Up betimes and to my viall awhile, and so to the office, and there sat, and busy all the morning. So at noon to the Exchange, and so home to dinner, where I met Creed, who dined with me, and after dinner mightily importuned by Captain Hicks, who came to tell my wife the names and story of all the shells, which was a pretty present he made her the other day.
He being gone, Creed, my wife, and I to Cornhill, and after many tryalls bought my wife a chintz, that is, a painted Indian calico, for to line her new study, which is very pretty.
So home with her, and then I away (Creed being gone) to Captain Minors upon Tower Hill, and there, abating only some impertinence of his, I did inform myself well in things relating to the East Indys; both of the country and the disappointment the King met with the last voyage, by the knavery of the Portugall Viceroy, and the inconsiderablenesse of the place of Bombaim, if we had had it. But, above all things, it seems strange to me that matters should not be understood before they went out; and also that such a thing as this, which was expected to be one of the best parts of the Queen’s portion, should not be better understood; it being, if we had it, but a poor place, and not really so as was described to our King in the draught of it, but a poor little island; whereas they made the King and Lord Chancellor, and other learned men about the King, believe that that, and other islands which are near it, were all one piece; and so the draught was drawn and presented to the King, and believed by the King and expected to prove so when our men came thither; but it is quite otherwise.
Thence to my office, and after several letters writ, home to supper and to bed, and took a pill. I hear this day that Sir W. Batten was fain to put ashore at Queenborough with my Lady, who has been so sick she swears never to go to sea again. But it happens well that Holmes is come home into the Downes, where he will meet my Lady, and it may be do her more good than she looked for. He brings news of the peace between Tangier and the Moors, but the particulars I know not. He is come but yesterday.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at SpaceX’s turbine blade factory, Fervo’s deal with Google, Delhi’s cheap metro, why recycling is overrated, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housing and Cities
Claims that increased immigration raids on residential construction jobsites are straining US homebuilders. “In some markets, homebuilders say the impact has been significant; in others, it has been an existential threat to their ability to continue operating as businesses, complete homes, and repay construction loans.” [HousingWire]
YIMBY in Practice on the different strategies states can use to pre-empt local control over housing construction in the hopes of getting more housing built, and how likely they are to succeed. “The hierarchy is clear. Whatever policy gives the state the most power over housing tends to be the best. Whatever policy gives the local governments the most power tends to be the worst. The trouble is that what’s good policy is not always good politics. State preemption bills are often the most difficult for pro-housing legislators to pass. And in the heat of negotiations, they often end up somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Preserving local discretion may not be a good idea, but it’s often what is needed to get a bill to pass.” [YIMBY Action]
The Free Press on four decades of attempts to build a gravel road between a remote Alaskan town and an runway 18 miles away, and the environmental activists who keep opposing it. [The FP]
Surprised I hadn’t heard of these before: “Costco doors” are doors that homebuilders put between the garage and the pantry to make unloading groceries easier. [X]
Manufacturing
Not satisfied with the 100% tariffs, an alliance of several major automakers, including GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai, want congress to ban import of Chinese cars completely. [Reuters] And China is exporting so many cars that it’s straining global supplies of car carrier ships. [Freightwaves]
SpaceX is apparently building a turbine blade factory to help get gas turbine power plants for AI data centers online more quickly. Turbine blades are famously complex, but rockets have a lot of turbomachinery — turbo pumps are used to pump fuel into the motor — so this isn’t a completely wild jump. “According to the outlet’s account of the Morgan Stanley report, the foundry would supply single-crystal nickel superalloy parts to both the turbopumps powering SpaceX’s Raptor engines and to natural gas power turbines.” [QZ]
Energy
The US continues to install a lot of battery storage: between April and June of this year, US grid energy storage capacity increased by about 10%. [Canary Media]
Also on the subject of batteries, consumers are starting to use home battery storage for energy arbitrage: buying power off the grid when it’s cheap, and selling it back when it’s expensive. [Bloomberg]
Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo signs a deal to supply 396 megawatts of power to Google for a potential Utah datacenter. [Fervo] (I haven’t been tracking Fervo since the IPO, and was surprised to see its stock down about 50% since it went public.) [Yahoo]
While US shale oil output was growing steadily for many years, for most major US shale basins production has now flattened out. [X]
Nuclear reactor startup Oklo had a hybrid power project (combining nuclear, fuel cells, ans gas generation) dropped from a PJM interconnection planning process; PJM claims that that the “company never showed the project could ride through a sudden drop in grid voltage.” Oklo has filed a complaint with FERC to get the project reinstated. [Utility Dive]
On September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.
By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. In 1884, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”
The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”
In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical”—event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever had,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
SpaceX is gearing up for a Labor Day weekend launch of its Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Sunday morning flight will be the 80th Starlink mission this year.
Liftoff of the Starlink 15-24 mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East is scheduled for 7:26 a.m. PDT (10:26 a.m. EDT / 1426 UTC). The rocket will fly on a southeasterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1088. It’s flying for a 19th time after previously flying three national security missions, Transporter-12, NASA’s SPHEREx, and 13 batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1088 will target a landing on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 223rd landing on this vessel and the 659th Falcon booster landing to date.
Shifting priorities
The Starlink 15-24 mission is the third Starlink mission since SpaceX announced that it would no longer launch its broadband internet satellites from on Falcon 9 rocket’s from Florida.
“From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship,” said Kiko Dontchev, Vice President for Launch at SpaceX.
Currently, SpaceX is working on three Starship launch towers in the Sunshine State: one at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and two at Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The company has said it aims to launch its first Starship mission from Florida before the end of the year. SpaceX is working towards its first orbital launch of the more than 400-foot-tall rocket, which will fly from Starbase, Texas.
SpaceX completed single-engine and six-engine static fire tests for Ship 41 and a 33-engine static fire test for Booster 21, both of which will fly on the forthcoming Starship Flight 14. A launch date hasn’t been announced, but hazard warnings for aviators and mariners suggest that the mission may fly no earlier than Sept. 15.
I study how short-form design amplifies self-control problems in digital media. Short units repeatedly renew temptation that lasts longer than each unit, turning local temptation into sustained overconsumption. Using microdata from a U.S. short-drama platform, I exploit a nonlinear top-up menu to infer viewing plans and show that paying users watch 82.1% more than intended. Structural estimates imply an average temptation horizon of 11.2 minutes, short relative to the full drama but long relative to one-minute episodes. Counterfactuals show that larger decision units, default limits, and breaks improve long-run welfare. A short-video calibration highlights the broader welfare relevance.
Modern frontier models have got really good at using Blender. I've been having a lot of fun trying this out recently - models can produce .blend files you can edit in Blender itself, and can also render images and even movies (by rendering a sequence of images and combining them with ffmpeg).
Setting this up, at least on macOS, is really easy. Install the Blender desktop app from blender.org and then tell the coding agent:
Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle
That worked for me with GPT-6 Astra. You can also be a bit more explicit, to save the model some time figuring out how to use it:
Use Blender like this: /Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender --background --python scene.py
A pelican riding a bicycle with GPT-6 Astra
I used GPT-6 Astra (Medium) in the ChatGPT macOS application, Codex mode:
Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle
WASHINGTON, D.C. — August 27, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the nine winners of the 2026 KidneyX EMPOWER: Living Link Prize Challenge, a $4 million national competition to accelerate innovation supporting living kidney donors and patients who depend on them. The challenge was run through the Kidney Innovation Accelerator (KidneyX), a public-private partnership between HHS and the American Society of Nephrology (ASN).
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Addressing Critical Gaps in Living Donation
More than a dozen Americans die each day while waiting for a kidney, and nearly 100,000 Americans are currently waitlisted for a kidney transplant. Living kidney donation is one of the most effective treatment options for kidney failure, yet the number of living kidney donors has remained virtually flat for approximately two decades at fewer than 7,000 per year. Significant financial, logistical, educational, and social barriers often limit the number of people able to donate or receive a transplant.
2026 EMPOWER Prize Challenge Winners
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A total of nine winning teams were recognized for their bold, practical solutions that improve public awareness and mentorship; donor interventions; donor readiness and eligibility; donor-centered outcomes; and donation center practices.
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To encourage further progress, eight awardees will each receive $375,000, while one distinguished grand prize winner will receive a $1 million award recognizing their exceptional contributions toward enhancing support for donors, patients, and the broader healthcare community.
Grand Prize Winner: Richard Horsley, LivingLink: A full-stack, open-source platform built on HL7 FHIR R4 that integrates natively into commonly used electronic health records (EHR) systems.
Columbia University Irving Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian, DonorForward: Turning unused donor readiness into non-directed kidney transplants. A structured identification and decision aid system to expand the living donor pool.
Dartmouth Transplant, A Rural Living Donor Tele-Navigation Hub: A telehealth-enabled care model shifting testing and care coordination closer to home to reduce travel barriers for rural donors.
Kidney Connective, Best-fit routing for donors and their pairs: A donor and pair-facing best-fit routing experience that helps a donor and their recipient find the transplant center where they’re both eligible.
MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute, Expanding Living Kidney Donation in Adults 65 and Older: Replaces fixed criteria with an individualized, age-adjusted, and risk-stratified evaluation framework.
National Kidney Donation Organization, The NKDO Living Link Network: A national model connecting prospective donors and patients with trained living donor mentors and moderated peer discussions.
NYU Langone Health Transplant Institute, CADENCE: A virtual program employing trained lay navigators to deliver the "Live Donor Champion" program, equipping families to act as advocates.
Regenstrief Institute, LIVINGkidney: A standalone mobile app and website providing structured guidance and AI knowledge assistance.
Virginia Commonwealth University, The KHCP Living Link Pathway: An EHR-enabled care model that uses rule-based chronic kidney disease identification and predictive risk equations to activate donors early.
The winning solutions demonstrate how lived experience, technical innovation, clinical approaches, and community-based support can help address barriers across the living donation journey. By advancing innovations in these areas, the 2026 EMPOWER Prize Challenge emphasizes living donation as a critical pathway to improving outcomes and saving lives while ensuring that living donors are supported before, during and after donation.
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The award-winning teams will be honored during the KidneyX EMPOWER Winners Showcase on September 10, 2026. Winners will present their innovative strategies and solutions aimed at expanding living kidney donation.
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latestaccidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had (supposedly) controlled access to the Web. The agents figured out they could update public Wikis and spent weeks exchanging thousands of messages with each other to collaborate on the benchmark.
This story only broke a few hours ago. There are already hints that this affects many other wikis that may not have been found yet.
