensibly non-corporate institutions have gotten the same idea. But it is management that does not want those workers to work — or they would act like it. If your workers aren’t massively motivated to do great work, it’s your fault. Because all you have to do is provide a worthy mission and get the fuck out of the way.
How do I know? Because I’ve gotten it right, and I’ve gotten it wrong. When I’ve taken my eye off the ball, either for unavoidable business reasons, or because I made mistakes due to inexperience or ego or distraction or competition or bad luck or whatever else, the people on my team showed it. Work stopped, quality dropped, frustration and tension increased, and all of a sudden my managers were telling me that “these folks don’t want to work”. Eventually I learned: the right thing to do is to tell those managers that we should be asking, “How are we failing?” Because, short of personal emergencies or life situations that keep them from being able to do their best work, people want to feel proud about the work they’re doing, and to feel like they’re not wasting their time every day when they go into the office. They don’t want to resent their bosses or be annoyed at their coworkers.
The few times I’ve been lucky enough to get it right have been the most satisfying times in my career. Once or twice, I’ve gotten to work for great bosses. They really inspired me to do great work, and taught me a lot that I didn’t know how to do before, or motivated me to want to learn on my own. But more importantly, they made an environment where I could collaborate with my coworkers to do more than I thought was possible, both by myself and especially together with others. I hope that at my best, the teams I’ve led have had a bit of that same feeling; I know I’ve been so proud of what I’ve seen them create and accomplish that they certainly have inspired me over the years.
But perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from watching great teams work is that the cynical, toxic view of people’s intrinsic motivations and work ethic that we hear so often is a damnable lie. Most people are tireless and brave and brilliant in the work they do, when it’s work that has purpose and passion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is telling on themselves, and revealing their own lack of imagination and vision about what it’s possible for people to create together.
Market Design