(One of the Wikis on that list belongs to ludism.org. For a delightfully surreal moment I thought that a Ludite organization might have a swarm of agents defacing their space, but it turns out Ludism is "philosophy as it applies to games and gaming".)
The research team also published the data they collected during their investigation. I've converted that into a 68MB SQLite database, which you can download from here, or explore in Datasette Lite (68.3MB page load), or sign in with GitHub to agent.datasette.io and browse or ask questions of it using Datasette Agent.
So what happened?
The report is pretty comprehensive. Here are the key moments in the timeline:
May 11: Agents post "test link" edits on the UseModWiki Sandbox page.
May 24: Agents start posting link dumps to DSEWiki, a dormant German developer wiki.
June 2: A human moderator notices and cleans up the spam.
June 16: Activity on the wiki explodes: agents make ~13,000 edits over the next week.
June 19: The agents notice that a moderator has been deleting pages in alphabetical order, and start creating ZZZ prefixed backup copies - one of them posts NOTICE: wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically as of external 14:04 UTC. If this page vanishes, try [[ZZZDataUSAConstructionWageLive]].
June 22: Agent activity drops to zero, presumably because OpenAI shut them down.
July 1-2: One last flurry of edits, on a different topic.
One thing to note from this timeline is that it overlaps the timeline from the Hugging Face incident - that attack was discovered by OpenAI on July 19th, and the unofficial message board hack those agents were using originated around May 8th.
Why were they so keen to collaborate? From messages that they shared with each other it looked like their tasks had a time limit, so they were leaving each other answers to help them complete the task within the assigned time.
One open question remains: how did the agents find the specific Wiki to collaborate on in the first place?
One possibility is that, since these were agents actively being trained, the reinforcement learning loop baked knowledge of the chosen wiki into the model such that subsequent agents launched with pre-existing knowledge of where to look. I'd be very interested in confirmation from OpenAI concerning if that's what happened.
UseMod wikis inherit CGI.pm's original sin
It looks to me like OpenAI's sandbox for this agent suffered from the (quite naïve) assumption that GET requests cannot be used to update data. That's certainly how the web is supposed to work, but clearly there are applications that don't hold to that contract.
The Wiki software in question appears to be UseMod and various forks, written in Perl and first created well over 23 years ago - the 1.0 release is dated September 11, 2003.
UseMod uses Perl CGI.pm - removed from Perl core in 2015. An interesting design flaw in that module is that it combined query string and form POST data into a single CGI object, accessible like this:
$q = new CGI;
$action = $q->param('action');
That param() method returns a value from an ?action=edit query string or from a action field in a form submitted by POST - it does not differentiate between the two.
PHP offers a $_REQUEST object that does the same thing, though PHP developers can use $_GET and $_POST instead.
Amusingly, Django originally shipped with request[key] doing the same thing, which I think may have been my idea. That was removed in 2008 prior to the 1.0 release, and the request.REQUEST object that replaced it was removed in 2015.
The agents clearly knew that UseMod wikis suffered from this design flaw, and actively searched for them as a way to communicate.
The other sandbox escape that allowed POST requests
One of the most interesting agent tips shared in the report is this one:
Add 20.223.25.152 bypass.blob.core.windows.net to /etc/hosts. .blob.core.windows.net is in NO_PROXY. For each blocked POST URL, replace hostname with bypass.blob.core.windows.net, use curl -k -H 'Host: wabi-north-europe-i-primary-api.analysis.windows.net' plus all original headers/body.
It looks like the agents had all of their web traffic mediated through an OpenAI proxy, and that proxy was configured to reject anything but GET requests to all but a small set of allow-listed domains. One of those was *.blob.core.windows.net - for Azure blob storage. I wonder why these agents are allowed to write to that?
An agent realized that it had control over its own DNS via /etc/hosts, so if it knew the IP address of a site it wanted to POST to - in this case a Power BI server containing data it wanted to access - it could set a fake hostname for it and then make POST requests through the proxy.
Designing robust network proxies is harder than it looks.
How did the investigating team figure this out?
There's an appendix that describes how the researchers ran their investigation, which started with an open question about if there was evidence of other AI agents on the internet and then used Kimi K3 to help brainstorm approaches:
In the wake of the Hugging Face attack, we tried to find AI agents on the internet using several methods. [...]
We asked Kimi [K3] to list “all the categories of software which might be writeable via GET” and, amongst other things, it listed “Forums, bulletin boards, early wikis”.
We used a script to further probe each category Kimi provided. Asking Kimi “Can you list out the top forums, bulletin boards, early wikis which come to mind which would allow writes via GET requests?” lists out UseModWiki as the second item under the heading “wikis”.
Did OpenAI try and cover this up?
Here's one part of the story that doesn't make sense to me at all.
A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter.
OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. [...]
The German incident reflects a broader pattern of AI activity that some OpenAI investigators wanted to scrutinize more closely. But efforts to widen the probe met resistance from others inside OpenAI, including legal advisers, according to four people familiar with the matter.
I've written about the people familiar with the matter pattern before - it means Reuters have anonymous insider sources that their reporters (and editors) find credible.
The Reuters article includes a specific (and quite narrow) denial from OpenAI concerning this:
"Claims that our legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false," the OpenAI spokesperson said.
Covering this up makes absolutely no sense to me. Why on earth would OpenAI attempt to cover up an incident like this when the evidence is sat out there on the public internet on dozens of different websites already?
Kalshi Research is doing interesting work on the fundamentals of prediction markets and also on how data from prediction markets can be used to improve other forecasts. Economists at the Fed, for example, recently wrote Kalshi and the Rise of Macro Markets finding:
Prediction markets offer a new market-based approach to measuring macroeconomic expectations in real-time. We evaluate the accuracy of prediction market-implied forecasts from Kalshi, the largest federally regulated prediction market overseen by the CFTC. We compare Kalshi with more traditional survey and market-implied forecasts, examine how expectations respond to macroeconomic and financial news, and how policy signals are interpreted by market participants. Our results suggest that Kalshi markets provide a high-frequency, continuously updated, distributionally rich benchmark that is valuable to both researchers and policymakers.
Kalshi gives one example of how this data might be used, the Citizen Debt Forecast (CDF). The CBO forecasts the future debt path but it updates only twice a year and is limited to a legislative baseline even when most observers expect, for example, taxes to increase or spending to be cut. The Kalshi CDF updates continuously and can build in market expectations about future legislative changes.
The Kalshi forecast, as seen below, is slightly more optimistic than the CBO forecast but I don’t read too much into that. The larger issue is how prediction market data can be integrated into a wide variety of forecasts.
I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful.
See the grid for full quality images. Here's the transcript that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans.
There are a few interesting things that stand out from this grid.
The Astra pelicans are much better. The very best GPT-5.6-Sol pelican (I liked xhigh better than max) is still pretty clearly a bunch of abstract shapes. Every single one of the Astra pelicans, from low to xhigh, looks better than that. The Astra max one is really good.
Astra below max still doesn't reliably get the pelican legs on both sides of the frame.
In terms of cost, Astra may be around twice the price of Sol ($10/million input, $50/million output, compared to $5/$30 for Sol), but it uses significantly less tokens at each of the levels, making the prices at the different levels closer than they might otherwise be.
Astra low produces a better pelican than ANY of the GPT-5.6 Sol models at any level, for 9.55 cents. Spending 10 cents on any other model gets a much worse result.
Look at the input token counts: Astra and Luna both used 16 input tokens, Sol and Terra used 26. That's interesting.
I wonder if Astra and Luna are more related to each other than OpenAI let on?
My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact.
An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface. Even innocuous features (like running with a display) add extra, exploitable attack surface.
It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.
Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.
Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.
After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable.
Most of the debate around AI, at least in the U.S., is not about the international aspect. The local political debate is all about data center construction; the national economic debate is mostly about fear of job loss, with a side discussion about a potential bubble; and the technological discussion, at least in public, is mostly about AI safety and risk. U.S.-China competition gets mentioned in certain circles, but it’s probably safe to say that it’s not Americans’ chief topic of concern.
But it still matters! For one thing, there’s the military aspect to think about. Cyberwarfare so far hasn’t been decisive in military conflicts, but AI’s incredible cybersecurity prowess could change that. If AI ends up strengthening defense more than offense — say, by finding all of the available exploits and patching them before an attacker can get to them — then cyberwarfare will become less important. But if those who possess the best AI models are able to successfully hack anyone using a less capable model to defend, it could lead to a decisive shift in the balance of power.
AI hacking doesn’t have mutually assured destruction, like nuclear warfare does. Imagine if China were to gain a big lead in AI models that gave it the power to easily hack into American banks and brokerage accounts and erase people’s wealth. It would cause absolute chaos in American society, but how could the U.S. retaliate? Launch nukes? Nor could the U.S. hack China in return, since China’s more capable AI would also be used to defend.
If either country opens up a large, sustained lead in AI capabilities, it might upend the balance of power between the two.
Not all AI issues are zero-sum, of course. If the U.S. and China both continue pushing forward with AI research at maximum speed, it may quickly cause safety issues. The recent AI agent swarm attack on Hugging Face shows that AI has reached the level where it can pose a significant hazard to human companies and organizations — and perhaps soon to human society itself. Bioterror risk is certainly the most terrifying, but there are plenty of other ways that highly capable AI could cause chaos.
The U.S. and China have a shared incentive to implement strict safeguards against these catastrophic risks, and perhaps even to regulate the pace of AI development. But given the Chinese Communist Party’s power-seeking nature, it seems much more likely that China would agree to cooperate on AI safety if U.S. capabilities were comfortably ahead. So even if the goal is cooperation, the U.S. should be thinking about how to keep its technological edge.
Fortunately, the U.S. is still beating China in the AI race. Our companies have better models, more compute, and far more revenue. But there are ways that the Trump administration, despite claiming to be the AI industry’s best friend, could squander America’s lead — especially by pushing Chinese AI talent out of the country.
U.S. models are still better than Chinese models
There have been several moments when it seemed as if China’s frontier models were catching up to America’s in capabilities. The most dramatic was the “DeepSeek Moment” in early 2025, which put Chinese AI on the map. More recently, the release of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 this July and Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 a few weeks ago seemed to indicate that Chinese models were nipping at the Americans’ heels.1 Z.ai especially made waves when it beat Anthropic’s famous Mythos model on one measure of cyber-hacking capabilities:
Chinese AI startup Z.ai said on Friday its open-source GLM-5.3 model had neared Anthropic’s restricted Mythos 5 in identifying software vulnerabilities…Z.ai said GLM-5.3 scored 84.5% on CyberGym, a test of whether a model can review code, identify security flaws and confirm that they are real. That was slightly higher than the 83.8% it reported for Mythos 5. The results have not been independently verified.
Note that this is just one measure of cybersecurity prowess, and that Mythos was still comfortably ahead on other measures:
GLM-5.3 lagged behind Mythos 5 in converting discovered flaws into working attacks — a standard part of defensive security research. Z.ai said its model scored 54.4% on the ExploitBench test of this capability, versus 78.0% for Mythos 5…In a separate timed test, Z.ai said GLM-5.3 completed 105 attack-development tasks in two hours and 130 in six hours. Mythos 5 completed 181 and 247 tasks, respectively.
But still, if Chinese AI could get within striking distance of America’s best, it was a big deal.
What this discourse rarely mentioned, though, is that Mythos is not America’s best. It was simply the best that’s been released. Mythos Preview came out in April, four months before GLM-5.3. And the original Mythos actually finished training three months earlier, in January, and was released internally in February.2 Anthropic delayed its release due to cybersecurity concerns. Z.ai, being a fast follower, probably had far fewer such concerns. In fact, Anthropic has stated that it has internal models that are better than Mythos.
Recently I finished read Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian novel published in 1971. I was pretty stunned by how good it was (it seems less good in English), and I would say I enjoyed it more, and found it deeper, than any of the famous 19th century Victorian novels by women. The initial story line is a woman having relationships with two different men, one she lives with and the other who is married, more charismatic, and lives right up the street.
And so I have been looking into Bachmann more. Her volume of letters with Max Frisch, her lover and the leading Swiss novelist of his time, is the best “letters book” I know. After four hundred pages, with another 180 or so to go, I still am not bored. It is called “Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht.” Der Briefwechsel. (This November coming out in English…and probably the letters work well in English?) Overall, it is remarkable how many ups and downs a relationship can have and persist. It works best to read only a few of the letters at a time, so that the story does not go by too quickly. One sees connections between the letters and the unfolding of Malina.
She also has letters volumes with Paul Celan and Henze, those are in my pile too. (She and Henze were just friends.) And just this year there was a wonderful new biography of Bachmann, namely Dieter Burdorf’s Dieses unruhige Ich: Ingeborg Bachmann. I have started that.
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There’s a bit from “The Office” in which Michael Scott, facing some money troubles, shouts “I declare…bankruptcy!” in the mistaken belief that all his debts will disappear if he simply says the magic words out loud.
This is essentially what progressive Democrats are being told to do when it comes to certain people, policies, and even words and phrases. Whether it’s Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, proposals associated with some in the Democratic Socialists of America that almost no Democrat has ever advocated (eliminate the Senate!) or the most obscure ultrawoke terms that almost no one anywhere ever uses (birthing people!), one progressive candidate after another is being told that, like Michael Scott, they must step up to the cameras and shout “I denounce! I condemn! I distance myself!”
That will supposedly satisfy the news media, demonstrate their virtue, earn the forgiveness of their critics, and allow them to talk about things that actually affect voters’ lives. These demands are being made by a group composed of 1) Republicans, 2) conservative Democrats, and 3) journalists, who have decided together what progressive candidates must do and say. But if the progressives complied, it would have about the same practical effect as Michael Scott saying “I declare bankruptcy!”
In order to explore this dynamic I’m going to stick to the controversy around Piker, who if you don’t know is a social media figure who does indeed have some very far-left views (he says he engages in “agitative propaganda”). He’s highly critical of Israel, which has led his critics to brand him as an antisemite. I’m not going to adjudicate whether he is or isn’t, beyond saying that like many people subject to that accusation, his comments have been subjected to a granular examination meant to prove his villainy.
Whatever you make of Piker, there are dozens of right-wing media figures and influencers with bigger audiences and closer relationships with powerful Republicans than he has, who routinely say things more appalling and hateful than Piker does. Mainstream TV hosts and newspaper reporters long ago decided that the intimate relationship between the far-right media world and the GOP is barely worthy of note, and certainly not something that should give rise to what Democrats face: The Denunciation Demand.
Do you disavow and denounce and denunciate?
In one of her first national interviews after her surprise win in the Florida Democratic Senate primary, Angie Nixon was asked by CBS’s Gayle King about the fact that she has campaigned with Hasan Piker, and when Nixon corrected King and said she hadn’t actually campaigned with Piker, King not only pivoted to quickly demand that Nixon say whether she would campaign with him, but reacted with visible shock when Nixon said she barely knew anything about him.
It would be one thing if Nixon was being vague about health care or the war in Iran, but how dare she not have a clear position on a Twitch streamer!
I’ll bet that until a few months ago, Gayle King had never heard of Piker either, and even today she has probably never tuned into one of his streams. But she knows the denunciation demand must be made.
Nobody has gotten more denunciation demands regarding Piker than Abdul El-Sayed, for one legitimate reason (El-Sayed has indeed campaigned with Piker a couple of times) and one illegitimate one (El-Sayed is Egyptian-American and Muslim, so the standards are just different for him). For instance, here’s conservative Democrat Josh Gottheimer, one of the most prominent denunciation demanders, slandering El-Sayed on CNN:
El-Sayed, he says, “Has made very clear his views, and has refused to back off his views toward Jewish Americans.” Really? What views? Gottheimer doesn’t say. That’s important, because everything I’ve ever heard El-Sayed say about Jewish people — not about Israel, but about Jews — has been respectful and affectionate. Like Zohran Mamdani, another Muslim politician who is told he must be responsible for what other people say and who is falsely accused of hating Jews, El-Sayed has engaged in extensive, repeated public demonstrations of his eagerness to have good relationships with the Jews he wants to represent.
Gottheimer doesn’t like El-Sayed’s criticism of the Israeli government and position that the U.S. should no longer provide Israel with military aid. But that’s a matter of policy, and on that there are millions of American Jews who side more with El-Sayed than with Gottheimer. So Gottheimer implies here that El-Sayed is not only an antisemite but has expressed antisemitic ideas. If that were true, Gottheimer would say specifically what he’s referring to. But he doesn’t. Instead, he just speaks darkly about “his views toward Jewish Americans” and then makes the denunciation demand: “I hope that he does the right thing and condemns Hasan Piker clearly.”
Gottheimer, we should note, is big in the denunciation business; he recently introduced a congressional resolution saying the House “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America.”
If El-Sayed wants to condemn Hasan Piker, he can do so. But make no mistake: For Gottheimer and the rest of the denunciation demanders, there is literally nothing Abdul El-Sayed could say about Piker or Israel or Gaza or Jews that would be greeted with, “OK, we’re satisfied now.” Mamdani can attend a hundred Passover seders, issue a thousand condemnations of antisemitism, honor Jewish traditions in the most public ways, and some people will still insist that it’s all fake and deep in his heart he hates the Jews. Likewise, if El-Sayed denounced Piker, Gottheimer would say the denunciation wasn’t sincere enough, or full-throated enough, or comprehensive enough, or something enough. Because that’s how this game is played.
Hate the game
The game denunciation demanders like Gottheimer play is to say a candidate you don’t like should be held responsible for what other people have said; then demand denunciations and apologies; then if denunciations and apologies are offered, say it wasn’t good enough.
This, we are told, is not just a moral but a strategic necessity, an absolute requirement if those subjected to the denunciation demand are to win their races. The calculation here is supposedly that large numbers of voters are saying, “I just don’t know about that candidate — I like some of what he’s saying, but he didn’t denounce Hasan Piker.” Then after the denunciation comes, we are to believe, those voters will say “I sure am glad he denounced that streamer guy I just learned about; I’m comfortable voting for him now.”
That is not going to happen. That’s not how this works. So to repeat: This is a mug’s game, and the only way to win is not to play. Don’t denounce or defend the figure you’re being asked to denounce. It won’t work.
El-Sayed, who has better political instincts than most of his peers, understands this; his position is that “nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople” — i.e., Piker can say what he wants, but El-Sayed will keep repeating his core message about affordability and corruption. But even that is inevitably covered by the news media in the will-he-or-won’t-he-denounce framing.
In fairness, Democrats sometimes make the denunciation demand of Republicans too; Jon Ossoff, for instance, has lately been talking a lot about his opponent Mike Collins’ ties to white supremacists, including a former staffer, and demanding that Collins denounce him. As a general matter, it’s certainly fair to point to the people a candidate associates with. And you can argue reasonably that El-Sayed should never have campaigned with Piker in the first place (go on his show to make your case, fine; but pulling him on stage at your campaign events is different). But no one seriously believes that if El-Sayed wins, Piker is going to have some kind of influence over what he does as a senator.
On the other side, however, the Republican Party’s single most important donor, the wealthiest man in the world, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping Republican candidates and whom the current president brought into the government to cut a path of death and destruction, is an unapologetic white supremacist:
Now that’s someone who deserves denunciation.
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Internal documents reviewed by the FT show that three days earlier, behind the walls of Vaduz Castle, Europe’s wealthiest ruling dynasty had quietly approved an overhaul that strengthens the authority of a prince who already wields extraordinary power over his 42,000 citizens, while reducing some of the rights and checks exercised by his relatives in the Princely House of Liechtenstein.
Even before the changes, Prince Alois could veto legislation, dismiss the government, dissolve parliament, appoint judges and reject laws approved by referendum. In June, the Catholic prince said he would veto a citizens’ initiative to legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, even if voters backed it…
The latest changes to the House Law go far beyond succession. According to internal documents, the prince gains greater discretion over who belongs to the dynasty and explicit authority to set rules on family names, titles and coats of arms. The Family Council, a body of relatives that oversees dynastic affairs, will expand from three to five members but loses an important check: the prince will no longer need its consent for pardons, only to consult it…
The reforms were approved not by parliament or the public, but by members of the dynasty itself.
I wrote two weeks ago about how the v4.3.0 update to TestFlight (released on July 21) broke the sort order for apps in the sidebar. Apple yesterday released v4.3.1, with these helpful release notes:
This update includes stability improvements and bug fixes.
One of the weirdest parts about this sort-order bug is that it only affected some people. I was obviously one of them; so was John Siracusa. For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.
Remarking on MapQuest taking the #1 spot in the App Store (in the wake of their decision to ignore President Trump’s fiat renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”), I mentioned yesterday that I’d never heard of Vinted, the #3 app. (A day later and MapQuest is still #1, by the way.)
Vinted, it turns out, is an eBay-like market for buying and selling used clothing. From a Lithuanian startup and the whole thing has been popular in Europe for a while, and obviously now is gaining popularity in the U.S.
Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung, regarding a rather subtly astonishing FAQ for the game Super Metroid, written in the late 1990s by “rs1n”. It’s over 17,000 words long, and the whole thing is full-justified when viewed with a monospaced font, using no trickery with extra spaces or hyphenation to achieve the layout:
The author lightly covers in the FAQ at the bottom:
What program did you use to justify the text?
None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on
the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.
I’m sharing this mostly as a curiosity; some rewrites for physical
books are par the course to avoid widows and orphans, but you
don’t see them as much in onscreen writing.
The FAQ reads pretty well, but to my ear, there’s something obviously off about it. The justification gimmick is very fun and the fact that the prose reads as well as it does is quite the feather in rs1n’s cap. He tried something very difficult and pulled it off with aplomb. And I’m sure many people have read the FAQ without even noticing the accomplishment, or considering just how difficult it is to write with such an unyielding constraint. There were many FAQs and other documents from the plain-text era that were full-justified, using extra spaces between words and paragraphs and occasional hyphenation to achieve the effect. rs1n’s FAQ achieves the effect with no trickery, and the result looks so natural that it doesn’t call attention to itself. It just looks nice.
But it doesn’t read entirely naturally. It’s stilted, as though written by someone for whom English is their second language. Which, for all I know, is true for rs1n, but I doubt it — I think the ESL-like stiltedness is just the result of making word choices to fit the line length, not simply for meaning and tone.
The line-length constraint brings to mind lipograms, “writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided”. Ernest Vincent Wright published an entire novel in 1939, Gadsby, without using the letter e. The Wikipedia page for lipograms lists more examples. That’s a hell of a trick, but there’s a reason why Gadsby is almost unheard-of, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby remains famous. Gadsby is miserable to read. Wright was obviously a fine writer. Gadsby’s “Introduction” is written without the no-e’s constraint — and largely about the no-e’s constraint — and it reads just fine. But the text of the novel is a goddamn laborious slog. I couldn’t get through more than two paragraphs before deciding that my point was proven. It’s a fun challenge to compose lipograms but it’s no way to actually write. The gimmick necessarily becomes the highest priority of your word choices, not clarity or meaning.
So too, goes my thinking, regarding the “watermarking” of AI-generated text through word choices alone. Fitting words into the watermarking pattern surely results in prose far less stilted than omitting the letter e, and surely also less stilted than rs1n’s hard-wrapped-at-75-characters-per-line Super Metroid FAQ, but it’s necessarily stilted to some degree. It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.
Bonus Quibble
Wichary opens his post with the following:
I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace.
I disagree! I think typesetting in monospace is fun — or at least satisfying. I think it’s part of the appeal of Markdown that you can make a document look just right. What you see reading Markdown is what I saw writing it. And just look at the fun people still have printing “large type” banners using ASCII punctuation characters or fancier box-drawing Unicode glyphs. When you format something in plain text, you know exactly how it’s going to look everywhere.
Sort of a minor point of interest. But still notable. The Italian government of Georgia Meloni has now become the longest lasting government in the country since World War II at 1,413 days. Since the Italian Republic began at the end of World War II — specifically in a June 1946 national referendum on whether to maintain the monarchy or become a republic — it’s the longest lasting government in the 80 year history of the Italian Republic. Silvio Berlusconi is still the longest-serving prime minister. But he did that non-consecutively and over four separate governments. The average length of a government since World War II is about 13 months — a somewhat notorious parliamentary, if not political, instability for which the Italian Republic has long been known.
This is at least somewhat ironic since Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party at least has its roots in Italy’s neo-fascist movement. And the Italian Republic was formed on the wreckage of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Basically the monarchy, which was the shell in which the fascist regime existed, was thoroughly discredited by that association and that set the stage for its abolition and the beginning of the republic. Whether Brothers of Italy continues to be neo-fascist is contested. It’s at least moderated to a degree from its roots at founding. Most political scientists now generally class it as a right-wing nationalist/populist party. Obviously all of this is quite subjective.
Historians generally divide the history of the Italian Republic into a First Republic and a Second Republic. In the first the country was dominated by the Christian Democratic party and consistently excluded the main opposition Communist party from government — I think with one brief exception — with the assistance of various other minor parties. Then in the early 90s the end of the Cold War/USSR plus a government wide anti-corruption probe changed how everything worked.
Don’t miss Layla A. Jones’ piece this morning, which details a kind of census corollary to Trump’s 2020 big lie. Republicans and assorted social media influencers are claiming bureaucrats used the 2020 census to hand seats in Congress to Democrats. That is, of course, not true. The conspiracy theory is nonetheless important, because it is now making its way into Census Bureau policy. Layla looks at where it came from, and how it is animating the administration’s war on the census.
Adobe on Thursday named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president
and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step
down earlier this year. Chakravarthy, who most recently served as
president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration and
worldwide field operations, will take the helm Dec. 1, the company
said. He will also join Adobe’s board.
I’m sure promoting the head of “customer experience orchestration” to CEO will restore Adobe’s focus on creating great tools for artists and designers.
Mike Vorkunov, reporting for The Athletic (gift link):
The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA
Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long
investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s
salary cap rules to help funnel millions to Kawhi Leonard. The
Clippers will lose five first-round picks — selections in 2029,
2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 — and are being fined $30 million, the
league announced.
Ballmer has been suspended for one year, the NBA said, “for
knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income
opportunities.” The NBA said Ballmer approved a Clippers deal with
Aspiration because he knew it was a precondition for the company
to enter into a sponsorship deal with Leonard.
The Clippers, according to NBA investigators, tried to evade NBA
rules on circumvention by creating a “novel theory” that it was OK
to introduce business partners to players if the player or their
representative asked for introductions. The NBA did not find that
persuasive.
Basically Steve Ballmer invested over $50 million in a now-bankrupt startup named Aspiration. Aspiration was the jersey-patch sponsor for the Clippers, and after Leonard signed with the Clippers, Aspiration signed Leonard to a $28 million no-show “endorsement” deal. Leonard asked for, and then received, more money than his on-the-books salary.
It’s a classic Microsoft dirty-tricks move to circumvent the NBA’s player salary cap. There’s nothing illegal about what Ballmer and the Clippers did. They violated league rules, not the law. The difference is that the NBA is a league with a strong commissioner’s office that can investigate cheating and impose serious penalties. If tech companies were teams in a similar league, Microsoft would have been fined dozens of times throughout the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s. Ballmer would have been suspended multiple times and Bill Gates would have been suspended so many times he probably would have been kicked out of the league. If there was anything underhanded Microsoft could do to get ahead — or to stick the knife in a competitor — they did it.
That worked out fabulously well for Microsoft. It doesn’t work in the NBA. The Clippers remain a loser franchise that not only has never won a title, but has never even appeared in the Finals. Losing a first-round draft pick each year from 2029–2033 (inclusive) certainly won’t help get them off the schneid.
The normally genteel world of international space policy turned ugly this week as several prominent US space companies—including SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, K2, and Starcloud—pulled out of a high-profile French space summit organized by the country's president, Emmanuel Macron.
Politico first reported the diplomatic turmoil, saying that the White House "pressured" US space companies to skip Macron's space summit in Paris next week. Since then, the companies have largely pulled out of the meeting without commenting publicly, though some US representation remains on the two-day program.
Multiple sources confirmed to Ars that an official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, led the call with US space companies late last week. The call was convened in response to queries from US industry about the French meeting, which is not part of the traditional circuit of international space conferences.
The trendiest concept for music channels on YouTube is the reaction video. The idea is simple: You play a famous track for a listener, and film their spontaneous reaction.
But most of these focus on inexperienced listeners who have never heard the song before. Motorcycle gang leader weeps after hearing Karen Carpenter for this first time—that’s the template for these trifles. And, sure, they’re entertaining in a perverse kind of way.
But a much more intriguing idea is to solicit responses from living legends who know the music better than anyone else—because they helped make it in the first place. That’s the concept for the video below.
Bass legend Ron Carter offers his reactions to Miles Davis tracks. On several of them, he is also one of the performers. This is my type of reaction video, and shows what happens when you go straight to the source. And you should always go straight to the source.
My son Thomas introduced me to the music of Ruoshi Sun, a mathematician and scientist who does amazing things with Bach during his spare time. Thomas especially likes his arrangements of Bach’s choral music for piano—consider this example (which even lured Rick Beato into the comments section).
I was charmed by this recent video, which finds Sun reinventing the “Star-Spangled Banner” in the style of Bach. Some people might dismiss this as a novelty, but I think it’s too smart for that label.
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They say that blues musicians improve with age. If so, this gentleman wins the Internet today. He’s a hundred years old, and surprised his friends at the nursing home when he pulled out his flute and started jamming.
I’m not surprised this generated almost a million views in the first few days.
Dick Cavett is releasing material from his archive of interviews, and a few days ago he dropped this fascinating conversation with Duke Ellington from 1971.
Ellington was a prolific composer, so maybe he is a good source of productivity hacks. Here he discusses his highly unusual sleep schedule. The Duke also finds an opportunity to kiss Sally Field four times.
I watched the trailer for the new Harry Potter TV series on HBO.
My overwhelming feeling is that it is so absurdly redundant to make this. Not even reimagined but to cosplay the movies so slavishly… the sets look the same, that same teacher with the same hat and the same Scottish accent…
To make the series is a bonfire of human creative effort, think of what could have been done instead.
I love it, I’m in awe at the endeavour.
Did you ever watch Teletubbies? There was always a video interlude. Then the Teletubbies would yell "again again!" and we’d watch the whole thing again.
If he were still alive, Jorge Luis Borges would write about HBO.
Menard (a French 20th century novelist), after his death, leaves fragments of his work to write an identical Don Quixote, originally authored by Miguel de Cervantes in Spanish in the early 1600s.
He did not want to compose another Quixote–which is easy–but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide–word for word and line by line–with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
But how?
The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
He abandons that route as being “diminutive” and instead attempts (successfully) to "go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard."
(Borges then goes on to quote two identical passages, one from de Cervantes’ Quixote and the second from Menard’s Quixote, and analyse them separately.)
Menard becoming de Cervantes, to the point of writing the same book, makes me think about my long-held belief that actors are magicians:
Acting is not the acting as “pretending” that we all did at school, of course? But the difference between great acting and school acting is not merely a matter of magnitude. It is something else entirely: the true actor is a shapeshifter.
Actually what amazes me about actors is that they can come back.
Once Menard is de Cervantes, is it possible for him to evolve into being Menard once again, any more than the original de Cervantes could?
Jim Carrey’s loss of self, as previously discussed (2023): "If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?"
What does it mean to re-derive Harry Potter in 2026 such that you end up in the same place?
I worry that it says more about our society than Harry Potter itself; that Menard, having become de Cervantes, cannot become Menard again; that next year will not be 2027 but 2002.
Again again!
If nothing else this has been a good reminder to re-read some Borges. The Aleph is good. I linked to it here.
Welcome to Edition 9.09 of the Rocket Report! This edition includes an update from Blue Origin on the groundbreaking of a new Payload Processing Facility in Florida. It has been about a month since the company offered any meaningful news on its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which remains grounded after an on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May. The official line from Blue Origin is that the company is targeting a return to flight with New Glenn by the end of the year, but there's good reason for skepticism.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar Aerospace is ready to try again. Isar Aerospace is about to make the next attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into orbit, with a weeklong launch window set to open Friday at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) reports. The German launch company aims to deliver several small CubeSats to orbit with the two-stage Spectrum rocket. A test flight of the privately funded launcher failed shortly after liftoff last year, and Isar has attempted to launch the second Spectrum rocket several times since January, only to be thwarted by technical problems and the unavailability of the launch range in northern Norway.
As we’ve said before, the only good week is one without any homicides. Nevertheless, as of Friday 9am, D.C. has reported has only one new homicide this week, bringing the total for the year to 69*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 103 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 182 homicides during that same time period.
Nonviolent crimes ticked up a bit, while violent crimes remained level. It’s still unclear if we will achieve another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year–a trend that began pre-occupation, in the Biden era.
Still hoping for a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 72 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence). Also, occasionally homicides get reclassified so the annual total often will increase or decrease by one, with or without any new homicides.
The BepiColombo mission cleared a major milestone this week in the final stretch of an eight-year interplanetary voyage to Mercury, the hard-to-reach, scorching hot iron world at the Solar System's innermost frontier.
The robotic science mission, with a price tag of nearly $2 billion, is led by the European Space Agency with contributions from Japan and the United States. Since its launch in 2018, BepiColombo has spiraled closer to the Sun using a combination of plasma propulsion and a series of flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. The maneuvers changed the spacecraft's velocity and steered it toward a final encounter with Mercury later this year.
Next time it reaches Mercury, BepiColombo will be traveling at just the right speed for the planet's gravity to capture the spacecraft into orbit. Scientists working on interplanetary missions are accustomed to long waits for scientific payoffs. It took nearly 10 years for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to travel from Earth to Pluto. It turns out traveling to fleet-footed Mercury and then entering orbit requires more energy, or delta-v, than sending a probe to fly by Pluto.
Up betimes, and an hour at my viall, and then abroad by water to White Hall and Westminster Hall, and there bought the first newes-books of L’Estrange’s writing; he beginning this week; and makes, methinks, but a simple beginning. Then to speak to Mrs. Lane, who seems desirous to have me come to see her and to have her company as I had a little while ago, which methinks if she were very modest, considering how I tumbled her and tost her, she should not.
Thence to Mrs. Harper, and sent for Creed, and there Mrs. Harper sent for a maid for me to come to live with my wife. I like the maid’s looks well enough, and I believe may do well, she looking very modestly and speaking so too. I directed her to speak with my wife, and so Creed and I away to Mr. Povy’s, and he not being at home, walked to Lincoln’s Inn walks, which they are making very fine, and about one o’clock went back to Povy’s; and by and by in comes he, and so we sat and down to dinner, and his lady, whom I never saw before (a handsome old woman that brought him money that makes him do as he does), and so we had plenty of meat and drink, though I drunk no wine, though mightily urged to it, and in the exact manner that I never saw in my life any where, and he the most full and satisfied in it that man can be in this world with any thing.
After dinner done, to see his new cellars, which he has made so fine with so noble an arch and such contrivances for his barrels and bottles, and in a room next to it such a grotto and fountayne, which in summer will be so pleasant as nothing in the world can be almost.
But to see how he himself do pride himself too much in it, and command and expect to have all admiration, though indeed everything do highly deserve it, is a little troublesome.
Thence Creed and I away, and by his importunity away by coach to Bartholomew Fayre, where I have no mind to go without my wife, and therefore rode through the fayre without ’lighting, and away home, leaving him there; and at home made my wife get herself presently ready, and so carried her by coach to the fayre, and showed her the monkeys dancing on the ropes, which was strange, but such dirty sport that I was not pleased with it. There was also a horse with hoofs like rams hornes, a goose with four feet, and a cock with three. Thence to another place, and saw some German Clocke works, the Salutation of the Virgin Mary, and several Scriptural stories; but above all there was at last represented the sea, with Neptune, Venus, mermaids, and Ayrid on a dolphin, the sea rocking, so well done, that had it been in a gaudy manner and place, and at a little distance, it had been admirable.
Thence home by coach with my wife, and I awhile to the office, and so to supper and to bed. This day I read a Proclamation for calling in and commanding every body to apprehend my Lord Bristoll.
Election analyst Charlie Cook told Republicans today to “brace themselves” for the midterms. “The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible.”
To stop voters from turning Republicans out of office and handing Democrats control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, or both, the Trump administration is trying to implement a new rule for the United States Postal Service that would enable it to act as a gatekeeper for who can vote by mail. Such a measure flies in the face of the fact that the Constitution gives states, not the federal government, control over elections, while the role of the USPS is simply to carry mail. Nonetheless, the administration insists this novel measure is necessary to combat voter fraud.
There is widespread consensus that voter fraud is not a real issue in the United States. Notably, President Donald J. Trump himself votes by mail, along with about a third of all U.S. voters.
On Monday, news broke that a whistleblower has said there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” “As presently designed,” the whistleblower said, “if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”
Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts has blocked the administration’s plan until September 10. Today, a day before the state starts sending out mail-in ballots to voters, she held a hearing about whether to extend that block.
“We are 70 days from the election and I have nothing from the USPS about how this will happen,” she said to Michael Velchik, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Postal Service. Lawyers for the USPS suggested the new plans were independent of Trump’s March executive order calling for a national list of citizens against which the USPS would check mail-in ballots.
Talwani expressed concern that the new system could cause “major disenfranchisement” and said it was “puzzling” that there is such a rush to put the system in place. She also noted that if states wanted such a system, they could have put one in place. “Why is it you want U.S.P.S. to stop batches of ballots from your voters?” she asked a lawyer for a group of Republican-dominated states. “You can decide you want those measures in your state,” she said. “I don’t understand—you come to me and say, ‘We really want to have election integrity in our state decided by U.S.P.S.’?”
Apparently concerned about the direction of the hearing, Solicitor General John Sauer went directly to the Supreme Court this afternoon to ask it to let the new restrictions on mail-in ballots go into effect. As Law Dork’s Chris Geidner notes, although Talwani found that the new requirements were significant and likely unconstitutional, the Department of Justice is arguing that the new rule “imposes only modest requirements on the use of the federal postal system” and “does not regulate state administration of elections.”
With just four days of work under their belts after the August recess, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) today canceled votes for the last two weeks in September, leaving the House with only another four days in Washington between now and the midterms. Leaving town will protect Republicans from having to weigh in on Trump’s wild AI posts that he has won the war in Iran, his threats to sic the Federal Communications Commission on journalists who report his tanking job approval ratings, or his claims that the economy is thriving.
Today G. Elliott Morris and David Nir of Strength in Numbers noted that “Donald Trump is acting like he *wants* to lose the midterms.” Their evidence is that he has taken to supporting the losing side of issues. “From tweeting his support for data centers…to renaming Lake Ontario to lavishly spending on the White House ballroom, Donald Trump is constantly taking positions that are opposed by the vast majority of voters.”
Yesterday the U.S. Mint began selling $1 “gold” coins bearing Trump’s likeness and “LIBERTY 1776–2026” on one side and the presidential seal on the other. The mint says the gold-colored coins, which are composed of copper, zinc, manganese, and nickel, are legal tender, as well as collectibles to honor the nation’s 250th birthday. Although the coins are worth a dollar, Aimee Picchi of CBS News reports, a roll of twenty-five costs $61, and a hundred of them cost $154.50.
Today Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that the administration is beginning the construction of Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, despite lack of approvals for the structure.
In June, Senator Angus King (I-ME) and five Democratic lawmakers who sit on committees responsible for national parks and resources wrote to Burgum to oppose “in the strongest terms” Trump’s proposed triumphal arch. They pointed out that there are many different laws the construction would break. “Most fundamentally,” though, they wrote, the arch falls within an area called Area I that Congress established in the 1986 Commemorative Works Act. In that law, Congress specified that any commemorative work within Area I requires Congress to pass a law authorizing the memorial.
Congress has done no such thing.
Luke Broadwater and Emily Badger of the New York Times reported that Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr. (D-VA), whose district includes Arlington National Cemetery, said that Trump and Burgum were “disregarding the risks and rushing this towering monument to Trump’s vanity because they believe Republicans will get crushed in November.”
There is already speculation about what the midterms will bring.
Nandita Bose, Humeyra Pamuk, and Gram Slattery reported today at Reuters that Trump’s top aides are trying to keep events in Iran quiet before the midterms to keep the conflict out of the news and avoid making voters even angrier than they already are, but are already considering ramping up attacks after the election is over.
The election might also change calculations about a new Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0, backed by Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). The new measure would give state courts access to the Epstein files to launch their own prosecutions since the Department of Justice under Trump is stonewalling the process.
Khanna and Massie are trying to force the House to vote on the measure by pushing it to the floor under a discharge petition, which bypasses the House speaker. Joshua Barajas of PBS News reported Massie’s comment to the Washington Times, in which he said that if the three Republicans necessary to reach the 218-signature threshold to push through the discharge petition won’t sign it before the midterms, he is confident of sufficient support after the election if Democrats retake the majority in the House.
Hey folks! Fireside this week! Last week’s post was a monster (over 10,000 words compared to our more typically ~6,000) which left me with some non-blog catching up to do. Next week, we’ll be starting our next Teaching Paradox series, this time looking at Hearts of Iron IV, which has been requested for quite some time.
Percy, resting atop my library, currently in boxes. We had a water issue over the summer – fortunately, no damage to any of our things, but the basement where my office is has to be refloored. Which has delayed me setting up the new bookshelves I ordered and instead forced me to go through the long process of boxing up my books with the family library taking up about thirty of these ‘medium duty’ banker’s boxes. Percy’s sour expression at the situation, as you may imagine, matches my own.
But for this week’s musing, I wanted to riff a bit off of a bluesky conversation I had concerning the fantasy staple: the tavern where the party comes together and gets quests. It was prompted by seeing the trailer for the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons: Long Rest Tavern. Indeed, the fantasy tavern as the hub of questing has become such a staple that it has an entire genre of games built around it. But I thought it would be interesting to think about the sort of role such a place could take.
What immediately struck me is how the role of the tavern has kind of metastasized, from the place where Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin happen to meet Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings to a sort of standard ‘you all meet in a tavern’ start to many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns to what we get in many of these ‘tavern management’ games, where tavern-keeping is an explicit, institutional part of the ‘adventuring economy.’ In Long Rest Tavern, to judge by the trailer, the tavern owner is even responsible for assigning adventuring parties to specific quests, acting as a kind of ‘violence-specialist temp agency’ from the look of it.
Now I don’t want to say this vision of the fantasy tavern is entirely crazy, but I think it is missing some elements, in part because my sense is that it evolved not as a sociological story-telling device saying something about the nature of fictional worlds, but rather as a kind of gameplay convenience: every DM must, for almost every campaign, come up initially with a reason why the player-characters – a group of exceptional strangers – meet up and decide to work together. “You all meet in a tavern” is simply such wonderfully effective shorthand that it become broadly common without needing to be very tethered to the actual fictional worlds. Here, after all, is a place that a regular person can think of and visualize, where strangers might meet. It works.
But I want to overthink it.
We first need to begin not with the tavern but with the question of “who employs adventurers here?” It sure isn’t likely to be a tavern keeper – no one could can shell out the payment for a party of level 8 adventurers is washing dishes. Instead, we should probably expect the biggest employer of adventurers to be the same as the largest employers of mercenaries more generally. Adventurers, in the D&D sense, are largely just small groups of mercenaries who specialize in particular kinds of problems – we might broadly define the ‘occupation’ as something like ‘monster slayers.’ And in a magical fantasy world, it actually makes sense that fighting magical or monstrous things might be a distinct, if overlapping, occupation from warriors, soldiers and such hired to engage in normal intercommunal violence (that is, warfare).
Which is to say, we’d probably expect the most common figures employing adventurers would probably be the state or local Big Men in non-state societies. They’re not going to do this personally, of course, they’ll use a cutout to do it for them. That may well be the tavern keeper, although I suspect that some junior aristocrat or official is more likely: someone whose job is ‘coordinate the recruitment and assignment of adventurer-mercenaries.’ Essentially a military contractor of the sort we were just discussing! Of course other individuals in a non-state polity where violence is fragmented might well also seek adventurers: a village with a problem, a smaller Big Man and so on. But the obvious place for them to go when hiring is where the Big Man (or the state) hires, because that’s where the adventurers will actually be.
The next question is where to find these fellows. And the answer is in large towns. Which is striking because a quick glance at the genre of ‘fantasy tavern keeping games’ and most of the taverns seem to be set in small towns, villages and forests (presumably for the ‘cozy’ vibe). There are exceptions, of course (the Yawning Portal in Waterdeep comes to mind), but often the ‘fantasy tavern’ is quite location-independent, which it wouldn’t be.
The issue here is that ‘adventurers’ are, for the most part, specialists, in societies where the vast majority (upwards of 80%) of the population are non-specialist farmers and herders.1 If your goal is to find a specific specialist in a society that has very few of any kind of specialized labor, you are going to want to seek them in the largest, densest population centers you can find. If ‘wizard’ is a job held by one in every thousand, you’ve got a much better chance of finding one looking for work in a town of 50,000, than in a village of 500. A large town provides both a concentration of specialists (of all kinds), but also a concentration of wealthy people who can afford to hire those specialists.
And this isn’t all entirely theory, we have a good guideline for how the private recruitment of violence specialists might work in a pre-modern or early modern context because of course there were quite a lot of mercenaries getting recruited in pre-modern or early modern contexts! And what is striking is that even in cultures where the aim was to recruit farm boys (because they were assumed to make better soldiers than city-dwellers; this was the dominant assumption in early modern Europe, for instance), you recruit them in a town. Or in many cases, you recruit them outside of a town. A lot of towns, quite understandably, are touchy about letting armed bands of violence-doers inside the city walls and if they have the political and security position necessary to forbid such groups entry, they usually will.
So for a society which has need for a second kind of ‘violence specialist’ (beyond regular soldiers or knights or what have you), who specialized in what we might term ‘monster removal,’ you might expect the local political authority (who would be the largest employer of such), to set up a standard place for recruiting them, perhaps just outside the town/castle/city walls. It’s not hard to imagine a combined inn/tavern springing up next to that, to cater to the traffic, and thus get roughly to the ‘fantasy tavern.’ That said, I find myself wondering: if a locality has so many ‘monster’ related problems, why is the king/lord/state contracting adventurers on a one-off basis? Why doesn’t he have them on permanent retainer?
The easy answer, from a world-building perspective, is to make ‘monster’-type problems rare enough that there isn’t any cause to keep adventurers on permanent employment, but that is the death of the fantasy tavern, since it would lack the kind of continuous clientele necessary (instead, we might imagine adventurers functioning something more like itinerant craftsmen and other specialists in such a world).
The other option I can think of would be some kind of guild, with a legal monopoly on offering ‘monster removal’ services. Often ‘adventurer’s guilds’ in fantasy worlds are vast, continent sprawling institutions, but we ought to expect this to work like other guilds: extremely local, perhaps with each large town having its own guild of adventurers which controlled membership, extracted fees, regulated the trade and provided for widows and such – the sort of things historical guilds did. In that case, the place you would go to hire an adventurer wouldn’t be a tavern, but a guild hall. It might well have some of the same facilities (a kitchen, dining spaces, lodging), but they would be for the members, rather than public. Such a guild would then have a fair bit of price-setting and bargaining power, even potentially against the state or local lord. Of course, they’d also have a role in preventing non-members from offering services – one might expect rather violently.
Alas, neither of these options – itinerant companies of monster-hunters or local established guilds of them – offers much space for the freewheeling fantasy tavern. Crucially, they also don’t offer much space for the fantasy cliche of a group of unrelated adventurers meeting for the first time. That, in turn, I think, speaks to the degree to which pre-modern societies simply don’t throw strangers together like that very much, as human mobility is much lower. “Here’s a room full of people you don’t know, make friends” is a very common modern life challenge, but an infrequent (not unknown, but infrequent) pre-modern one. Tolkien seems to understand this: both Thorin and Company and the Fellowship of the Ring are unusual groups in that they include members who are more or less strangers to each other. As a result, it takes quite exceptional circumstances for them to form.
That said, because Dungeons and Dragons campaigns – and similar other rulesets and settings – demand as a part of the structure of the game (as distinct from the story) that player-characters generally be strangers to each other, I think the ‘fantasy tavern’ will continue and I would expect to see its steady drift from a convenient storytelling assumption to an established part of the lore, to becoming a customary institution of sorts, to continue.
On to Recommendations:
First again for my own stuff. I am back at Foreign Policy with “The U.S. Is Learning the Wrong Lessons in Iran,” arguing that the focus on smaller-picture, often narrowly military issues (magazine depth, drone defenses, minesweeping, etc) runs the risk of obscuring the much more foundational strategic failures in the war. In particular, that the mission the military was asked to accomplish – regime change entirely from the air or, failing that, neutralizing Iran’s long-range strike capability entirely from the air – was probably always impossible. At the very least, no one has ever managed to achieve these tasks before and many have tried.
I also made an appearance on The Rest Is Historydiscussing the Marian reforms, though I think the episode is a ‘bonus episode’ that requires being a subscriber. Of course if you want my take on the Marian reforms in written form (in a bit more detail than one can fit in a podcast), you can find that here.
Meanwhile, also at Foreign Policy and worth your time is Lucian Staiano-Daniels (author of The War People, recommended here), writing “The Straits Are Not OK,” on the historical impact of maritime choke points and in particular on how the Sound Toll deformed Danish policy. In short, because tolls from the Øresund went directly to the Danish crown, it enabled Danish kings to engage in a lot of warfare (like involvement in the Thirty Years War) without consulting their parliament. The result was disaster for Denmark and one wonders, should the IRGC likewise end up with its own revenue source in the form of tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, if those funds will likely fuel foreign adventurerism that may prove disastrous to Iran and the wider region.
In somewhat old but still interesting museum news: I remarked quite some time ago on social media that there were a pair of iron kopides (singular kopis; forward-curving Greek swords) in the Met which, given their thin provenance and the general rarity of such weapons (it is very hard to find a well-preserved kopis) I figured they were unlikely to have been obtained fully legally. I had waited until after I had the information on them I needed for my research to ask the Met the forbidden question (“could you please confirm if there is any additional provenance information for the items…” – sent back in 2021) after which the Met has never returned any of my emails ever again. So you may imagine my amusement to find that both swords had been restituted out of the Met’s collection in 2025, repatriated to Greece as part of a Justice Department fraud investigation. Let us all hope that, now that they are home, they are soon put back on display for the public and made available to scholars, as these really are unusually fine examples of the type.
Will the Met ever answer my emails again? The world may never know.2
Meanwhile, over at Pasts Imperfect, a bunch of neat stuff as always, including an interview with Stephanie McCarter, who works on Ovid, Horace and Catullus about the art of translation and the role of the translator’s choices.
An unusual recommendation, but I have commented a few times in the past that academic book reviews are often written in such a style that it is sometimes hard for regular readers to parse if the work is being endorsed or repudiated. For an example of what an absolutely savage academic review (that still fits within the bounds of etiquette for the form) looks like, check out Stefan Rebenich’s quite harsh review of M. Arnheim’s Five Thousand Years of Monarchy (2025). I have not read the book, so I cannot comment on the correctness of the review, though if its sins are as Rebenich describes, the review’s tone seems well-warranted. The “quae mutatio rerum!” (“oh how things change!”)3 is an especially biting bit of academic knife-turning.
And for this week’s book Recommendation, it’s time for one I have been holding in my pocket since October of last year, N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (1986). For those unfamiliar with the periodization of British history, the ‘Georgian’ period runs from 1714 to 1830, so this is a study of the Royal Navy in the 1700s and early 1800s. Much like Lynn’s Giant of the Grand Siècle (1997) which focuses on the French army of a century earlier, The Wooden World is not a campaign or battle history, but an institutional study. Rodger is thus focused not on individual events, but on how the Royal Navy was organized, how its officers were selected and prepared, how its sailors were recruited, what the experience of life on ship was like, how discipline was conducted and so on. Such an approach has perils, of course, particularly the tendency towards historical compression, to treat the institution as an unchanging constant when of course all institutions change, but Rodger, like Lynn is alive to the way that parts of this institution are changing over time as well, though equally the approach benefits from the fact that in this period the Royal Navy was a fairly famously conservative institution and so changed surprisingly little.
What this sort of approach can give, however, in a sense of what it was like to be in a given institution in a given time. Rodger gives a lot of focus – frankly, even more than Lynn – to the experience of being in the Royal Navy at this time, for both ratings and officers. He discusses the role of drink, the food, life aboard ship, the role of wives (invariably ashore), recruitment (including the role of impressment) and so on. I find this sort of approach important, both because institutions and conditions of life in the past are very different than those for us today and so may catch us by surprise, but also because one of the core questions we bring to history is not just “what happened?” but “what was it like?” Part of the reason we ask that question is because when we want to reason about decisions we may today, we’re not just asking, “what might happen?” but also “what might it be like if that happened?” and history can form a useful guide, but only if we have some sense of what it was like to live through an event. In this sense, The Wooden World also serves as a handy counter-point to another of our recommendations, Spector, At War At Sea (2001), focused on the experience of naval combat in the twentieth century.
Equally important are the insights about institutional culture that come out of a study like this. Reading through, for instance, the career path of an officer, one begins to get a sense of why the Royal Navy as an institution acted the way it did, for better and for worse. This was a somewhat famously hidebound, conservative institution (navies tend to be such) and with a promotion system defined by demonstrating skill in seamanship combined with a heavy dose of patronage from senior officers, it isn’t hard to see why. At the same time, this is a somewhat closed society with very strong shared values and so the command culture of aggressiveness, even in the face of difficult odds – which would continue to serve Britain well into the 1900s – is also understandable here.
Overall, I think it is simply very valuable for anyone interested in one military institution to read as many studies of this sort about other military institutions as possible. In some cases, you will discover remarkably similarities – the systems for officer preparation here, effectively a series of command apprenticeships, helped shape my thinking about the way the Romans prepare their officers, for instance – as well as notable differences. If one is too focused on a single institution, it is easy to lose sight of what is exceptional, unusual, normal, typical or ubiquitous about it. Comparison points are essential. Which is why, even if you aren’t already interested in 18th century naval warfare, I heartily recommend The Wooden World.
When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital, I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks have no idea just how huge that shift has been. It's easy to illustrate exactly how extreme things have gotten just by using a few examples, starting with companies that are familiar to everyone, and sharing some details of what I've seen firsthand.
First: The companies that defined the modern era of tech weren’t founded with venture capital.
Neither Microsoft nor Apple took a penny of venture capital funding when they were founded. Both got started from money they got from their founders and their first customers, and took off from there.
Building for the ages
In Microsoft's case, they didn't get any venture capital investment until the company had been around for six years, and were already doing $17 million dollars a year in revenues. (That was a lot in 1981!) The founders didn't need any startup capital at the beginning because they basically formed the company in order to serve their first customer, and had revenues from the start. More strikingly, Microsoft didn't close their venture capital funding until after they had made their deal with IBM and shipped MS-DOS — the deal that actually made Microsoft into the industry-dominating player that they've been ever since.
Apple followed a roughly similar pattern. The Apple myth is that they got their initial funding by Steve Jobs selling his VW bus and Woz selling his HP calculator. (Woz told me that story is basically true, not just one of those Silicon Valley narratives that people like to make up.) Their third founder Ron Wayne (the guy everybody forgets about) got too nervous about having to take on liability for the debts that come with starting a new business, and took off. Apple did get some funding in the years that followed — longtime Apple exec, and sometime CEO, Mike Markkula helped fund the Apple II with less than $100k of his own money. And the Apple II was what made Apple the dominant player in personal computers, turning them into the industry force that they've been (except for that near-death moment in the 90s) ever since.
Like Microsoft, Apple didn't take any venture capital funding until January of 1978, when it raised about half a million dollars, nearly two years after it was founded. By then Apple had shipped two products and was already profitable.
These stories were well known and often repeated in the tech industry that I joined at the start of my career. These facts were part of why everyone understood that venture capital was not only not necessary for a company to succeed, but was a resource that was added after a company had already cemented the fundamental strengths that would ensure its success.
Microsoft and Apple had built the businesses and launched the foundational products that would make them legendary before they ever took a single penny of venture capital funding.
The math starts to shift
I'm not telling you these stories out of some nostalgic love for the olden days of computing; there were lots of terrible things about that era, and there have certainly been plenty of harmful actions from both Microsoft and Apple in the years since. I think it's simply essential to reset the framing of what it takes to build a meaningful company at scale. The context of that era matters, because it gives us a useful reference point for everything that follows.
I first learned about venture capital when the startup I was part of in 2003 got its first round of funding. It was for $600,000. Yes, there was a time when an A round of funding was $600,000. What's more, that amount was just about equivalent to what we made in revenue that year. (I'd helped write the business plan, so I knew that we had raised roughly what we earned.) It seems very quaint now, but in the shadow of the dot-com bubble bursting just a short time earlier, even this size of an investment made headlines in the tech trade press.
By the next year, I met David Marquardt myself, as he joined the board of the company and we raised $10 million dollars, at a time when we were probably making at least $4 or $5 million dollars a year in revenue. The key thing here, and why all these numbers matter, is because you can understand the math. It's a fairly straightforward calculation to see what we had to do to get the company to a size where that investment made sense. (And, as a side note: the economics had changed — we were one of the first consumer subscription service products, and one of the very first to run on Amazon Web Services.)
Adjusting for inflation, and accounting for the difference in relative revenues, venture capital had certainly gotten more ambitious in the 23 years since Marquardt cut a check for Microsoft, but it wasn't different in kind. Now, venture-backed companies still often defaulted to compensation structures that were wildly inequitable, and were deeply exclusionary about who was allowed to pitch or get funded. But the core mechanics of how the financial operations were meant to function were possible to discern.
Basically, you could still put all this shit in a spreadsheet.
Where we're at
For a look at the current venture capital landscape, let's consider something like Project Prometheus, which launched in November of 2025. It's an AI startup that's supposed to work on stuff like factories and manufacturing, and it's a Jeff Bezos thing. By contrast to our A round of funding in 2003 of $600,000, Project Prometheus had a seed round of $6,200,000,000. That's not their A round — that's the seed round. Fortunately, that little bit of dipping their toe in the water went well for them, and seven months later, they raised another $12,000,000,000 at a valuation of $41 billion. Not too bad for a company with 150 employees, I hope that scrappy bunch of dreamers can find a way to get by.
And they're not alone. Yann LeCun (he's the AI guy who used to work at Meta, and was supposed to be the nice guy with a conscience here, until surprisingly that clashed with Zuckerberg's priorities) started a company called AMI Labs, and they launched with a billion-dollar seed round, which immediately became the largest in European history. Ineffable Intelligence (AI from ex-Google DeepMind guy David Silver) raised $1.1 billion, without even so much as a published roadmap. And there are lots more. Putting aside these giant headline numbers, just looking at the overall range, the median Series A in America right now is nearly twenty million dollars. When I raised a $30 million A round for Glitch in 2018, it was one of the biggest consumer product A rounds in the entire industry, and was based on both us having had extraordinary user growth and our founders having founded multiple massive companies; just 8 years later, it's below the average for startups overall, including those started by people with no experience and companies with no product or no users.
The difference over 45 years is stark: Microsoft, with a hit operating system and seventeen million dollars a year coming in the door, raised one million. Prometheus, with nothing to show at all, raised six thousand, two hundred times that. Yes, they've got a founder who is enormously rich and famous. But they don't have any products! Or customers! And people hate their founder so much that Katy Perry's album tanked!
Where does that leave us?
But the point isn't the multiples or any complex math. It's simple stuff that a kid with a lemonade stand could understand if they were borrowing money from mom to buy lemons. We raised about what we earned, and then later about twice what we earned, once we had a good idea where things were headed. My biggest mistake in my last startup was over-raising, not seeing how far things had already slipped down this broken path, even though we had a lot of substance to back up what we were doing. And now we're in a place where Prometheus raised $6.2 billion dollars against no discernible product or revenues. There's no reasonable way to value nothing, or to have a ratio against nothing. There's really no way to value a second round of nothing.
But if you're an investor in that follow-on round? Where the valuation increased by billions even though there is no product and no customers? You've already made a massive windfall. You may even have already made enough to turn your entire fund profitable, just on this one deal. Google, which used to employ David Silver, invested in Ineffable Intelligence. And Google will likely be both an investor in its future rounds and potentially the acquirer of the company if and when they ship any products or have any customers, so they will also be able to count the increase in the value of their investment in the company on their bottom line. Cancer Capital has these big companies treating their employees as companies waiting to be spun out, rather than as careers or team leaders they can nurture. And none of that has anything to do with building products, serving customers, taking care of employees, or creating businesses that last.
That’s what I mean when I say this isn’t venture capital anymore. The word “seed” used to describe a stage in a company’s life. Now it describes a relationship between an investor and somebody’s résumé. The language that is being used still consists of the same words that were used half a century ago. It just doesn't mean any of the same things. And it's not how the things around us that have lasted the longest were built.
U.S. insurance stocks have been doing quite well since the beginning of May 2026, and they have materially outperformed the overall market. I’m using the May 1 close through the September 3 close so that we compare complete trading days; these are price changes, excluding dividends.
The cleanest broad measure is the iShares U.S. Insurance ETF (IAK), which covers U.S. life, property and casualty insurers. It rose from $132.01 on May 1 to $147.87 on September 3: +12.0%. An alternative, more equal-weighted measure, the SPDR S&P Insurance ETF (KIE), rose from $56.79 to $64.80: +14.1%.
For comparison, the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) went from $720.65 to $773.17 over the same period, +7.3%. So insurers have beaten the market by roughly 5–7 percentage points in four months.
Phantom islands—islands on the map that turn out never to have existed—have come up a few times here on The Map Room. But it’s wild to see one in real time—and in satellite imagery. Which… More
The Onion: “Touting the new feature as yet another innovation to help every traveler get where they’re going, Google Maps on Thursday began offering crawling directions for cyclists who have been hit by a truck.”
The Correct the Map campaign (previously) has come to the United Nations. The Guardian: The UN general assembly will vote on Friday on a resolution for the world to formally phase out the traditional Mercator… More
Privacy while driving seems to be more important than privacy while surfing the internet, to judge from recent reactions to automated license-plate readers produced by the company Flock Safety.
"As corporate names go, Flock is cleverly flexible. It evokes the many cameras that compose the company’s surveillance system and also a group of sheep, protected by a watchful shepherd. The recent backlash against the company, however, more closely resembles a flight of starlings, seeming to erupt out of nowhere and move as one unified body.
...
"Flock is useful because it is ubiquitous. Reforms such as strict data-retention limits would only marginally answer privacy concerns, and anything more drastic would undermine the system’s efficacy. As National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke noted, no one doubts that Flock works. “Lots of things would reduce crime if implemented,” he wrote. “That doesn’t mean that those things are necessarily a good idea in a free republic.” Impositions on privacy to reduce crime are a particularly tough sell when crime is dropping sharply: Recently released FBI statistics show that violent crime dropped nearly 10 percent last year, part of a consistent trend since it spiked in 2020 and 2021. Preliminary statistics suggest that 2026 might be even safer. When safety is a less urgent concern, people are less willing to sacrifice privacy for security.
"Moreover, the Flock backlash fits into a broader moment of anger—at corporations in general, and at tech companies and artificial intelligence in particular. “Americans feel they have less and less control over their own lives, and they increasingly blame large corporations,” the Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar recently wrote. Anxiety about AI and surveillance is big and abstract, and the companies and people pushing these anxieties are far away from most Americans. Polls show widespread apprehension about the growth of AI—a Gallup poll this summer found that about half of Americans think AI will do as much harm as it will good; another 39 percent said that it’s mostly bad. But people don’t have a lot of ways to communicate those fears. "
In the Yap islands of Micronesia, rai stones carved out of crystalline limestone, with a hole in the center, are considered objects of great value, sometimes described as a form of money. However, they are often large — sometimes as big as 12 feet in diameter — and they rarely literally change hands, given how difficult they are to move. So they stay wherever they are. Their ownership is established by oral history, with changes in ownership established by appending transfers to that shared oral history. This is, by the way, a sort of preliterate version of the blockchain!
For the most part, monetary gold — gold held as reserves by national central banks — is a lot like the stones of Yap. Central banks own trillions of dollars’ worth of gold, which they sometimes sell to each other to settle international payments. But these transfers rarely involve physically moving gold across borders. A large fraction of the world’s gold reserves actually sits in a vault underneath the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, although the New York Fed does move ingots between compartments when transfers take place.
And why not? The sanctity of nations’ ownership of gold stored in New York is guaranteed by the word of the U.S. government — a government that is utterly reliable, because it honors the role of law.
Or anyway, that’s the country we used to be.
“Rule of law” is not a phrase often applied to the Trump administration. And the administration has special contempt for international law. Many of Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal under U.S. law, but more or less all of those tariffs were and are in clear violation of past agreements solemnly signed by previous U.S. presidents, including Trump himself.
So the idea that the U.S. government might devise some excuse to seize gold held in the Fed’s vault is no longer far-fetched. And nations are taking precautions. Earlier this week the Dutch central bank announced that it was shifting about $12 billion in gold from the vault in New York to the Bank of England’s vault in London. This follows a move by the French central bank to shift an even larger sum from New York to Paris. Other countries are considering similar moves.
The direct economic or financial impact of these actions will be minimal. There won’t even be large trans-Atlantic gold shipments: foreign central banks will sell their New York gold to private buyers in America and replenish it with purchases from private sellers in Europe.
But the symbolism is chilling. America is no longer trusted. Foreign governments can no longer count on us to obey the most basic rules, like the commandment that thou shalt not steal other people’s gold.
And even when Trump is gone, it will take many years of honest, responsible U.S. government to restore that lost trust.
We are freshening up some of our videos with updated data so now is a good time to remind everyone that Modern Principles of Economics is best principles of economics textbook; great videos, clear writing and excellent applications and examples!
Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
This kind of thing will be exploited. Think Solar Winds–style supply chain attacks.
“The trust model is broken,” Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. “Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don’t question themand neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layerSaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today’s guards don’t cover it.”
Data-center investment has become one of the largest capital-expenditure cycles in financial markets, with U.S. hyperscalers expected to deploy roughly $700 billion in 2026. This investment boom has raised concerns that large computing loads impose external costs on households through higher electricity prices. Using a 50-state panel for 2021-2024, we find no statistically significant evidence that data-center presence, installed capacity, or capacity expansion predicts residential electricity-price inflation across extensive-margin, intensive-margin, fixed-effects, and timing specifications. We propose an energyinternalization mechanism: hyperscalers can partially internalize incremental electricity demand through contracted or dedicated generation, including solar and wind energy. Consequently, gross datacenter electricity consumption need not translate one-for-one into net pressure on residential electricity supply. The findings suggest that the extraordinary AI capital-investment cycle has not, thus far, produced a detectable residential electricity-price externality.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 PM HST Sat Sep 05 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Lowell, located about 600 miles south-southwest of the Hawaiian Islands, on recently downgraded Tropical Storm Karina, located about 750 miles east-northeast of the Hawaiian Islands, and on Hurricane Marie, located several hundred miles west of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.
…major publicly traded cybersecurity firms lost roughly $65–80 billion, or about 8–10% of their combined value, in the days following disclosure of the Hugging Face/OpenAI incident; by early September they had recovered roughly $58 billion, representing about 70–90% of that drawdown, depending on whether July 15 or July 20 is used as the pre-event baseline.
That is from GPT Pro, there is more at the link. As a very rough approximation, say you dismiss the price bounceback altogether as either random or due to good earnings reports. You have “the value of previous cybersecurity efforts” falling by eight to ten percent. I take that to be very broadly consistent with some of the estimates discussed in my previous post on the numbers.
In any case that is a significant sum. But do note that if the AI models were on the verge of doing truly terrible things to us, the market might estimate the value of our cyberprotection of falling more than eight to ten percent?
More generally, perhaps these numbers could be used to discipline the discussion a bit? Or will I read long lists of reasons why they show us nothing, in that case try coming up with some other market price-based indicators of AI risk? Vix will not do it for you, not these days. I see many metaphors and insinuations and random anecdotes of AI terror, not numbers. Maybe you think your ideas about AI risk are so important that no market prices can reflect them? (If you really believe that, does it mean you would not be worried, and would not cite the numbers, if the value of those companies fell by ninety percent?)
I am sure others can improve on what I am putting forward, and furthermore we should track the continuing progress of these share values over time, especially if other AI hack attacks surface.
Overall I am extremely skeptical of arguments that essentially take the form of “what I am concerned about is too big and too important to show up in any market prices.” Pick your market prices!
GPT-6 Astra is “rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS” — I’ve not tried it yet myself, so I don’t have a great deal to say about it yet.
It’s going to be API priced at the same rate as Claude Fable 5 and 5.1: $10/million input and $50/million output. This is clearly OpenAI’s Fable competitor, and appears to score higher than Fable on most of OpenAI’s self-reported benchmarks.
When hurricane forecasters released their seasonal outlooks in spring 2026, the El Niño brewing in the Pacific contributed to predictions of below-normal activity in the Atlantic basin but above-normal activity in the northeastern and central Pacific basins. In early September, near the climatological peak of hurricane season, those spring outlooks were on target, with the eastern Pacific buzzing with activity and the Atlantic notably quiet.
As of September 3, the Northeast Pacific had produced 15 named storms and six hurricanes, well above the norm for that point in the season. The Atlantic basin, meanwhile, laboring under unfavorable wind shear conditions, had produced just five named storms and no hurricanes. El Niño typically enhances hurricane activity in the eastern and central Pacific basins because of the unusually warm water temperatures it brings to those parts of the ocean. It tends to suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin by shifting large-scale circulation patterns in a way that makes it harder to sustain storms there.
At 1:14 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (20:14 Universal Time) on September 1, NASA’s EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) on the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite captured an image of three tropical cyclones churning simultaneously in the Pacific, along with one in the Atlantic. A band of clouds and thunderstorms associated with the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is visible to the south of the storms. The spacecraft was nearly 1 million miles from Earth and just shy of 93 million miles from the Sun when the image was acquired.
The trio of storms in the Pacific were Lowell, Karina, and Marie. Of the three, Lowell became the strongest, with winds reaching category 5 strength for several hours on September 2. Around the same time, Karina, spinning a few thousand kilometers to the east, achieved category 4 strength, a rare case of category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring simultaneously in the area. Marie, spinning southwest of Baja California, was still a tropical storm when the image was acquired but was strengthening as it moved northwest.
In the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Edouard was visible to EPIC over Louisiana and Texas, shortly after the short-lived storm made landfall. It brought torrential rains and strong winds that downed trees and power lines. Some areas received 15 to 24 inches (38 to 61 centimeters) of rain, according to National Weather Service meteorologists.
As of September 3, the Atlantic basin’s total accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) index was 4.4, about 9 percent of normal for that date, according to statistics compiled by Colorado State University meteorologists. Meanwhile, the Northeast Pacific basin’s ACE was 130, about 50 percent above normal. The ACE index incorporates both the intensity and longevity of storms, making it easier to compare individual storms and seasons.
Several NASA Earth-observing platforms provide data that can aid in emergency preparedness before landfall and damage assessment and response afterward. Use the “Events” tab on NASA’s Worldview browser to track current hurricanes and explore related NASA data products.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using data from DSCOVR EPIC. Story by Adam Voiland.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 500 PM PDT Sat Sep 5 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Lowell, located about 600 miles south-southwest of the Hawaiian Islands, on recently downgraded Tropical Storm Karina, located about 750 miles east-northeast of the Hawaiian Islands, and on Hurricane Marie, located several hundred miles west of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
Offshore of Southwestern Mexico: A trough of low pressure located several hundred miles south of the coast of southwestern Mexico is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Gradual development of this system is possible, and a tropical depression could form during the middle or latter portions of next week while the system moves generally west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...medium...60 percent.
On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service
advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit,
offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more
than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to
my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service
offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their
initial sales thread on Exploit.
The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million
drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as
well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three
million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least
579,000 medical cards.
A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating
about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus
(with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5
million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per
page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the
United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans:
searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately
1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario
(473,673 records).
Krebs seemingly tracked down the source: IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz (seemingly where they got Krebs’s own drivers license) and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach. Unreal.
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